song: Black Hole Sun

artist: Soundgarden

album: Superunknown

year: 1994

A corner case in a new corner of the city. It sits on the horizon like sun at the end of the day. A disk at edge, teetering over oblivion. 

I live for the edge cases, for the transitions. “Don’t get lost in the transaction,” someone once told me, “That’s where you’ll lose time.”

I sit next to the burger stand in Chinatown waiting for my name to be called from the brightly lit service window, a contrast to the moody red and washed-out greens of the plaza around me. You could even call it charming. 

I reply to a message from someone I probably shouldn’t be involved with and the air is rife with the seeds of disaster, and that is 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. 

I’ll cut this part out of my memoirs, like an act that should be dropped from the show. It serves no purpose.

About halfway down the side-street I sit next to exists the Grand Star, and I remember the posters on MySpace for the 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-forties now. My friend Alex and I talk about those places whenever we see each other. He was there in that time, fresh out of college and not sure whether to stay or to go and with a shitty apartment in North Hollywood. It was between Pittsburgh and here, and during that time he always felt that he should’ve chosen Pittsburgh. “It could’ve been worse,” he often reminds me, “But it was definitely weird.”

Our present world is different. The largely spaced out LA basin has been awkwardly stitched together by broken Southern California dreams over the last fifty years and we have found a space in the gray that’s without question unique. I get the feeling that long planted seeds are currently blooming in our present narrative and that there’s something in the air. Don’t you feel it?

I like to try and stitch together different eras of the place that I know the best in my conversations, and I’m a sucker for the stories that take place in times before my own and places that I’ve never been to. I always populate those scenes with the memories of people that I currently know or remember and wonder what the outcome would be of any particular encounter. It’s always a roll of the dice.

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.