The universe is collapsing. The love child of infinity and time has become the bastard of another failed marriage, unbalanced and withered, troubled and empty.
At eighteen I decided to try to relieve the weight of this kind of apocalyptic and paraplegic cowboy wisdom and hit the streets in search of redemption. There were rumors of an oasis whispered in the fermented vine that gave me hope, tales told by toothless creatures of a bright people not yet separated from their sisters of hope and divine substance. So I headed to the A303 hoping to soak my ‘John Majoresc’ universe in the kaleidoscopic colors of Brighton rock. Unwashed hair and linen shirt blew romantically in the salt-soaked wind as I approached the elegant and expensive Sussex countryside. My mind was drawn towards infinity by the wild horses of providence. The thud of their hooves hitting the tarmac sent serotonin pounding through my nervous system, powered only by the wisdom of Marks (Howard, not Karl) blathering on Radio 2. It turned the fire truck in the buy-and-sell section into the window and parked it in the middle of the city. Wheels and 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; talented artist protégé whose work showed suffering and hunger, living off aristocratic parents while trying to ‘make it big’, Little Jane; a four-foot-tall 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 progress,” Blake said, so perhaps, I thought, this is a sign of a truly alive community. Hope and drug. 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 was poetry reading every afternoon in dusty underground bars, and by nightfall the Cowely Club was packed with whores and anarchist virgins, vegan conspirators talking softly, drunken lovers yelling obscenities at each other in public. The whole place seems to be swayed and swayed by the tide of the majestic ocean, the atmosphere was both captivating and intoxicating to my hungry and depraved mind.
The town itself was charming and magical. The Lanes sweated life on noble cobblestone sidewalks as coffee shops, organic delis and colorful patrons lined the sidewalks. You felt someone but no one between the monsters and the flowers of the freedom fighters to cut and bend. The sound of stitched acoustic guitars float through the oak trees in the national park, mixing with the sweet smell of jazz cigarettes before probing your senses. Sun washed brown healthy spines. I was Ernest Hemmingway every time I wrote nonsense in my tattered notebook, glancing up only to catch glimpses of peacocks flaunting their trendy feathers, Miss Sixty jeans, and pastel headbands. “Brighton”, I remember noting, “is the rampant rabbit of the dwellings. The atmosphere here is so intense that life feels like a constant devastating orgasm, its juice thick and sweet as honey.” Typical nonsense that feels good in the moment while being high in the moment. This was how I always dreamed San Francisco would be in the sixties, rich and velvety with new age culture, but sharp as a wire whip ready to cut through the ugly, sleeping world in the fundamental ways of beauty and progression. .
I felt I had reached Nirvana, but this would soon prove to be a fool’s paradise. There is a crack in all that they say, it is where the light enters, the poets murmur. Well, regarding the former, I can confirm. However, when the rift formed, instead of light, molasses gushed out from the illusion split, drenching my soul once more in sticky darkness. The contradictions I had dressed in sheep’s clothing ached and throbbed like a bruised finger until the truth bit into my sinew with its sharp wolf teeth. There was no romance on this rock; It was just a colorful version of the loose runner I left behind. The difference between my archaic and neo-hell was purely cosmetic. An ugly woman redeems some nonexistent sense of her beauty by resigning herself to the fact that she is ugly. On the other hand, an advanced state of disgust is spewed out on humanity as the beast covers itself in three inches of scaly paste trying to hide its misshapen bone structure. Unless, of course, you’re a walking boner intoxicated on cheap liquor. And that, in retrospect and a worn metaphor, is exactly what I was, dressed in linen and deliriously drowning in my own dopamine.
Brighton was beginning to reveal itself as a brothel for wishful dreamers, a dirty syringe filled with numbing conceit. My subconscious was working over time to erase the dark truth from my waking life. At first, when you get there and unpack, you feel like you’ve struck gold, a rich soul like a Christmas cake with Peruvian icing. Then the nightmares creep in.
Skeletons wrapped in velvet and joules dance around fires bright and rich with useless thoughts, swaying to sweet empty songs, embracing pigeons of cracked china. Blurred visions of vintage cars rusting away in miles and miles of endless traffic, dead babies rotting in gray booster seats. Trying to escape, finding another shit fence…
I knew that the wall would come down at some point and reality would dawn, the future smelled like bipolar disorder.
………………………………………………….. ……..
The diamond bullet penetrated my fragile skull one night without warning. No one noticed the little prick as it entered my forehead with a silent hiss. I stood tall, increasingly aware of the pretentious nonsense pouring out of my mouth in the crowded room. The damp wall behind me bore witness to my precious neurological palace of sand pouring out the exit wound like drunken diarrhea. I not only felt the dissolution I had once felt, but also a new and darker sensation altogether. I realized that it was not only the world that was screwed and ignorant, but also my judgment. The clown of cynicism was being teased and teased by the very guy he felt was above and smarter. I had been deceived, there is nothing more depraved for the soul of a man than that. A cosmological kick in the balls. I wasted no time, as my grandiose illusions of freedom and substance collapsed around me like the twin towers of prosperity and freedom, I ran like a speedy dog on fire until I could run no more.
Today that moment still haunts me. I felt in a macromoment the loss of that dangling carrot that gave me the will to stumble every day, allowed me to fantasize about a world that still harbored a beating heart.
Adam ruined everything. The soul of the world has been released to start a new life and will not pay maintenance. God is dead, reborn in another cosmos or in no cosmos. He could travel the world searching for that divine magic in every nook and cranny, country and city. He may have learned the lessons from him; don’t play with time, don’t masturbate and don’t become so obsessed that you try to catch your reflection in every shiny surface that manifests itself. Invest but don’t risk it, listen to Alan Sugar. This is the Big Crunch, the heavenly master’s Hall of Death for which the swindled and disillusioned have sacrificed their sensual pleasure, hoping to redeem eternal reward. A ghost town full of rotting weeds. Elvis has left the building.