The universe is collapsing. The love child of infinity and time has become the bastard of another failed marriage, lopsided and withered, troubled and empty.
At eighteen I decided to try to lighten the weight of this kind of apocalyptic and paraplegic cowboy wisdom and go out into the streets in search of redemption. There was news of a whispered oasis in the fermented vine that gave me hope, stories told by toothless creatures from a glittering city that had not yet been separated from its sisters of hope and divine substance. So I headed towards the A303 hoping to soak my ‘John Majoresc’ universe in the kaleidoscopic colors of Brighton rock. Unwashed hair and linen shirt fluttered romantically in the salt-soaked wind as I approached the elegant and expensive Sussex countryside. My mind felt drawn into infinity by the wild horses of providence. The thud of their hooves on the track sent serotonin through my nervous system, enhanced only by the wisdom of Marks (Howard, not Karl) babbling on Radio 2. Upon arrival, I hurried over to the nearest store, brought a He turned the fire truck from the buy and sell section into the window and parked it in the middle of town. Wheels and a home all in one. Every man named Sam should have one.
It didn’t take long for me to settle in and meet some interesting characters. Bill ‘Bongo’ Burns; a talented protégé artist whose work depicted suffering and hunger, living off aristocratic parents while trying to “succeed,” Little Jane; a six foot anti-capitalist singer-songwriter who was in the process of amassing enormous financial wealth by selling hallucinogenic drugs to manic depressives, and more of the same contradictory perversions of the human form. “Without opposites there is no progression,” Blake said, so maybe, I thought, this is a sign of a truly living community. Hope and drugs. I immersed myself in the social scene, I became a being of value, a face that everyone knew and liked, I began to feel fulfilled. There were poetry readings every afternoon in dusty underground bars, and in the evening the Cowely Club was packed with anarchist whores and virgins, quietly talking vegan conspirators, drunken lovers yelling public obscenities at each other. The whole place seems to be washed away and rocked by the tide of the majestic ocean, the atmosphere was both fascinating and intoxicating to my hungry and depraved mind.
The city itself was charming and magical. The Lanes sweated with life on the nobly cobbled sidewalks as coffee shops, organic delis and colorful patrons lined the sidewalks. You felt someone but no one among the monsters and flowers of the freedom fighters of cutting and folding. The sound of acoustic guitars drifted through the oaks in the national park, mingling with the sweet smell of jazz cigarettes before probing your senses. Healthy brown thorns washed by the sun. I was Ernest Hemmingway every time I scribbled nonsense in my tattered notebook, looking up only to catch a glimpse of peacocks flaunting their trendy feathers, Miss Sixty jeans, and pastel headbands. “Brighton”, I remember writing “It is the rampant rabbit of the dwellings. The vibe here is so intense that life feels like a constant orgasm that destroys the earth, its juice thick and sweet as honey.” Typical nonsense that feels so good in the moment while being high in the moment. This was how he had always dreamed San Francisco would be in the sixties, rich and velvety with new age culture, but sharp as a wire whip ready to slice through the ugly, sleeping world into fundamental forms of beauty and progression.
I felt that I had reached Nirvana, but it would soon prove to be a fool’s paradise. There is a fissure in all that they say, it is where the light enters, the poets mutter. Well, as for the first one, I can confirm it. However, when the rift formed, instead of light, molasses gushed out of the illusion split, drenching my soul once more in sticky darkness. The contradictions in which I had dressed as lamb ached and throbbed like a stubbed toe until the truth bit my tendon with its sharp wolf teeth. There was no romance on this rock; it was just a colorful version of the dissolute corridor I left behind. The difference between my archaic hell and my neo-hell was a purely cosmetic matter. An ugly woman redeems some of her nonexistent beauty by resigning herself to the fact that she is ugly. On the other hand, humanity vomits an advanced state of revulsion when the beast covers itself with three inches of scaly paste trying to hide its deformed bone structure. Unless, if you’re rude, you’re a walking boner drunk on cheap liquor. And that, in hindsight and with a poor metaphor, is exactly what it was, dressed in linen and delusional drowning in my own dopamine.
Brighton was beginning to reveal itself as a brothel for delusional dreamers, a dirty syringe filled with insensitive self-importance. My subconscious was working over time to erase the dark truth from my waking life. At first when you arrive and unpack you feel like you’ve found gold, a rich soul like a Christmas cake with Peruvian frosting. Then the nightmares creep in.
Velvet-wrapped skeletons and joules dance around bright, rich fires of useless thoughts, swaying to sweet empty songs, embracing cracked porcelain doves. Blurred visions of rusted vintage cars in miles and miles of endless traffic, dead babies rotting in gray booster seats. Trying to escape, finding another damn fence …
He knew that the wall would collapse at some point and reality would dawn, the future smelled of bipolar disorder.
………………………………………….
The diamond bullet penetrated my fragile skull one night without warning. No one noticed the small pinprick as it entered my forehead with a silent hiss. I stood upright and became more and more aware of the pretentious nonsense pouring out of my mouth into the crowded room. The damp wall behind me cold witnessed my precious neurological palace of sand to come out of the exit wound like drunken diarrhea. I felt not only the dissolution that I had once felt, but also a new and darker sensation altogether. I realized that it was not just the world that was screwed up and ignorant, but also my judgment. The clown of cynicism was being mocked and laughing at the very subject that he felt was above and more intelligent. I had been deceived, there is nothing more depraved for a man’s soul than that. A cosmological kick in the balls. I wasted no time, as my grandiose illusions of freedom and substance crumbled around me like the twin towers of prosperity and freedom, I ran like a fast burning dog until I could run no more.
Today that moment still haunts me. I felt in a macro-moment the loss of that hanging carrot giving me the will to stumble every day, it allowed me to fantasize about a world that still harbored a beating heart.
Adam set it all up. The soul of the world has let go to start a new life and is not going to pay maintenance. God is dead, reborn in another cosmos, or there is no cosmos at all. He could travel the world looking for that divine magic in every corner, field and city. You may have learned your lessons; do not play with time, do not masturbate and do not obsess enough to try to catch your reflection on every shiny surface that manifests itself. Invest but take no chances, listen to Alan Sugar. This is the Big Crunch, the heavenly master’s room of the dying for which the scammed and disillusioned have sacrificed their sensual pleasure in hopes of redeeming eternal reward. A ghost town full of decaying weeds. Elvis has left the building.
