MadameBastet-firing-neurons

MadameBastet-firing-neurons
The city is a dead paradise now.
All of the glamour once so prevalent here,
born of necessary illusions beneath golden poppy skies
and picture-perfect palms has turned to gore.

It is a place for the macabre now; a living, breathing horror show
of the dead, the dying and the desperate.
And yet, and yet...we are still fascinated by this concrete metropolis...
in the same way we are mesmerized by the slow-motion appeal
of a bloody traffic accident.

We observe the city in the same horrified yet detached manner we would
a mangled steel wreck - with a sense of shock and fear, disgust and terror.
We don't want anything at all to do with it and yet we feel compelled by some
great mysterious force to look at it, to live it, revel in it, worship it; indeed
we sacrifice ourselves to it...we sacrifice ourselves to the city's false Gods unwittingly on a daily basis
without ever realizing it.

We worship words, signs, figures, images, visions, illusions, ghosts, fairytales and unrealities. We worship and we believe.
We have become a city of seekers and searchers forever needing to fulfill the empty, vacant, black hole that is us.

We do not discriminate. We will fill these voids with whatever we find, with
whatever this neon nightmare has to offer us.
We hide in our stucco houses in the hills and cross empty streets in the valleys,
our eyes to the ground, raw and aching, leaving a trail of pathetic need and desire wherever we go.

Once upon a time, this city promised us something.
We can't quite remember what now, but we know that it promised us
something wild and wonderful, big and bright...something that would be all ours...something that would make us SOMEBODY in a wasteland full of nobodies.

It was the promise whispered in the palms in the warm dusk of the Santa Anas;
in the promise found in the glinting white-capped lapis lazuli seas,
It was the promise of cocktail party voices and laughter echoing down the canyons...the promise of happily ever after, of incandescent swimming pools and glittering valley nights.

These were the promises that brought us here, away from nowhere...the no man's land we existed in before...away from the dull greenish glow of cheap TV's glowing through screen doors....away from tin box heavens we wasted away in for so long.

And yet, and yet.

We are beginning to suspect. We are beginning to suspect that the city lied to us; played with our oh-so-delicate senses and sensibilities as it so loves to do.
We're beginning to walk the star-crossed streets less, and huddle in our beds more, listening to the pre-dawn traffic, and wondering.

We're beginning to wonder if somehow, somewhere, we took the wrong path down the infamous yellow brick road, despite the directions being so very, very clear...despite the golden stars leading the way...despite the signs, the lights in the hills, the whispers in the winds.

Our senses have been slowly and silently crushed into a pulp of complete senselessness; indeed, sensory overload is simply a way of life in this hole - everyone knows that. Didn't we get the memo?

Come on...you used to bleed with the stiffs on the eleven o'clock news -
now you wait impatiently for hockey scores and Lotto numbers and joke about the Death and Dying report.
Everything screams and begs for your attention here and you are forced to give it away.
Blaring neon and fluorescent lights bore down on our skulls, blinding UV rays burn the vision straight from our corneas. Grinding metal on metal causes the blood to run ice cold from our ears.

The roar of engines, the screams for help, the wolves howling in the glittering hills at night; all the sounds have become the same...all the sounds have become The Noise, the collective drone of Hell.

Hypnotized...and yet we are still hypnotized by the great, grand illusion, by all that glimmers and glitters and glows silver and gold in the darkest, most depraved recesses of our minds.

We hope. We forever hope that what we are living is not a lie...THE lie.
But somewhere, where truth lives, if indeed it lives and breathes at all, we know it is all a lie.
We know we've been fooled; tricked again by our own sad, wanton desires, our basest, most pathetic needs.
We know that what we live for does not exist; it never has.
And yet we live for it anyway; because without the illusion we will have to come face to face with the reality: who we are, what we really do with our lives, what we cannot and will not ever do.

So we live out our days in silent, desperate hope and spent our nights in quiet fury...a rampant rage that threatens to break out of us like a grotesque alien and consume us whole.

And we have, in some small place inside of us, given up on the idea that the city is our friend. Our futile attempts to bargain with it, to appease its obscene appetites, to make a deal with it...have failed miserably and we know there is no future here but we have no where else to go. And it knows this.

We are as dead as this paradise.
And what we see at the end of each day....the warm, orange glow of the setting sun...the ice blue sea...the winding highways...the lights flickering down the soft curves of Sunset...the palms waving slowly in the summer breeze...what we see we know does not really exist here...except inside of us.

For all we see is a mere projection of what we once hoped to be true;
that we could go somewhere in this beautiful place
that we could be someone here
in Los Angeles.