Until the wheels fall off......

I sometimes wonder where amusing myself with a ball, a stick, or a rock went….for days I would run through the woods fantasizing of being chased throughout the streams by cannibals or wild animals, climbing dead trees and ripping off the dead branches like the great warrior I pictured in my mind. Stealthly sneaking back to my house and slamming the door as the bells that hung from the outside echoed through the house, once again….succesfully escaping the clutches of the evil that hailed in the dark forest behind my house. I never really watched tv and there was no such thing as video games like there are today. So imagination was important. Me and my oldest friend would do the weirdest shit. We were definitely the original beavis and butthead of our generation, sometimes I would watch that shit and actually think someone was watching us when we were kids and later made a show out of it.

From shoving bottlerockets up frogs asses, to slamming wiffleball bats into the bulbs of innocent unsuspecting lightning bugs in the front yard at dusk. We terrorized anything we could get our hands on. I remember one time standing across from the big church on rt 212. We found an old pair or gross dirty underwear in the bushes and picked it up with a long stick. As cars drove by we were trying to swing it onto the antennas. Successfully completing this mission on one car and almost ripping my arm off in the process as the car quickly slammed on the breaks. There was plenty of cover to run into, for we lived in the woods…..the bearsville flats didn’t offer much as far as child entertainment went. There was a tiny ghetto playground behind the church, my buddy had a treehouse behind his house in the woods, and on the weekends the public pool down at the local bar would open. But I barely remember going their. It was all about skipping rocks, slamming branches off of trees with other branches, and setting shit on fire.

Im in iowa writing all of this, I had to get out of the distraction that Hollywood has been nothing short of kind giving me over the past 15 years or so. And it is fall. The air is crisp and thin, the leaves are changing color, the smell of fireplaces and burning leaf piles are in the air. It is quite a refreshing change from the annhilation of bus fumes and another 75 degree day with no clouds to be seen anywhere. I actually mowed and raked the lawn the other day. The shit I grew up doing on a daily or weekly basis has basically become nonexistent and a memory till just now. Maybe once every couple of years when I go home for a few days around Christmas or whatever that shit pops back into my head. But im here for a couple of months, most likely into winter. My winter clothes for years have been a hoodie and a pair of chucks. I might have to borrow someones jacket or actually go buy one.

It’s the kind of weather that makes you take a deep breath everytime you step outside. You can do that in los angeles but it smells different. There is a lingering scent of forced hate in the air that sucks up into your nostrils when you breathe like that and slowly starts to take over your brain. Making everything right, wrong, and beautiful that is not in your possession completely disgusting and unattainable. Hollywood is my home though. The scummy swine filled streets crawling with douchebags and starfuckers . the way the earth moves my little town and throws everyone into a complete panic once or twice a month to keep us on our toes. The sunsets I take for granted every single day. The bus loads of clueless tourists, with their fannypacks and digital cameras wrapped around their hawaiin shirts and hanging off their docker shorts, with those weird crock shoes or whatever the fuck they are called…who thought THAT was good idea. In a way I feel bad for them all. Hollywood as seen on tv is a totally different entity. Before I actually moved out there I literally thought that everywhere would look like Venice beach, or santa monica or something. Like there was sand on every sidewalk, and the sound of the ocean in my ear everywhere I went. With a saltwater breeze tickling my nosehairs while I would sit on a sand dune and watch the sunset every night while tom cruise and Katie holmes played catch with their baby where the ocean met the sand.

It was a pretty rude awakening for me when we drove over the 405 into los angeles, and you can see the entire city from the break. I thought to myself out loud “wow it sure is cloudy out here”. Much to my surprise it wasn’t a cloud overlooking the city like gotham. It was pollution, A big smoke ring of toxins. I just wonder if all the European people that come here think the same thing. Like its all one big E channel, TMZ on every corner just hoping they will get in the backround. I mean to an extent that is definitely true, but for the most part you just see these poor saps wandering up and down Hollywood blvd looking into the exact same store 50 times over down the stretch, as CRAZY homeless people lunge in for change….or just lay there on willie nelsons star stinking to holy hell soaking in their own piss and shit. As the tourists step over them and slip in semi dried vomit from some whore train that couldn’t hold their alcohol the night before. Probably some fat mexican chick in a dress 5 sizes to small for her, with black feet because her shoes are in her hand. while some Persian cokehead tries to pull her and her friends into his yellow sports nightmare, her friends just yell for him to keep driving.