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[spencermandel]

Aquifer

To do it for myself. I imagine there’s still the capacity, in fact it’s likely evolved in silence.

I didn’t get into the game for screenwriting, I’m here for the simple love of the page and the lust for life’s nectar, despite any evidence to the contrary. Within me or within life.

It can often seem pretty empty, all of this. Running from one stressor to another, the sought-after just out of reach. How can we do it for other people if we can’t do it for ourselves? The yellow emergency mask goes on the adult before the child. And survival alone isn’t worth it.

Despite the apparent meaningless, I do want something. It’s deep, it’s buried now, but it’s there. It’s a belief in the implicit color of things. And a hunger to paint with those colors.

The story makes its own sense if you let it tell itself. Don’t force its hand to clamp down some neurosis. We’re here, everybody, we’re here. All together again, we’re here.

Gratitude for privilege only goes so far, but not gratitude for gratitude itself. That goes on and on if you let it, I let it, let it go and go and go.

Other humans are hard, keeping up with their blindspots, their triggers, their flights of fancy and moods. I can shut them out but then I take them back, and my shutting is another clamping.

Can I let myself be angry, and still love all this beauty?  Look at those goddamn clouds, glowing above me, backlit, hitting squares of light off stucco walls. And the dark wine beside me contains the very same light, it is beauty in liquefied form.

I can help people sometimes and I can also help myself. I can make my days more than survival, more than for eating, leapfrogging meal to meal. More than fulfilling chores, out of repressed but-ever lurking shame. There is something to be done, be done. Always, always.

I don’t need to run and I’m not right now. I can drill ever-deeper if I want to, or I can live right here, on the surface. They want to help, they’re there.

The stab of the spoken-for, beauty and pain and the space between it, real as it always was. High on the real thing. And the real thing is here, just buried. We drill and we reach it. I drill down toward the aquifer, the well that was never far.

[spencermandel]

Shadows of the Cloud

San Francisco is the heart of the grand new chapter, as it was of the Aquarian one before. The failed attempt. This one is real though, not just ideals and expanding minds. It’s technocratic data-ocracy, the Godhead being born in the shadows. The shadows of the cloud. 

What is happening in the shadows? Who is hiding there, which human pains, which conversations happening in secret? What are the things that We’re not seeing, but They are? What are the things that They’re not seeing, but We are? Is there omniscience beyond us and them? Is it growing as an umbrella above us, or through us in a net of spiderwebs, unseen or simply ultraviolet? Glowing and growing, as we go about our days, sending text messages and streaming films. Adventures so carefully documented, that inform the God of who we really Are. Is it us that it is learning, or just our choices? Can it see every shadow as well? I suspect not, for now. The last glimmer of true freedom is within us, when the whole planet’s surface is mapped, scanned and droned.

Let the shadow in you meet the shadow in me. Let the Shadow Net build and build, the dark matter outweighing the light. True love is both, not just sunny happy, not Emojis and rainbows alone. Your pain is very beautiful, awesomely so, if you let yourself see that it is. You can show us too but show yourself first, get to know it before posting for our analysis. It is cool and it isn’t cool, it’s lovely and ugly and insane. Sanity is bigger than all of us, when perspectives and positions hold us back. It’s there though, don’t you feel it? Not just Their God, or our God, or the rocketing Tower of Techno-babble. The One beyond the Orange One, All-Seeing beyond the NSA. You are illuminated, my lovely, so illuminated. Join me, and join us, and let’s go.

[spencermandel]

Monoliths

Pop go the paints and easels, like fireworks in the shadow of monoliths. The one-offs, the startups, the anarchist narcotic dilletantes. To buy in is to not buy in, to purchase is to flail at the surface. Join the party, pounding hearty, be the happiest motherfucker in the game. Don’t hope for flow like a waiting Godot, any third camp of resistance you’re a posthumous Perot. 

Fuck that and love that, show your abs you sexy, throw those chairs and swing that dick around, the Christianized mission is dead. Shalom to every Muslim, and Salaam to the Westernized drones, floating overhead as we pray for your hedonist souls. We’re comfy and convenient on the cliff’s edge, with a primetime definition from up high. Carbonize as you quantize, like a barbarian savior set aflame. There’s a way out and a way in, weighing on the insanity of our norms. Thank God for all of it, for the memory of her womb, for the sexual ultraviolence of her love. The zeitgeist is always shorter than you think.

[spencermandel]

That New Old Sweetness

As thoughts flow in, coherency is the last of all worries. It’s time and essence, and non-thought, and the purpose of why, how, and where.

We remember the tours, the roads bounced over in the Econoline, America rushing past in its fields and forestry, gas station mini-marts and sticky-floor music venues.

It all matters, all adds up. It’s life in every capacity, as musician and tight-rope walker, strategist and night-lady charmer.

It’s the process and purpose, you see. Or I see, at last after years, the exactitude of exacting pursuits. Debts financial and relationship-wise, glories natural and psychedelic. And worth it on the best days. Like nothing sweeter in life.

Age comes, step by step, hairs gray and wrinkles fold – in tasteful moderation, for now. Roles change, friendships strain, emotions run from stir-crazy to cannaboid contentment. It could be dead, has been dead.

Until the fire comes again. Fluke-like, like a high desert tumbleweed rolling into the sprawl.

Watch it come and seize it. The past can wait: the future has arrived in the present. Unrecognizable but ever more personal, as You. Older and healing up wiser, and younger all the while. 

[spencermandel]

Corcovado

Losing clarity’s as easy as watching the newsfeed, but how dear it is when it comes to visit. To be human again, to remember why we do it all, why to get out of bed and play a few rounds in the game.

Escape is a fine thought, especially to places impossible to reach. Big Sur in an H&M ad, or Ibiza with chalky empathogens. Or Rio in ‘63.

We’re here and so we start. The pain is tiresome and it’s no longer good enough – we’re fueled by flesh and blood now, the will to survive and conquer. The satellites orbit in a perfect rotunda, and we’re all on our best behavior. Or so they think.

The threat we’re all facing isn’t physical, or mercenary, or imported from the Persian Gulf. It’s altogether adjacent, as flannel as Brooklyn or Scotland, as endemic as the eagle is bald. It starts stateside but thrives outside, and inside, and everywhere the self is at stake.

But there is an antidote, and I think you can’t have it alone. It’s collective and bigger than ego, although it’s you to a deeper degree. To digest it may sound Newly Aged, but the pages are only brown as the eyes that scan it, from book to glowing iPad.

We’re moving now, for and against it. Toward it as a hurtling, spiraling, collusion of all dark and light. The part of yourself you’re most ashamed of, and the core of you that was bigger than middle school emasculation. It’s neo-feminized, industrialized, transcending ocean and epidemic.

And if I knew what it was, I’d tell you. I know what it is, but won’t tell you.

[spencermandel]

Menagerie

“Life as we know it is awful strange,” said Porter, as he lifted the duffel bag into the back of the Econoline.

A gas station, a county north of Reno, where the tail of the Sierras expires into the Basin. The drab sort of wilderness the Utes trolled for rabbit meat, in the bone-dry foundation of a Cretaceous sea.

Porter looked at Richie, who was sucking the last of an American Spirit. Richie glared back, becoming self-conscious. “The hell you talking about?”

Porter slammed the van door shut. “Remember Hendricks, back in Eagle Rock?”

“What about him?”

“That garden of his, all those succulents. You ever think how he got those plants? The bastard was broker than poker.”

“So. What about it?”

“He would drive around, middle of the night,” Porter continued, “looking at people’s front yards. Then he’d pull over, yank a whole agave clean out of the ground, careful like, and throw the whole mess onto his backseat. Dirty roots and all.”

“Then drive off with it.”

“Yeah. After a few months, he had quite the menagerie.”

“Menagerie means animals.”

“You know what I mean.”

Porter searched the man’s face in front of him, the wrinkle deltas spreading from the corners of his eyes, the Oakleys perched high on his grizzled head. Either he got the point, or he missed it, but it was time to get back on the highway.

Richie needed no reminder. He opened the passenger door and got inside, peeling open a Slim Jim as he adjusted his seat.

Porter got into the driver’s seat, tapped the play button on the CD player. Stoner metal filled the air, fueling them north to Idaho.

                                                     ___________

As the white sun closed in on the rising cliffs, Porter lifted a final heap of dirt onto the roughly dug grave. Wiping his pasty brow, and smoothing his stringy goatee, he kicked the shovel with his boot, and slid it back into the duffel bag.

Looking at the chalky topsoil, sprinkled with roots and brush, he knew he could have done better. They’ll find him by Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe Monday if they bring out the dogs. It didn’t much matter though. It’s what Richie wanted, in that roundabout way of his.

Porter noticed something glimmering, on the road near the shuddering exhaust pipe. A pair of Oakleys, with the lenses just the slightest bit scuffed.

Bending over pensively, he picked up the Oakleys and peered into them, an unreadable Darth Vader gaze. Either he got the point or he missed it, Porter thought.

He put the sunglasses onto his head – backwards facing, like a snowboarder at a Park City bar. Opening the double doors at the back of the van, he threw the duffel bag inside, and shut them. Then rounded the chassis to the driver’s seat, and wheeled a wide turn back toward the highway.

[spencermandel]

A Change in the Weather

Starting from nothing the wall is rising concrete. Lurking chaos, rumbling drain waves, utter nonsensical towers above the fray. You think your logic has merit, your two bit acquisitions, the sewage pumps of hyperbole and police car indiscretion. 

That's the semblance of civility in infinite concrete, the last scrub of humanity in a curve of freeway overpass, to highlands and subsequent parks. It's where you are and where you find it, the pipe dreams and long shots, pitches and stitches, plastic afloat in a storm cloud. You alone saw it, now I do. I see the downpour, the tidal force, the shockwaves of godlike repose. 

Each head of current alternates clockwise, and floor side, like a cruise missile teasing the coast.  It's fully ecumenical, armchair economical, like cast iron footwork among the cadres of the deep. It isn't just you, not alone, at least -- it's a breathing space as broad as your chorus, a simpering council of desire. You made it this far, front and center, like a centaur facing bowmen in the mist. Let them spear you, let them rend you, for the goring is the whoring of the throne. You're the main line, errant skyline, on the tightrope of all that hangs in truth and veils. In that glimmer of a liquored tomorrow, you're the answer, and the question, and the rest. 

                                                     ~ ~ ~ 

****S O U N D T R A C K by Qwizzzzzzzzzz ***** ---> https://soundcloud.com/qwizzz/a-change-in-the-weather

[spencermandel]

December

Listen to the slowdown, the car town, the ballet on the surface of the moon. Utter chaos across the oceans, and it’s summer in fair LA. We’re hanging on dreams and firewater, like manics on a tightrope edge. We know it won’t last yet we milk it, pretend that we’re still in the Nineties, as we caffeinate under swaying palms. In December it’s the best place on Earth.

Here we build things that others only aim for: the idyllic consumer idols, the fiberglass female ideals. The starships and prowling rocket cars, a hairlength from scraping the curb, just a burnout away from Las Vegas, and an S-turn away from Big Sur. Get it, kid, come and get it— to the Westside and all the way down, to inferno and paradise and back again. Your midcentury awaits in the Bird Streets, but it definitely won’t buy itself.

Down the 10 and everywhere elsewhere, there are shooters and self-taught bombers, and rednecks who will shank you for meth. The whole world in shuddering terror, under spy-cams and armored police. Malarial rising tidewater, from the Mekong floating markets to Amsterdam. Why does it feel like we’re spared it, and by saying so, are we now jinxed? It’s one world, they say, but not here. Not in our minds, nor our air-conditioned cars. Blockbusters are Coming Soon, on the billboards perched over Wilshire, and glowing on all of our phones. Whiskey bars bustle with line producers, and the darlings of network TV— grab the cocktail waitress while you can, before you lose her in the sport-coated flesh. Wanna close it out, or we down for another round?

It will surely never end before it has to, won’t quit til the third or fourth overdose. Until bullets start hitting our stucco, or the royalties stop arriving in the mail. And really now, why the hell should we? So they judge us a bit less in the Bay? The green juice and cold press are flowing, and the models and purebreds still roam. The fault line is sleeping soundly, El Niño a distant dream.

[spencermandel]

Morning Ritual

You could start with a question or take the first train to Flagstaff. What would we do without coffee or ego boosts? These were the questions entering Whittington’s mind the first morning after the October daydream. Grab the handle and turn.

Way too soon to think about readers, or writers or anyone circumnavigating the mattress you lie on. Alligators stand on the riverbed—they don’t just float there. So when you talk about passions, your chainsaw you grind through the world with, don’t freeze-dry or vacuum seal til you cook that first ravenous meal.

Whittington got off the train and looked out over the expanse: the staggering concrete, the shelves and staircases, tunnels and handlebars. Navigate it all without a turnstile, a sexton, or an obelisk to interpret the energy flow. Utterly abstract hogwash, for whitewash or backwash. He breathed the trees that grew in the planters, the ivy that crawled the mahogany on rich people’s front doors. Time for another coffee— he swung under an awning and grabbed a stool by a table. Cold brew or hot stew? Today it’s scalding Joe, the American fucking pastime.

He laughed as he read the paper, the op-eds and meager concert listings. Past the escort ads, and hip hop party boys, with brothers in jail and nightly Tinder liaisons. It felt mildly productive—an update on the world as we know it, the consensus of media stimuli. “I’m a part of it, part of it,” and the only way out is through. He mopped some coffee with the sports page, no offense to college athletes, or their salivating Insta-fangirls.

Sun from one direction will burn your face, so he got up and walked, and danced down a subsequent staircase. It isn’t so bad, so bad. It’ll cut you a break when you do, like any half-functioning system, nervous or parasympathetic. The contractions in your esophagus and contracts on glass tables; water bottles and K-Cups, Red Bulls or even champagne. Drink the Kool-Aid before it settles, into soppy and sugary sludge. It’s refreshing with a hint of mania, fuel for the next battle or just your breakfast and pushups. If you’re not going to Japanese islands, to shave heads and sit still on cushions, care enough. You don’t need to love it, but let it love you.

The city looked downright heartbreaking under the cumulus cloud cover. As beautiful as dreams, or Narnia, or Paris before the war.

[spencermandel]

Lake View

The nectar is where you seek it. The middle thread in the eating, the bleeding, the shouldering and the breathing. Too far to the left, you miss it— too far to the right, you burn it right down like a birthday candle.

Age will outpace you, as your image of youth hikes mountains, drives speedboats, picks darlings up at the bar. To those of us still in it, it’s so much harder to relish. Enjoyment is retrospect, when the brain fog of conflict, and scratches, and proving things takes its toll. Ever harder when it’s images upon images, Russian doll screenshots of loves, and joys, and coastal adventures. And to those you believe in, ignore what disappoints you. Or none of us pass the test. All of us walk the tightrope – if you pull someone down, everyone’s going to fall.

What to do then with our boiling, our edges, the ones that cut like beer cans, sharp or with tetanus rust? Let them pierce inward, or slash them through loving hearts, and the hands that reach out to hold us? It’s push and pull, in and out, and the judgment of who to hurt next. Drinking can bring it to surface, but never steadies the lake. Ripple, fizzle, fissure— the torrent only heightens, until you go deeper, darker, into depths where others wouldn’t dare. If the way out is through, go through.

Yet some part of you seeks another way. A hack, a counterweight, a skeleton key for the jigsaw. There’s glory at your feet, if you only look down to see it. You can feel it, when it’s there, and it’s there almost all of the time. Despite the soot and shedding hairs, the ever-encroaching grime. Nothing’s dirty in a mud bath, only nourished by the sludge. Let it spread over you, fill you, take you under its care. Your body will thank you, then your soul, as the holes reach inward with tendrils, with arms of encircling soil. Roots and bedrock, entwining once again, canyon walls united after millions of years.

[spencermandel]

Angelus Vista

When you look at this city for what it is (or was), it spirals like tie dye, weaves like a sunbird on a textile desert. The truss beams of the Craftsmen offer solace to summer arrivals, winding like pilgrims through the chaparral canyons. You’ll know who you are once you reach the final party, the hotbed valley cook-off at the skirt of the world. You were nothing before today, just a blur of bleacher pantomime, and dinners you’d rather forget.

The children of the workforce, fishing in the teeming reservoirs, make playthings out of ravaged corn cobs, and hieroglyphs from aluminum wrappers. With a cooler in a baby stroller, a vendor peddles soft drinks, sustaining the thirsty urchins for the toll of a gum-stained quarter. The smallest and most serious, a lazy-eyed little Napoleon, shoves brothers aside for the very first, iciest sip. They allow him his survival, his precocious and bullish greed, with the knowledge that someday, with a Glock in his caramel grip, it’s likely he’ll return the favor.

Like beef jerky wrapped in a windbreaker, a drunk lies dormant at the feet of a Eucalyptus, finding sanctuary in the mentholated umbra. Unaware of the amplified sermon, echoing in plaintive Spanish, that megaphones threats and promises from the coming Kingdom of God. The preacher, voice cracking in the August heat, sweats through his tucked-in dress shirt. A few stoic disciples, perspiring in solidarity at his trembling flanks, affirm his words with their silence.

The drifter doesn’t wake but I do, shaken by the fruitless doomsayer, ruing the futility of his auto-da-fé. I can feel the coming El Niño, lurking at the smoggy horizon; the darkening cumulonimbus, the squad cars and boxes of legal briefs, that will sweep the empire inland, or back over the rusted razor wire, for another round of jagged keloid scars. I brace myself for the rain, with half a heart’s hope that the aging storm drains will hold. When the torrent passes Long Beach, and the river finally dwindles to a trickle of emerald algae, the succulents may find time to bloom.

[spencermandel]

Nocturne

What parallaxes, parataxis? Would it ever be true to inseminate those that the holy have deemed mere receptacles? To inhale in a room full of shoe varnish, if all you respect is decadence and you've blown away all of your dandelions. You're intricate just to be interesting, with barely a rope to swing on, like a terrapin egg on the shore. We're everything together, yet we're seeking. Vaulting into tourmalines like a nightingale in your Ovaltine, or creatine in the regimens of wholly impersonal trainers.  

Nightly smackdowns over ethical epithets, as shacked-up breadwinners serve matzah balls to headliners. Or compete with their reputable concubines, who jackknife all your credit cards til they're halfway to Asia and back. No wonder my friends are all fugitives, or superlative covert operatives. It's a damn wash when gametime was yesterday, like Jackie Onassis on saccharin. Anything sensible is obsolete, an obsequious morning obituary.

You're as suited as I are or they am, when the only thing left is your stomach lining. The Second Brain as they say, which trumps lesser brawn if the yuppies agree to produce it, or the boomers smell lucrative publishing rights. All is forgotten when you are; the only blacker prerogative is sticking your lover in sighting range. The realest deal gone commando, the darkest night processed for sausage meat. What better thing to stuff your face with, like ketamine wetting your dreams.

[spencermandel]

Dependence Day

Adversity in diversity, the country grew out of mixing and conflict and 360 degree style-cramping. And now we complain about the alloys that forged steel in the fires, the mettle and metal that sideswiped the German Blitzkrieg like a defensive tackle, cleats in the churning French mud. Humid Brooklyn summers, sultry swims in the gene pool, new skin and slang and noses and asses, causing ancestors to writhe in cathartic hatred, in graves and rest homes and places of worship, as tradition always withers in the face of human magnetism.

It was fusion and fission, like born-again bacchanalia, as the Africans syncopated Beethoven and Einstein sketched out the bomb, despite Jewish guilt, on American chalkboards. The Chinese gave bones for the railroads and now they design our monorails; the Mexicans poured sweat on our orange groves, before we thirsted for Alba and Gomez. Build all the walls you want, in your heart or Arizona; the stars are no longer your slaves, and the stripes are your Cherokee blood.

[spencermandel]

Old Glory

Garage sale Stars and Stripes, leaning askew in the mirror, gracefully say it all. Post-collegiate party, coughing swigs of tequila, jams from the mid-2000s. Resin spliffs as you network, cream puffs and popped balloons. We've all been there, but I was there first. And the noise has now reached cacophony, antiphony, a better suite for sympathy. Golf clubs and hanging fixed-gears, smuggled Third World ornaments, juggled dreams and tearing seams as pink shirts dive to necklines, curved or full of hair. You're a young Robert Downey and we're missing the very same boat. Boas sparkle arches over walls and cavernous doorways, as the Moors slathered plaster in Spain. The ring leader's a retail sushi chef, of good times and raw tuna deals, on cantilevered barrio balconies. Or gum-spotted street corners, where the candles burn Jesus for 14 year olds. Italians chug Mexican corn water, Scots hightail for tacos -- it's over, they say, it's over. And when I bag my clothes for Goodwill, flannel or Southwestern chic, I'll close the door, don't worry. Save flair pieces for the kids.

[spencermandel]

Welcome to the Perma-Eighties

Fresh as college springtime, those same old chords—tap-tap that volume button, that anthem for what was, and what could still be. Like white wine sangria, the daylight is golden sour, a projector on the gum-spotted sidewalk, cracking with the force of the mother goddess. The salacious pull of nature itself. The Eighties left and came back ten times stronger, bulldozing the Clinton years in a neon tsunami, roaring with vintage synthesizers. In summer, in the Sun Belt, the zeitgeist makes a bit more sense. No wonder Los Angeles is back on its feet, a prizefighter refusing the ropes, a former teenage heartthrob on a second career spike. A survivor of cocktails on an ego of inflatable plastic, in a Jacuzzi of starving tiger sharks.

The summer never ends if you don’t let it, with a couple blind eyes and a bottle of herbal sleep aids. But really, should it ever? Why hate the party boys and the fashion blog starlets, with their Ray-Bans and news ticker Insta feeds? Their enthusiasm’s golden, that youthful joie-de-vivre that can only be made in America, that smirking, naïve optimism. Vomit all you want from your cayenne juice cleanse or your righteous backstory, your books on mindfulness or the crystals you keep on the nightstand. Your conscience is clean but you’re dying, dying while the assholes live, and breathe, and fuck in the bathrooms at Vegas pool parties.

If you’re going to save the world, save yourself first—your spine and your dreams and whatever launched you out of bed as a child, at six in the morning to your parents’ chagrin. If we’re meant to survive, we’ll need you more than anyone. You, lovely you, despite your bourgeois escapes and your brilliant excuses. For what it’s worth, I’m here for you. I’ll keep you strong, until my brainstem’s burned for jet fuel and my chicken arms fall to the mud, frying like rotisserie in the merciless sunshine. Free of ozone, and sunblock, and the shade of the towering palm trees.

[spencermandel]

What Better Place than a Balcony

“The beautiful shades of neurosis,” said the boy, swigging Jameson on this forlorn Tuesday or Sunday or whatever it is. It’s warm like Florida on the balcony, swish-breeze swinging like a hurricane sugar-cane.

You reach these sort of days where the trees sway and you want to speak poetry, and you could just as easily be in Greece or Spain. Old culture places, women burned to caramel and iron-cooked seafood, line-caught and searing on the coast. But staring at the houses, smelling the warm stucco, feet resting in the dust, here is the same if you get past your brain.

Chasing fines, closing his eyes, chiming the wind as we take another swig. The swishier we get the closer, and also the farther, barley-wine twilight in my Panama hat. What would I talk about that’s even worth saying, besides the feeling as is, at this middle point in history, the time that’s always now however near and far we get in all our middlings on the Earth. Our barrel-jumps through the Industry, barbeque stabs at art, skewers aplenty for the feast as long as it lasts. Which requires another swig – to wash it down, of course.

The clouds are cirrhotic if that’s an adjective for cirrhosis but I’m talking about cirrus clouds like the downy blanket above us. The days getting longer add gravitas to afternoons, snoozes on hammocks or self-hating bedspreads, blinds closed to the daylight. The confinement is self-imposed but better your gun than theirs, the thoughtless meta-masses who grill you like seafood, old cultures on the side.

He’s thinking, next to me. He’s got a solution, but it hurts him to look at it directly. His sad eyes think of white thighs and his loves that fell far away, in Russia, in acting school, or New York south of 14th.

I swig again and go deeper, as the utility declines, as I hate myself all the more and love my typing all the same. My feet are dirty, my arms are hairy, I’m not getting younger and I live well nonetheless. Someone is cooking something, the barbeque closes in. Of days, and dreams, and lost loves and victories and dulling memories.

“I’m just thinking about your character,” he says, not me this time but the other guy. He stands and perches the balcony, stretches, clasping hands behind his neck. He get it, so much of it, and knows it isn’t easy. But he isn’t giving up, not ‘til he tastes that nectar, bathes in it, the sludge of younger dreaming, drizzling the sundae of Now. I get that, I do, as I drink again from the bottle, golden ethyl goodness burning southward over the tonsils.

Swivel, twist, twist, and the bottle is closed. I’m still alive and so is he. More than ever, although we’re not young. Older, and younger, and better all the while. Like fine wine and whiskey, and friendships, and that certain kind of love, that you only meet once or twice.

____

photo: Chase Fein

[spencermandel]

Golden State

From a lawn chair at the continent’s end, you can look out into blankness and possibility. There’s no further to go, so there’s only deeper, beneath the cracks in the pavement. Into bedrock and tar pits, where California perforates the mainland, biding its time for the final rendering, the doom and salvation. Enjoy it while it lasts, she says, a woman in your bed, restive in her wanderlust. You relish her sweet impermanence, like a masochist under a bullwhip. Her ancient newness, her volatile Sierras and drained Cretaceous seas; the landslides when it rains, the wildfires in the droughts. There is a peace in her chaos, from the standpoint of stillness, the cross-legged monk in zazen.

Peruse the concrete plazas, the clearings between sun-baked ziggurats, running your hand over sandpaper stucco, until you bleed for the thirsty Sun God. Rest in the shadow of monoliths, in the rotating shade of a sundial. Sometimes it all seems dead, a ruin of the capitalist golden age, the fountains choked and waterless, the river a barren aqueduct. Yet you keep pressing on, in faith and loyal stubbornness, divining for moisture with a two-pronged stick. The shamans have long since gone, and your shot is as good as anyone’s. If the core were no longer molten, the land wouldn’t shake underfoot. And when the final reservoir dries, and the chaparral parches to desert, the metals will still churn below, waiting to be forged into idols.