song: Black Hole Sun
artist: Soundgarden
album: Superunknown
year: 1994
A corner case on the edge of the city. It sits on the horizon like the sun at the end of the day, a luminous disk teetering over oblivion.
I live for the edge cases, for the transitions.
“Don’t get lost in the transactions,” she once told me while we were sitting on a blanket at the park in the middle of the day, “That’s where you’ll lose time.”
I sit next to the only burger stand in Chinatown waiting for my name to be called from the brightly lit service window, a modern contrast to the faded red and washed-out greens of the plaza around me. Some people call it charming.
I take out my phone and reply to a message from someone that I probably shouldn’t be involved with and the air is rife with the seeds of disaster and that’s a tired fucking theme.
I’ve been getting more real with myself lately. Trying more, caring less. The usual checklist symptoms of a slow psychosis and I remember to cut this part out of my memoirs, like an act dropped from the show. It serves no purpose.
Down a side-street that leads into the plaza there’s the Grand Star and I remember posters on MySpace for Transistor, a place that I never got to see. It was for a late twenties crowd in the mid two-thousands, so those people are in their mid to late forties now. I have a friend who was there at that time. Fresh out of college and not sure whether to stay or go to Pittsburgh. He lived in a shitty apartment in North Hollywood and during that era he had moments where he felt he should’ve chosen Pittsburgh. “It could’ve been worse,” he often reminds me, “But it was definitely weird.”
Our present is a mess. The largely spaced out LA basin has been awkwardly stitched together by Southern California dreams over the last century and we are now in a space that’s without question unique. I sometimes get the feeling that long planted seeds are about to bloom and that there’s something in the air. Don’t you feel it?
I like to imagine different eras of this city superimposed on the present, dancing around each other, and I populate these scenes with people that I know or remember and then roll the dice and let the story wander.
I feel like a sun about to burst and when the anxiety comes as it inevitably does I catch it and slow it down and remember that I probably still have a billion years left and that always makes me happy and then I hear my name.
kosmik city 