And today, like most days in L.A., it's a sunny day. Patches of clouds float like white cotton candy on the backdrop of a massive, overbearing blue canvas. Metal machines in the shape of a cross fly high above the Angeleno smog. On the 710 exit at Valley Blvd, engines emit black smoke and hum vroom! vroom! while the man with the cardboard sign coughs ack! ack! The heat intensifies the more one remains in place, but you move forward, catching a hot breeze here and there. Cars congests and twists and turn as the traffic lights conduct the symphony of traffic like the bellow lungs of an accordion. Push. Pull. Stop, go. Slow down. Speed up. Breath. Go! hurry. Inhaaaallleeee. Exhaleeeee. It's turning! now! wait. halt. honk honk honk~
I'm stuck in traffic, racing to be on time and surrender my energies to higher powers. I'm not speaking figuratively here; I'm talking socio-economix blues (I play my part in the suicidal concerto, pressing the mechanical pedal, accelerating the disengaged clutch: rrrooom moo moo moo moo)
Ads. Commuters. Walkers. Disputers. Computers. Stupider. Smog. Oxygen. Homeless. Homemore...This "modern" world possess' the ability to breed schizo-bodybuilder-narcissistic-anti-cool-consumers children of the future: #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. And these metals and concrete boxes that possess the ability to numb and sleep you to death does not help the barrage of concussions that can slowly grind you into amnesia. I'm just here pressing the "pedal to the metal," and eating cheese crackers.
My dad used to say, estamos en Califas. Canijo!
Oh yeah, hell yeah.
Me&Califas.
meXcal, a borderline merger of realities.
MexKali: miXture of Time and Death. Kali, "the black one," and Me.
El meXcalero
"para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien también"
aqui, no mas, Nomas aqui. No Mas! Canijo!
Some resemble walking dead amnesiacs, while others are literally killing themselves on the daily grind. It's an assault on life, living everyday in the constant drift of movement away from humanity (destiny? Perhaps it's not that bad. The next evolutionary step might be tech.no.logic.(k)ill, and the "great dying off" will be the consequential shed of the biological skin so to enter the technological hive: OUROBOROUS: twisting and turning and evolving back and forth, like that boomerang Ellison describes)
Still in traffic. This heat. This shinny sun boiling my brain into a soupy stew of soft meats in cerebrospinal fluid. I'm not dead yet though it feels like I am, but how do the dead feel? They feel nothing. It's like going through these motions, in line, honk, me next. Walking under the sun reminded of eventual decay, looking at every step taken to move forward while the grave remains underneath my sole.
A recent Vice report said that "Unemployment is Killing 45, 000 people each year." something about the number of suicides related to unemployment rates. A Que Canijos! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. Its either death from no work or death by overwork; the Japanese call it Karoshi, 過労死 (かろし).
The suns been out all day, heating the land. People's soles hot under the Sun, salpicando and dancing the impassioned masquerade! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal! Lost souls that could have been. Shoot. Lost causes to a potential workers solidarity movement. What have you got to say on the matter, Marx? Kropotkin? Gramsci? Lukács? Althusser? Deleuze? Guattari? What's that ya'll say? class struggle? that the proles are alienated, and without an identity, or income, living Hell!? And what else? since many people's sense of identity results from their employment, they feel lost?....oh Boy! ooouuuu weeeee!!! I don't know any o' dat nonsense talk! You guys and your special vocabulary with yer subalterns, yer culture, yer ideological state apparati or however ya say it!, and and and and yer yer dissociation, and ancillary culture and all that jazz. Them words be zounds! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal!
I've been dazing and daydreaming most of this day, lost in inner space from radioactive intake of one too many doses of gray. I blackout on the drive home. Suddenly, I'm in my room. It's late and when the sun goes down, the 'lectric moon keeps me warm.
It's time to give in.
Catch the Gold Line on Mednik and Beverly into the veins of Kali on the gold train. Cortez, our gold is yet in Boyle Heights! it's in East Los. It's still in the golden thighs of brown and sun-burnt bodies. In the movement of Afrikan Soul.
Here it comes. Hop in. Snake through and under the
concrete and steel of the sun burned Angeleno metropol. Maybe die of cancer someday.
Maybe get run over. Careful, it's too easy to get on the "wrong way" or miss your stop, or maybe you were meant to get lost and meet that "random" person. Fuck you muth'fucka. and you momma and daddy. Shut the fuck up bitch! Keep talking! Thwack! someone just got crunched by the weight of gravity of a 410,000 pound punch from a vato with a loko motive. Remain calm and coherent for as long as you can before possibly "snapping" into reality on the Blue line. I saw it once. 1am--last train to Long Beach. Man mumbling something into the reflection on the window. Spooked out from something he saw. Ran out. Left his bag behind. It smelled bad, like rotted ass flesh gone more than one too many days without a soap and water. People started moving and cursing: hole shit mein! ouuuu weee boy! aw, hellll naww!
Here comes the hustle man and his goods. $10 for the reds and $20 for the blues, but for you amigo, special price. Give me both. Here's 30. Take the change, and tell the vulture organization to stop laundering money from Big Cocaine through these candy pills. Shit! I missed my stop. This is the richlands. Cerros and mountains. The land of swine, and slave profiteers. Imperialist and colonialist. Philanthropists and Humanitarians. Shh, the white folks are sleeping on mountains. Let's go for a hike...express your technicolor feelings by trying to capture them in a moment of still life, and thus adding to the digital pastiche mosaic of 1's and 0's that everyone Oh's and Ah's.
The pill takes its form. Red and blue make purple. Purple people on the gold line. The hustle man was really a medicine man, man. Is this that purple stuff? I'm tripping. And, I'm tripping on the trip. Purple haze vision and mysterious apparitions: Swine. Rats. Snakes. Sheep. Rabbits. Coyotes. The train forks here, careful on the time slippage, it can easily fracture here, and you'll miss your departure/arrival point once again. You might end up "lost" amid the various tiny villages of Los Angeles. Canijo! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. I'm losing my grip on reality.
The cliche old man whose suppose to be the "wise" messenger archetype symbolizing a good omen next to me asks, "How are you?"
Fine
There's no connection. He has as much company as I do! hahahaha!! but it feels good. Sharing the diddly-squat is something.
That smelly bag on the train is still there, except there are many more now. There's a man high on patriotism. High on nationalism. He's got a veteran's jacket. He fractured and lost, just like the rest, but he's holding on to his sanity with psychotic fervor. He's yammering something to people on the train about Aguas Blancas. He's drunk blabbering: A yo! tzinapa! Mireles Valverde! Ahua! Tlataya! I can see him from the reflection on my window. Atenco! Atenco! Acteal! In another reality, that could be me.
I've had enough tonight. This is my stop fellas. You can open the doors now. On the L.A. trains I'm Warren Fuckin Buffet! the Wizard! I leave behind me the disoriented Mestizo beside the Afrikana and a medley of brown, black, and bruised bodies. Watch out ladies and gents! Warden Buffet is leaving the fucking building! Off you go now! I'll let some of you sleep in here tonight! All of the trains end up in the same place! don't worry about being lost! Especially you there! looking at the window reflections with the thousand-yard-stare! ou weee boy! snap out of it! Look at me! I've got $20 in my pocket 'till next payday and that's enough. Learn to live like me, fellas. Just live a little, would'ja? Just a little. not a lot. just a little. just. live. a. little. just a little.
I hear sounds of train tracks and whizzing cars and muttering retreats and half deserted streets. At my exit I see J. Alfred Prufrock; he walks toward me, then recedes his steps, then moves left before moving to his right and ends up back in the same spot. On my walk home, years of explosions flicker down tonight as the light pollution diminishes the visibility of starlight. It's all for good; I'm too busy watching my step to look up and wonder about stars.
A recent Vice report said that "Unemployment is Killing 45, 000 people each year." something about the number of suicides related to unemployment rates. A Que Canijos! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. Its either death from no work or death by overwork; the Japanese call it Karoshi, 過労死 (かろし).
The suns been out all day, heating the land. People's soles hot under the Sun, salpicando and dancing the impassioned masquerade! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal! Lost souls that could have been. Shoot. Lost causes to a potential workers solidarity movement. What have you got to say on the matter, Marx? Kropotkin? Gramsci? Lukács? Althusser? Deleuze? Guattari? What's that ya'll say? class struggle? that the proles are alienated, and without an identity, or income, living Hell!? And what else? since many people's sense of identity results from their employment, they feel lost?....oh Boy! ooouuuu weeeee!!! I don't know any o' dat nonsense talk! You guys and your special vocabulary with yer subalterns, yer culture, yer ideological state apparati or however ya say it!, and and and and yer yer dissociation, and ancillary culture and all that jazz. Them words be zounds! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal!
I've been dazing and daydreaming most of this day, lost in inner space from radioactive intake of one too many doses of gray. I blackout on the drive home. Suddenly, I'm in my room. It's late and when the sun goes down, the 'lectric moon keeps me warm.
It's time to give in.
Catch the Gold Line on Mednik and Beverly into the veins of Kali on the gold train. Cortez, our gold is yet in Boyle Heights! it's in East Los. It's still in the golden thighs of brown and sun-burnt bodies. In the movement of Afrikan Soul.
Here comes the hustle man and his goods. $10 for the reds and $20 for the blues, but for you amigo, special price. Give me both. Here's 30. Take the change, and tell the vulture organization to stop laundering money from Big Cocaine through these candy pills. Shit! I missed my stop. This is the richlands. Cerros and mountains. The land of swine, and slave profiteers. Imperialist and colonialist. Philanthropists and Humanitarians. Shh, the white folks are sleeping on mountains. Let's go for a hike...express your technicolor feelings by trying to capture them in a moment of still life, and thus adding to the digital pastiche mosaic of 1's and 0's that everyone Oh's and Ah's.
The pill takes its form. Red and blue make purple. Purple people on the gold line. The hustle man was really a medicine man, man. Is this that purple stuff? I'm tripping. And, I'm tripping on the trip. Purple haze vision and mysterious apparitions: Swine. Rats. Snakes. Sheep. Rabbits. Coyotes. The train forks here, careful on the time slippage, it can easily fracture here, and you'll miss your departure/arrival point once again. You might end up "lost" amid the various tiny villages of Los Angeles. Canijo! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. I'm losing my grip on reality.
The cliche old man whose suppose to be the "wise" messenger archetype symbolizing a good omen next to me asks, "How are you?"
Fine
There's no connection. He has as much company as I do! hahahaha!! but it feels good. Sharing the diddly-squat is something.
That smelly bag on the train is still there, except there are many more now. There's a man high on patriotism. High on nationalism. He's got a veteran's jacket. He fractured and lost, just like the rest, but he's holding on to his sanity with psychotic fervor. He's yammering something to people on the train about Aguas Blancas. He's drunk blabbering: A yo! tzinapa! Mireles Valverde! Ahua! Tlataya! I can see him from the reflection on my window. Atenco! Atenco! Acteal! In another reality, that could be me.
I hear sounds of train tracks and whizzing cars and muttering retreats and half deserted streets. At my exit I see J. Alfred Prufrock; he walks toward me, then recedes his steps, then moves left before moving to his right and ends up back in the same spot. On my walk home, years of explosions flicker down tonight as the light pollution diminishes the visibility of starlight. It's all for good; I'm too busy watching my step to look up and wonder about stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment