The Divine Comedy
A man in Hollywood sold me a flower made from a palm branch for five dollars. I carried it in my right hand during the metro's slow subterranean crawl back to Figueroa. Eight days later. Slim tells me he is taking up method acting, hoping to compete with Denzel Washington for an oscar. He was overjoyed to hear that I was a member of his group on thefacebook. Wednesday. The air around campus smells strongly of semen. Is Los Angeles coughing up all the cum it swallowed over the winter? Does that account for this bitter afternoon wind? And these silent trees, festooned with small white flowers. Are they involved? What do these signs mean?
No, ignore this madness.
I've spent the past week wandering around in a warm drug haze. Smiling in the smoggy air, that balmy miasma caressing me. Dirty fingers wrapped in velvet. My universe has fallen in step with the tumbling drums on The Stooges' Raw Power, my left foot shattering the pavement with every footstep, every downbeat. Iggy Pop's voice radiates out of the concrete, howling about the apocalypse and dangerous, lusty women. Is this the soundtrack to my life? This precise moment from 1973, when man's primitive ancient lust for life clawed its way free of the hippie movement and found its apotheosis - metallic waves of superheated fuzz! The birth of postmodernism! Is this it?
I've watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas something like five times in the past week. I finally understand the entire movie, especially Raoul Duke's final monologue, grimly refusing the notion that some force is tending to the light at the end of tunnel. That terrifying assertion reaching your ears as the camera pans far, far away, letting Duke's bright Vegas hotel room shrink away into darkness. A miniscule pinprick of light fluttering in a vast black sea.
I've been a good boy. I'm doing everything expected of me, and then some. I can speak French now. I can get by - I can discuss world news and Lindsay Lohan and order coffee and purchase shoes, and everything else that language is used for. I can mourn the death of my childhood in an enlightened fashion, now that I know that childhood is just an artificial social construction. What's going on here? Where are we? What are we doing out here, stranded in the middle of this quivering no man's land of post-adolescence? Searching for some kind of collective destiny? Preparing ourselves to most efficiently consume the overripe fruits of mother America's whirling economy? I don't understand the twenty-first century. Where did this generation come from? Are we just waiting for some call to arms? Some sort of new-wave vietnam? Is it the sex? Has it always been this way? There are no answers in the music, in the movies, in the horizon. Everyone is trying to sell me something. It is too quiet here with the TV off. Bad waves of despair and loneliness floating into my room. I can't feel my legs.