30 Watt Midnight
This is part of a much longer piece I've been working on for some time. Read it out loud, it's a poem.
Sometimes, in my sober moments when a sadness like bubble gum enters my mouth and I find myself chewing, I wonder why I ever returned to this city of my birth. LA, great and broad and bloated, a beached whale swallowing every flat piece of floodplain in sight, and rolling, haphazard over the hills like a blanket that has been stretched over expensive furniture and in its dusty old age, here and there over the corners and rigid angles, the fabric frays and groans, promising to tear. Here, this electric city with its eternal curfew and coco-plum hedges, offices on wheels and nylon thighs, fitted caps and ironic outfits, this pinup city left on the wall long past its calendar year, there is a puppy dog frequency with feline attitude in this landscape of concrete and vinyl and parking lots (covered parking lots, uncovered parking lots, crenelated parking structures and subterranean labyrinths with elevators that know only the 55 degree darkness of unused sprinklers and fluorescent cans coated in brake dust).
Never any other color than gray, this forever femme fatale aging like plastic. Golden hills and magenta explosions at sunset. Sure, yeah, those and many other Kodak moments, snapable, snipable, filtered and unfiltered flash-points of melodrama, actual beauty that would startle tears in unprepared Midwesterners and unfamiliar Northeasters, unabashed Southerners and even self-assured Northwesterners, but hereto the initiated and the well-washed, well waxed, carefully sculpted and impeccably dressed and groomed Angeleno—these snapshots are simply the revolving backdrop of a subtle seasonal drift, a steady treadmill never moving fast enough for us to change our pace, but keeps us still, and without direction, the ideal vantage point for Facetimes and arid eyes staring undreaming into the eternal fabric of fantasy: the West Coast, the Gold Coast of dead foreign grass, the emerging mantle crowning a civilization of a thousand nations, an endless shelf where anything might land, and if it does, it might as well stay.
Where else to go? The golden bricks always lead back to Oz, where beautiful Venus reddens by the sea, corpulent and vain, and fearing—secretly, quietly, but always fearing—some thing might mess it all up, some outside force might blunder in and stand in the way of its precious sunshine, might insist we are too perfect, too comfortable, too languid in the gentle current of our endless dreaming.
“Wake up, wake up!” screams some sober prophet, but no one listens to the homeless man raving, lunatic, living off curbs and driving his shopping cart into the shoulder of the freeway. How could it possibly come to an end? Here, where the palm trees go on growing forever (our beanstalks into a featureless sky), where rain is a respite to wash our asphalt trenches and fill our concrete channels and paint the air that postcard blue we never forget is hiding somewhere in the gray, where God is the long haired and sandled Jesus living out of his tattooed van on Venice Beach, where worries there are none of and chill is a state of mind, where car washes are more common than ice cream stalls and you can survive off of liquid plants, where sex comes before love and bright orange fruits grow in the winter, and the soundtrack to every life is the steady sound of traffic and every night ends in the 30 watt glow of midnight. Where else could I have been born but here?
