Los Angeles Gothic
-Tourists, tourists everywhere. They are so lost. They ask for directions and do not stop, you scream, they are still asking you for directions. You scream, they still ask you for directions. Where is the hollywood sign they ask. They are covered in sunscreen it is dripping off them. Screaming, unending screaming.
-Traffic is terrible you say to a faceless co-worker, they agree. You hear car horns, lights flash, you realize you are in traffic right now. Traffic is all there is. You cannot remember a time you weren’t in traffic. The co-worker was a hallucination or was it? The traffic is testing you, you will not let it break you.
-Someone makes a joke about the drought. You laugh. It is a dry laugh. As dry as the state you live in. You laugh so hard you cry. There is no water in your eyes, only drought. Still they make jokes. The voices around you laugh, all of california is laughing it is a dry horrible thing.
-Your favorite place to eat is a hole in the wall taco place. You maintain it is the best taco place even though it is never in the same place twice. You do not find it, it finds you. It finds you during late nights when you think you are drowning in the city. When you can’t remember what trees look like. Then the smell of tacos drifts towards you. You forget trees and remember that here there is real mexican food, real flavors. You go and eat some.
-You stare into the night sky nostalgic for something you never had. You make a wish on a shooting star. It is a helicopter. You make a wish on another shooting star. It is a plane. You cannot remember if you have ever seen stars. The sky is filled with twisted machinery blinking eerily.
-Pavement covered in gum and skyscrapers climbing ever upwards and bricks grey from wear and bright colorful lights reflecting unnatural rainbows. Man’s folly was pride you think to yourself. You see someone pissing on a street corner.
-You think of moving, of walking until you reach the ocean. You look to the west and to the east. There is smog and in the distance mountains. You think of forests and rivers and cities that weren’t carved from man’s ingenuity and sheer force of will. You wonder what the world is like out there. You turn around, breathe deeply, and feel at home.
-There are homeless people everywhere. Bundles of rags, who you do not recognize as human until they move. They ask for change, beg for attention. They are ignored, avoided, shunned. You wonder what you could do to society to make them hate you that much. You give them change, leftovers, anything and they smile like you are the first sun after a long winter. But you do not know what winter is. And at the end of the day they will spend their nights under bridges in their rags.
-Graffiti spread across the city like a rash growing and growing, ever shifting. You admire a piece on your way to work it is gone when you are back. Replaced by something equally colorful and relevant. The paint shifts before your eyes, art is not stagnant they say. The tourists coo.
-It is raining. People are screaming. Why is water falling from the sky? Cars are crashing. Children are crying. Mother nature has become twisted, cats barking and dogs meowing. Corpses are coming back to life, they ask if the dodgers have won a world series yet. God is punishing us for our sins, we will be left to drown for some new Noah’s Ark. We will all drown oh god someone save us. Oh wait, it has stopped. That was pleasant.
