smoke or sand

I am watching a Russian film called "Mermaid", because I'm tired of listening to Captain Beefheart. I lost him in the desert, where he went to high school with Frank Zappa, not far from where we dumped countless bottles of tragically cheap tequila into the underbrush.
The weather has been humid, the skies alternately filled with the usual seabirds crap crap crapping, caw-caw-cawing and the pounding of tandem rotor Navy copters on training missions. All the while I'm on the last pack and reading the Wall Street Journal for nuggets of information I don't even know I'm looking for.
In "Mermaids" the heroine is a 16yr old girl who constantly saves the pathetic life of a venture capitalist who sells property on the Moon. Fucking Muscovites. I usually hear nothing from that city but the sound of muffled women under the weight of a hundred years of smoke-stained tapestries, smoke-stained men and smoke-filled skies. I look at modern Moscow and I automatically choke. It's a bullshit response, of course, because I live in Los Angeles, and many images of this city would provoke a gasp. Namely our programming.
The "mermaid" is dreaming about her Moon salesman. She's put his goldfish in the bathtub, on account of it being "depressed". "You could've at least put some sand in there," he says.
That is one thing I have entirely too much of in my condominium. Sand. It's blowing constantly up the walls. The DVD player by the patio door is jammed with it. My toes are the only objects here that enjoy it. And it makes a pretty good holder for whatever drink I bring down to the beach. But otherwise it's everywhere. In the pockets, between the sheets... on the screen inside a Muscovite's bathtub...

I'm getting tired, which is better than confused. And somewhere in the woods, Don Van Vliet is crippled, walking in the desert of his head.