"Sister Let Them Try and Follow"

The trailer park smells of cheap dinners, salty and larded food wafting out from open sliding doors, permeating the porc, the sunset, the road, the nostrils. People here are as interesting as people anywhere, maybe friendlier, but the difference is that you see their facades when they smile and wave to you while driving out in their Nissans and SUV's and then hear their true selves at night as the smell of their nourishments envelops the porch and overwhelms even the tobacco smoke. Cheap food and cheap language, bickering unfolds like a ratty notebook. Men controling their wives, girlfriends saying 'fuck this fuck that.' My own mother seems to be in the spirit. "Joey, get your finger out of the cat's asshole! If you do that one more time i'm giving the cat's away!" And my nerves grate against something rough, the cliff of her voice filling me with vertigo and absolute revulsion.

I miss my nights in cheap apartments with a warped record spinning on the turntable, a crate of records from the thriftstore askew and asking for further damage as I smoked on the balcony, discussing literature and revolution with a roommate, his girlfriend mixing flour in the kitchen, her hands like two white birds. The sentient sky above, traversed by whisps of water vapor and the pearl of the moon, hinting at expanse, the desire of the spirit. Wet streets that smell like dead leaves and a dry wind effusing ginger, quiet memories of love. The interuption of a record for a public radio broadcast with no hard feelings, people in the apartment do what they want and no one is annoyed. Then the television, reruns of Seinfeld or Futurama, and cookies for everyone, which i refuse but appreciate none the less. Then to my room where my vintage typewriter speaks as the keys strike the paper, its language like an archaic robot, the cross between golem and HAL: sentient, destructive, and weirdly productive.

But this is not a complaint, just a simple sketch, the way an eccentric might sketch out the face of a woman with six lines on a restaurant tablecloth using a permanent marker. More of a gesture than an intent.

I read love stories all day long today, then I walked to the bookstore to return a book by Bataille so i could get the next volume, but the clerk refused me, he seemed to understand that i thought Border's Rewards constituted making the place into a lending library. First refusal ever, on the grounds they stopped carrying it. I checked; they had volumes two and three but not the one I was trying to return. I left after coffee. I noticed things on my walk back, useless things without meaning, like the smell of a cheap diner and the driving habits of people on a busy boulevard who must, without any doubt or hesitation, make right turns across crosswalks without any thought or consideration. I recall Erika spitting on a taxi that almost ran us over on the way to the Hangar, and I smile inside, waiting for tomorrow when she returns. The people I run into on the sidewalk all have desperate postures, as if walking were great suffering that bent their postures into question marks directed at their misery, as if a life spent walking through dense suburban commercial zones simulated the eight circle of Hell. I light a cigarette then sputter, hack and cough. The thought strikes me that i could die soon. I would be embarrassed for the people who would have to speak at my funeral. "This is a tragedy, but really, he almost did this about six other times in his short life, so maybe we shouldn't take it so seriously." Then someone would try to shake me awake, but something inside me that the embalmers put there would break and then result in an instant mess and more embarrasment. "Oh, i guess he really means it this time." However, it is important that corpses possess more dignity than the living. Or so it would seem.

Small aircraft travel in curliques above the bank building. It smells like burnt gasoline everwhere, even on the freshly cut grass, where it should smell like freshly cut grass but doesn't, and this is sad to me in a way that violinists playing a requiem on a sinking ship is sad to me. I'm reminded of this news story I saw about an entrepeneur who goes around the city of LA with an airbrush, painting dead lawns into a pantomime of life, increasing real estate values after the huge housing bust and all the foreclosures, and he is making money because people with money care about image and not life. Imagine if they did that with anything else but grass. "Well, my wife miscarried, but we took the body to a doll-painter, and now my son looks better than the real thing..." Or the rivers get blue dye dumped into them to conceal pollution, the army paints landmines to appeal to children, and skywriters create clouds to detract from all the damn smog fouling up the nightsky and increasing the light pollution.

I am happy because my future prospects make me optimistic; i will leave town with a girl i adore and hopefully will never have to come back for more than a week. Even if i am struck with sickness, there will always have been that hope, that chance to leave, to walk away from the nightmare of living in Los Angeles with the attitude "Yes, and i condemn everything you have built and worked for. It is obviously an atrocious mistake."