You blink one day and look back and wonder what the hell and where it all went. I went north yesterday for a coffee and as I approached Hollywood I saw a dead rat on the sidewalk and a person on a bench bundled from head to toe in sheets like a corpse about to be jettisoned to Davy Jones’ Locker. Continuing on…A pile of brand new shoes of all sorts clustered around a fire hydrant, all the same size, I mulled over taking a pair. I pushed the button for the crosswalk and it sawed back and forth on one screw like an insane dream. Up in the hills I could see the Hollywood sign in the mist. The rain had cleaned much of the grime away but the sadness of the concrete and absence of trees remained. Again my thoughts turned to how the hell I happened to be here and how I left Vermont and took a strange route through other hellish cities to arrive across the country in a place like L.A. A destination I had made fun of my whole life for being exactly the way it is. Eight years in. Eight fucking years. It doesn’t even seem possible it’s been that long. I haven’t lived in my home state for almost 20. I left in 2005.

I live close now to 5124 Delongpre Ave where Bukowski lived for almost ten years and wrote his novel Women. The little shitty bungalows that were about to be torn down and are now preserved in his name. Not much has changed since he lived there in the seventies. Sure, there’s more traffic and technology, but L.A. is still a place that makes no sense, a massive urban sprawl with heartache and wonder on every corner awaiting your choice. We’re not supposed to live here, there’s no natural water source, yet turn on the faucet and there it is. Where does it all come from? None of it makes any sense. I grew up in the country where people stop and wait for you to take a left turn, where the air is clean and not much happens. Over here I think every day about what would happen when a handful of horrible events will occur all at once. A bum army, earthquakes, the grid shutting down, an invasion from overseas or even worse a nuke exploding in the sky and raining down hot radioactive death on us all. Life is fragile and it can all turn on a dime, that’s what seeing the homeless does to my mind, that that could be me down there lost and somehow comfortable no longer having to be part of society and all the hard work it takes from day to day just to exist. A guy I know my age had a scare with his heart. The sour onion breath of the grim reaper rasps in all our ears and at times it’s so magical to fantasize about what it all means or if it means anything at all. At the end is there a big sigh of relief in that last exhale? Is this just one plane of existence and there’s another one to travel to? Who created us? The older I get the less I believe in either an omnipotent god or the theory of evolution. I think we were some sort of weird virus foisted upon the already existing biological matter present on the planet but even that begs the question: Where did the first life spawn from? If we’re all descendants of amoeba then where did those first amoeba come from? A meteor from somewhere else? Life didn’t just spring from nothing. There’s something called abiogenesis, the theory that life came from non organic matter, that somehow it just sprang to life all of a sudden. That’s a tough pill to swallow. Was there really something else involved? Who the hell knows? The best part about the mystery and never knowing the truth is the constant speculation. Religion provides explanation, it’s one of the best things about it. You don’t have to think about so many things. They just tell you and if you believe what they say then your mind is at ease to do so many more things instead of thinking about what happens when you die and where we all came from. Without it, we have to come up with everything on our own or listen to others. Evolution? Ok, great, but where and how the hell did life spring from a molten slab of volcanic activity as it hurled through space at 17,000 miles an hour? Yes, yes, the proverbial primordial soup. And what created all of it in the first place? The big bang? Ok, but then nothing existed before all of this? And the infinite universe that is infinitely expanding? What exactly is it expanding into? How can it be infinite? Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of star, trillions of galaxies. None of it makes any sense and living in a city makes us not think about it at all. The light pollution blocks out the heavens. Unlike our ancestors, we have no way to see the Milky Way and so we’re unable to dream of what is out there, to see infinity on a nightly basis.

And when I think of what I do to exist, it becomes so strange. To take boxes of liquids and bring them up the stairs and then bring the bottles down the stairs one by one and mix them with sugar and fruit so people can come in and enjoy a beverage to help them relax and maybe forget the stress of the day which probably wasn’t all that stressful to begin with. Most of our issues are contrived by our minds because we have no real problems to occupy our lives. Even our homeless have cellphones. Each successive generation has less to worry about but worries more.

I often wonder what kind of shit my son will see when he’s in his twenties, what the next mind suck will be after instagram finally loses its luster or if it ever will. Maybe it will just become reality and reality itself will be reserved only for eating and drinking, the only physical reality we’ll need will be to nourish ourselves and everything else will be fake. Shit, maybe it’s all fake now. We’re living in the strangest reality right now. There’s robots delivering fast food to us. AI is full steam ahead. Yeah, the shit that was the villain of several movies is now in control of all the content being flooded into us via our cybernetic link to our “smart” phones. Maybe all it comes down to is the corporations selling us a bunch of crap we don’t need and everything else is just fake. That the wars we see are only there to make us scared so we buy and consume more crap. Sometimes I’m terrified at what we’ve become and other times I’m filled with wonder at how far we’ve come and I want to see what the hell happens next. We’re currently living in our own sci-fi nightmare/fantasy. If I wrote about this twenty or even ten years ago no one would believe any of it.

No matter what, we continue on. Ingrained within all of us is the natural ability and desire to survive. Even rats have at. Even the smallest insect scatters away so as not to be swatted. We share this with all life forms and it is what makes us who we are, that, and some purpose. The bird builds the nest, breeds, protects its family. We are not so different. Even the man who wakes up and showers and dresses in order to go to the world’s shittiest job does so out of some duty or supposed purpose with his own survival as the catalyst.

Each one of us contains this inside and each one of us watches all of it from inside a unique mind, from a fresh set of eyes seeing things from a different perspective from the other. Making decisions, finding our way along in this strange, ever changing existence…Waiting for the moment when the inspiration will hit for the next cocktail…Ha…