Day: November 23, 2004

I’m sitting in a cozy cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, grooving to the Beatles and quietly seducing every single male on premises. I have the phone numbers of every staff member and customer. Plus some who merely wandered in to talk to me after seeing me through the window. No-one here expects girls to have purple hair or something, it’s amusing. I ran away earlier to escape a rather unsightly ex-military man who tried to tell me that Nietzsche was the answer to all the worlds ills, but now I’m back at The Green Room being plied with free juice and comfortable company, having been rather put off by the tag team trip that Zorro and the Phantom of the Opera were laying on me just up the street outside the famous Chinese theater. This place seems a bastion of sanity, full of skaterboy intellectuals and musicians who speak physics and comic books. One of them asked me out dancing.

Up the road is a seething mass of tourists, stopping in the middle of the street overwhelmed by the neon spectacle that I simply danced under. Everyone wants to talk to me and I’m more then willing to talk back. I hung out for a bit with the official Walk Of Fame photographer and we traded stupid celebrity stories. We know some people in common. A security guard outside the Kodak theater told me the history of his people, a tribe in the middle east who escaped war with their splendid embroidery and a young man outside Ripleys Believe or Not tried to sneak me inside while explaining his recent break-up that was apparently culminated inside an exhibit with a bout of bad noisy sex that got her fired.

I need to live here sometime.

I was even welcomed by the pimps of the hookers in santa hats and red miniskirts trimmed in white fur. If that’s not a glowing endorsement, I can’t think of a better one. They sang for me as I walked by. “Oh graceful woman, stay some time with me-e-e-e” It’s one for the record, harmonizing pimp boys with gold capped gold teeth. The world is more interesting than fiction.

I like it here. When the plane banked over endless blocky rows of gray roofs, I felt welcome. The traffic was too small for me to see. The delineation between the blue sky and the burnished pollution was beautiful. This place is made of ghosts, soaked in our culture. A creation of form and fancy as sweeping as the graceful curves of the freeways. I sat waiting at LAX for hours, watching people. I sat where the cameras must have gone in the first scene of Night On Earth. That I was a sight to folk at the L.A. airport ropes me some points.

We had dinner in a towering dome of a spaceship restaurant and we drove to Venice to show me the beach. Today I’m going to try and find The Strip, where the galleries are, where the concerts play. I want to pry at history. I know the music, let me find the places. I slept last night and I dreamed.

It feels like being home, there’s so many people. The aggregate tumbles on for miles out of sight. Industrial lights blazing like stars, I can’t wait to see the daytime. Cars smoothly slipping down the cloverleaf curls, it’s thrumming with electricity. Deathless, this place is deathless. The softest recognition feathers into my brain and I love it.

I’m going to catch a train and wander alone. I should go now, before I see myself.
Jump in straight, the fire won’t hurt because I know what it tastes like.

I suspect I will be like a poet, sewing stones to my body with every day here.
The souls best poison is love.