Flying sedans and gigantic wheeled boxes are my companions, going ahead, past this endless nowhere and the one strange house in the middle of it all. It’s the one with the infinity freeway porch, all of us passing, no one waving. I imagine living in that house, it feels like the place where the American dream has crawled into and died; a shit hole with virtual reality goggles rooted into the amorphous veins of the internet.
I’m somewhere now within the Southland, at the end of the long fast line that is I-5. Everything has come to rest, sitting slowly after the journey from one petroleum palm oasis to the next, parched fronds sniffing at the glimmer of aqueduct reflected in my eye. Though often unseen, northern water flows south towards thirsty desert dwellings, the conditioned caves of the southern basin.
The most common sights along the route are dairy cow slaughter yards and nut tree orchards. Often in tandem are signs reading, ‘Is growing food wasting water?’. The water that isn’t used for nut-cash continues south for lawns and pools and spraying water up into the sun and for washing away the old seagull shit behind the burger stop car wash. Most of those nuts will one day float offshore in cargo ships that return with everything you don’t need.
Surprisingly, the dollar stores here actually have real food, like fruits and vegetables. I’m not sure when this started but it’s a great development. Sometimes the produce is oddly shaped, but it might be organic and mostly has good flavor. Even coconuts show up sometimes, the type that floats in on sea cans from Thailand, maybe even a banana spider or two that could render a male impotent, that is, if they survive the phosphine gas pumped into their yellow hideaway.
And so there I am, a day has passed, filling my basket with fruit rolled down the chain to the end where I shop in Birkenstocks, the ones I bought from a time before I realized this life we’re living isn’t endurable.
A side note – there are a lot of palm trees down here. They felt like a new friend at first, eccentric. You might even see them warped around license plates as shiny plastic chrome fronds on big new cars or rust buckets going on right ahead and going hard somewhere fast, probably burgers.
And you know what, it’s getting to me, I just want to eat hamburgers too, they’re just so available, like candy. Whenever I’m out, food shopping, the gas station, some doughnut shop, where I am now scribbling in my notebook, a burger just seems to fit nicely in the palm. The price is right for old dairy cow flesh past its milking prime. Soon I’ll pull into a fuel station with more burgers, foil wrapped and warming in a rotisserie toaster. Then somewhere up in the real blue sky I see the moon, just a sliver above the quick stop ‘FOOD STORE’ sign with a ragged pigeon nest hanging out the R.
It’s tiny, almost invisible. On that moon, I feel eyes looking down on me… sitting here waiting for my tank to fill while my soul settles down in tule fog with the cows for the night, it can’t go fast like cars. In the morning light it’ll hoist itself over the San Gabriel pass, I think, hopefully just a day away in the valley of dust. I really need it to hurry up… still looking to find balance in this designed oasis.
