e should have known that it was coming, should have seen the
signs, but we were too tired to look for them anymore, especially
with so many wonderful channels endlessly singing on in the background,
a picture within picture universe without end, like staring into
a mirror facing a mirror.
ESPN.
HBO.
Showtime.
Cinemax. After Dark.
Adult On Demand.
We had given up on the media long ago, turned our back on politics
too, at least to the degree that we rarely if ever got involved
in them. It simply didn’t matter much in the bigger scheme
of things. We thought that everything would eventually work itself
out, like it had before, like it always had in the past, with
or without our inconsequential voices.
I know that it is hard to understand that now, that something
that seemed so important, something that could directly affect
our lives, was tossed aside so indiscriminately.
You had to be on the planet at the time to understand it.
You had to have lived in the twentieth century and have ridden
it through into the next glorious dawning of the Age of Aquarius
to have had it all make any sense.
You had to have been there, to have tasted that sweet apathy
coming on, like unplugging from the disinformation age if only
for a moment and enjoying the silence. It was like a drug that
silence, especially when you could achieve it both outside in
the world and inside, not even being bothered by the sound of
the beating of your own heart.
Not even death is that quiet.
I can’t even describe it to you. That’s how good
it felt.
It felt like not even existing.
Apathy was a Luddite rapture anyone could experience at any
moment, just by tapping into their inner burn out and letting
the fuse blow without attempting to replace it.
Sometimes it is just okay not to know what you believe in.
Sometimes it is necessary to survive.
I know all about surviving. It’s what I used to do best,
before the world ended.
Things had just gotten too confusing. None of the world leaders
were willing to propose solutions anymore. No one wanted to be
held accountable.
Apathy was a survival trait in a world where you were being
assaulted by the winds of change every fifteen seconds, by a
new wave of meaningless celebrity.
Apathy was the only way you could even wade out into the swamp
of politics that America had become, your only guide through
the quagmire.
I used to love that word; quagmire.
Both parties had switched stances so often, generally without
warning, that eventually they just became the same party and
none of the important issues were being dealt with or even discussed.
The only topics of interest were those with the least practicality
to daily life, the most improbable, or those that should not
have concerned the governing bodies of a free and democratic
nation.
The discussion of such trite subjects as ‘personal liberties’ became
passé in the face of the new peace established by surrendering
them.
We were totally irrelevant.
Our voices would not have been heard had we spoken up.
Nothing was going to change the world.
We held that peace on our soil alone, like a fresh flag waving
in the breeze, while waging one ceaseless proxy war after another
in conflict scarred lands, already torn with strife, in the name
of an Orwellian freedom. It lasted for nearly seven years after
September the 11th.
No one wanted to question that peace or what price it took.
No one was listening.
We truly learned the meaning of happiness in slavery.
We were happiest when we were medicated.
We just weren’t paying attention anymore.
They didn’t have to burn or ban books when people stopped
reading them altogether. All they had to do was close the libraries.
Independent stores blinked out of existence nearly overnight
under the strain of competing with the chain resellers who only
carried the blandest sort of propaganda imaginable.
We censored ourselves willingly.
We voted to make things this way.
We did it to ourselves by our own free choice.
Even in the remnants of a late capitalist society you still
vote with your dollars.
We turned on our television sets and waited to be told what
was happening like proper citizens should do.
Every channel showed us a different story, a different version
of the news. They were utterly void of all objectivity, like
blanched meat or a drained and rotting carcass. I don’t
think I even minded it then, the way things had become, because
it suited me. It matched everything I had ever wanted to believe
about the world.
I used to have a hard-on for ambiguity.
‘The truth is just a story that we tell ourselves over
and over again until we grow tired of it,’ that’s
what I told myself.
‘Everything is subject to entropy,’ that is what
I said. “All systems eventually lose energy and dissipate,
even political ones.’
‘When a thing can mean whatever you want to believe it
means, then everything will lose its value. Nothing will mean
anything anymore.’
If you disliked what one channel said all you had to do was
simply switch to another.
FOX News.
CNN.
C-SPAN.
Slate.
The Economist.
Guardian U.K.
The Onion.
It was all there happening, the whole time, and never once
did we put it together.
Only Jesus, the literal son of God, the one who I never believed
in, could bring it about.
We should have seen it coming but we were consuming so much
pornography in the vague pursuit of some elusive happiness that
we didn’t have time to keep up with current events. Not
to mention there were those pointless productivity meetings we
were forced to attend, whether we were needed or not, until we
thought we would go insane under the dull and lurid glow of florescent
bulbs and commit unspeakably atrocious acts against our coworkers.
Only Jesus, who bore the punishment for the sins of all humanity,
had the power and authority to execute the judgments against
man.
We might have taken more interest if there were fabulous prizes
involved, that’s all that I’m saying.
Only Jesus knew when it was to begin, despite what Mormons
or Baptists or Lutherans said. Only he was sure of its exact
hour, the start of our judgment; even if demagogues and self-anointed
prophets and doomsday cults had predicted otherwise.
We might have been more responsive if they had tried to be
more accommodating about the whole thing, if they had given us
some kind of notice. The world was moving a hundred trillion
miles a second on the information superhighway with no sign of
ever stopping. It was whirling so fast, like a pretty toy, and
some days I thought I might just spin off of the globe entirely
and be lost to the black and peaceful void of space.
There were days that I would have been just fine with that.
The day that the world ended was one of them.
Only Jesus could have broken the seals, and surely the Pope
or someone must have known about it, but I never heard a word.
Perhaps that was the day that the Pope had his tracheotomy done.
In retrospect I don’t think that it would have done us
much good to be warned.
In retrospect I admit that we may very well have been warned,
and just not been paying attention at the time.
In retrospect I confess that no one I knew was still going to
church when the world ended, other than to drink the free wine.
In retrospect I imagine that only the insane and the guilty
and the unredeemable would have attended mass in the final days,
all of them desperately searching for a single person to listen
to them, to hear their voice, their effervescing, endless confessions,
like ghosts made of tissue.
We really should have seen this coming, but we didn’t,
and then it was too late. Once Christ returned and removed his
church from the world, there was no way to cash in on his sacrifice.
There was no longer any way to repent, even if most of us never
would have repented in the first place. After all, there was
a reason that we were stuck in the world, because we were of
the world, entirely, without exception, down to the last man
alive the day that the world ended, which was me.
Coca-Cola.
Sex.
Capitalism.
We had enjoyed every profane thing there was to experience in
the world, without guilt or shame.
We had acted like Gods when we were anything but.
We had it coming to us, really.
We had to be punished.
The first broken seal led to the rise to power of the Anti-Christ.
We did this to ourselves. There can be no doubt about that.
It’s just that it was difficult to see back then because
it seemed just like any other day. Except that it wasn’t.
The problem was that no one agreed on what had happened exactly.
The problem was that one news program claimed he was defeated
and another proclaimed him victorious.
The problem started with his brother, in Florida, and hanging
chads.
The problem was that no one really cared which of them became
president, since the narrow election results omitted the knowledge
of millions of Americans who abstained from voting altogether
in protest.
America had grown tired of the puppet show before the debates
even began. It had been a really long century and we just thought
we deserved better than that kind of blatant pandering.
We thought we were past mud slinging and name calling.
The problem was that no one was going to fight for Lieberman
to censor movies and books. No one wanted Tipper to start in
with the PMRC nonsense again. No one wanted to see her attempt
to take it to a national level.
Hillary Clinton used to call Tipper Gore ‘the Basset Hound.’
Al Gore blamed Bill’s blowjob for costing him the Presidency.
The problem was that Al didn’t actually create the Internet.
Despite all attempts to impeach him, no one really wanted to
see Bill leave.
It was like losing JFK in Dallas to see him go.
The problem was that the courts were left to decide who was
going to rule the free world when the people didn’t rush
into the streets and protest and burn down things and raise hell.
We didn’t have any fight left in us. We remained locked
in their houses, glued to our televisions, ready to vote for
the next American Idol.
The world was changing in ways we could not even imagine.
The world was more than we had suspected it was.
The world was ending without Hale-Bopp or Y2K or Ebola.
T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland used to get quoted a lot near
the end, but no one took it seriously. It seemed more like detached
irony than presage. The world just seemed like too big and too
complicated a place to ever end.
No one bothered praying anymore because they didn’t think
God was listening.
Most of the people I knew believed that God was dead.
I was the only one who thought it might have been from a broken
heart.
The second broken seal brought us a global war, only it started
in Iraq instead of Israel, in the same land that played host
to the city of Babylon, when we waged a pre-emptive strike in
search of weapons of mass destruction we were assured existed.
The problem was that the evidence presented to go to war was
cherry picked.
We blamed Porter Goss but we did not stop to pray over it.
The problem was the failure of intelligence organizations to
cooperate.
We pointed our fingers at various heads of departments but
we did not consult the bitter word of God.
The problem was that Condi might not have been telling us the
exact truth.
No one was listening anymore. It just didn’t matter.
Bill Maher referred to the PNAC foreign policy as brashly optimistic
the year that the Anti-Christ finally got elected by a narrow
but definite mandate.
We all swooned while he spoke about political capital, happy
to have avoided four years with a ‘tax and spend’ liberal
from Massachusetts who used Botox.
I remember making love the night that the bombs fell on Baghdad
and being happy.
I remember feeling safe once, like the world made sense, like
we were headed in the right direction despite all outward appearances.
I remember believing that if only we could kill Saddam that
things might change in the world, that I might be able to feel
protected again, despite what Bin Laden had done to us that unforgettable
day, despite the terrible lies that our government had told us.
Losing hope is easier than I can tell you.
I remember how much it hurt when I realized that we were being
lied to.
I took it so personally and I don’t know why.
I guess I had really wanted to believe in it all.
It felt like one of my parents had died all over again.
It felt like losing my faith as a child after the accident.
It felt like finding out that God didn’t love me enough
to let me die, that he allowed me to be pulled from the wreckage
that orphaned me as a child, that he ensured that I would see
Jesus as the last man alive the day that the world ended.
I can never forget that feeling.
The third and fourth seals brought famine and death to a full
quarter of the people who used to live on the earth, before the
establishing of New Jerusalem, but since it started with two
million in Darfur and continued throughout the Western Sudan
and into Africa, the largest and least looked after continent
on the land, no one paid too much attention.
We turned our backs on them and let them die.
We had been doing it for years, as the continent became infested
with AIDS.
We could have intervened and stopped their deaths if we chose
to, but we were more interested in sporting events and sex scandals.
We were utterly consumed by the debates between the war hero
and the draft dodger.
We were utterly enthralled by the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth.
We were utterly lost in slogans and ideology that didn’t
really belong to us, wrapped up in our perception of past atrocities,
in causes from a previous generation, like wearing a large American
flag with holes eroding it.
We were watching them fight over Vietnam all over again, watching
them tell us that it wasn’t about the world that we were
living in now, that it wasn’t our world.
The world is the world is a word.
We were watching them act out their rebellions against the Freudian
infantile dependency they had nurtured their whole lives.
Our eyes were on Fallujah.
Our minds were on gay marriage.
We couldn’t have stopped it once it had begun anyway.
They were going to fulfill the prophecies in their sacred book
one way or another, whether it left them sweet mouths or bitter
bellies.
The fifth seal came suddenly, with saints being martyred for
their testimony of Christ. Nearly all of us in the West saw this
through the Internet, innocent hostages taken in Iraq and then
slaughtered, contractors and soldiers and peace workers alike.
They murdered Daniel Pearl simply because he was a Jew.
He was the precursor to the main event, an appetizer to their
cruel and sadistic show, meant to get our attention. Only something
as savage and unfiltered could have shaken us out of our trance
and even then, we were only fully aware of it for an instant,
before we slipped back into the quicksand of digital images that
anesthetized us daily.
Our number one export to the world was images and dreams and
fantasy and fancy, bred first in our hearts and then in or heads.
No one can deny that Daniel Pearl was a genius.
No one could say that his murder was anything less than a travesty
of justice.
I remember weeping when I heard the news.
I remember feeling outraged that such a thing could be allowed
to happen.
I remember wanting justice to rain down on the heads of his
killers, swift and merciless and final.
I remember cold chills running up and down my arms, an icy
numbness.
I do not remember once thinking about God or Jesus or the Holy
Ghost, amen.
Those that came after him, the true Christian martyrs, made
barely a ripple in comparison, even as they pleaded for their
lives.
Nicholas Berg.
Kenneth Bigley.
Eugene Armstrong.
Jack Hensley.
Margaret Hassan. Could she have been described as anything less
than a saint?
The sixth seal was something unexpected as well.
It could have meant anything.
It could have been prevented with some warning but it wasn’t.
It could easily have passed for a natural disaster except for
the size of the catastrophe, and the fact that it hit one day
after Christ’s calendar birthday in a land famous for forced
underage prostitution and sex tourism.
In the end none of us were saved.
We had forgotten about Darfur.
We had left them in the grip of a preventable catastrophe.
We had put them out of our minds.
We had a new cause to support, a new tragedy to decry, to name
fundraisers after.
Feed The Children.
CARE USA.
Mercy Corps.
Relief Now.
Rock 4 Tsunami AID.
There were almost too many to name.
They were falling all over themselves to be viewed as the most
compassionate aid organization on the face of the planet and
accusing each other of not doing enough for the suffering children
affected.
They were still ignoring genocide in seventeen known places
in the world.
None of us deserved to be saved.
We had become like the demon locusts that awaited us from the
bottomless pit, the ones with the unyielding scorpion sting that
would not bring death.
Some who survived, who floated to safety on the carcasses of
those less fortunate, later described the killer wave rolling
in from the ocean. They said that the sky seemed to roll back
like a scroll into the heavens themselves as the water reached
out towards them.
By this point no one was paying attention anymore. Christiana
Amanpour offered us her rebuke but we turned our heads and looked
away while Karl Rove performed miracles that made the Anti-Christ
speak lucid and clear, the kind of pretty lies we wanted to hear.
The seas turned red with blood, killing one third of the creatures
in the ocean but we thought it was just another man-made ecological
disaster.
We had every reason to believe it was.
We had dumped mercury into the ocean.
We had buried toxic waste there.
We had raped the land and when we were done and we thought
no one was looking we had turned on her sister, the great seas,
contaminating the very place we believed we once crawled out
of, our briny womb.
We ate steak and gloated while we listened to reports of mad
cow disease sweeping England and Canada.
The world was just too busy to ever end.
The rivers fell victim to Wormwood but we didn’t worry.
Angelino’s had been drinking bottled water for so long
that they never even noticed when people started dying from the
bitter fluid slinking out of the pipes like a poisonous snake.
Meetings were held and city council members raged against sanitation
and water treatment officials.
Nothing changed.
We were convinced of our own righteousness.
We were consumed by sitcom programming and TiVO and high definition
cable television and broadband speed porn.
We were listening to arguments about social security.
We were reading about the Olsen twins.
We were watching Harry Potter.
Hail and fire mixed with blood didn’t seem unlikely in
some places, especially on the killing fields, where the earth’s
grass was already scorched from the march of war.
Locusts had happened before, but most of the world was not
trying to understand these events anyway. We were lying in wait
for the end to come, medicated out of their minds, drugged into
a stupor by television and high-grade pharmaceuticals.
We were living in a dream world, a world we had built from
the broken shards of Babylon, that we had reconstructed from
the silky garments of the whore herself.
We had imported them like expensive Tokyo beer.
We had ingested them and integrated them into our personal
constitution.
We had built Los Angeles, an ethereal dream city, on a barren
desert.
We believed we were in control of our own destinies.
We did not have any reason to believe anything less.
I used to love drinking Starbucks in the morning, sitting in
traffic, listening to pop music.
The seventh seal brought down seven plagues on our heads.
Ulcers and boils, all for using Mastercard, all for depending
on revolving credit.
I thought it was another outbreak from skin popping.
No man may know when the end will come, that is what the book
said.
No man may know the mark of the beast, that’s what they
told us in Sunday School.
No man will survive his wrath when it comes, that is what is
written in the Book of Revelations.
The sea turned to blood and everything in it died. The blood
of the martyrs was repaid that day.
The rivers and all of the fresh streams on the Earth turned
to blood as well, while the sun blazed so hot we could not bear
it, burning our skin and drying our mouths for two thirds of
the day. Some were struck blind, just as the prophecy had predicted
they would be. They wandered around wailing and biting their
own tongues in their own personal darkness. It was awful watching
them suffer and not knowing why.
No one expected the book to be taken literally.
No one was prepared for what happened that day, when the world
ended.
At last the armies of the East met and marched across the dry
rivers of the Euphrates and into Iraq, setting off the final
battle, Armageddon, the day that the world ended, while earthquakes
and hail destroyed the fair city of Los Angeles and we never
knew why.
Jesus was there that day, while the seraphim and cherubim watched
from the throne of God with the ascended elders.
I always thought that my blood would one day pour out onto
the cracked asphalt of this city and be absorbed into it.
I always thought I would die a random and violent death, like
the ones they show on local news every night.
I always imagined that I would end up the victim of a drive-by
shooting.
The day that the world ended people were rioting in London,
streaking in Piccadilly, traipsing home from shopping in Trafalgar,
arm in arm, bags full of meaningless material goods wrapped in
foils and tissues, still with the expensive price tags on them,
smiling, while the locusts poured out of the sun over them, killing
them almost instantly. They were standing in the streets of Cardiff,
singing ‘round Arthur’s Stone in Swansea and swooning,
laughing with their heads full of strong ale and their feet stuck
in the reeking mud of Fishguard harbor as the end came to greet
them.
We were all heathens that day.
We were all bound to the same fate.
None of us were saved.
They never saw it coming in Dublin, where the day and the night
become one drunken stupor and blur together. I can remember when
I caught an iron rail through that country once with a woman
I fell madly in love with, who broke my heart and my balls all
the way back to Los Angeles, then left me in the arms of another
woman on dirty Venice Beach.
I will miss you Cosmic Crusader.
I will miss all the tarot card reads and swamis and charlatans
along with the chainsaw jugglers and fire-eaters and circus freaks.
I will miss the drum circles under the moonlight and spinning
and spinning until the stars commingled and I fell to the cool
sand with a dizzy thump.
The day that the world ended swept so fast past the European
Union that no one had time to scream as all those ages of history
and crumbling stone, one religion and government built right
on top of its failed predecessor, were blasted away.
I will miss the drive down Ocean Avenue towards Marina Del
Ray. I will miss the Third Street Promenade and King’s
Head Pub and the street performers and thieves as well.
One third of the world had died of famine and plague only months
before, but we were listening to reports coming in from leading
experts in the field about peak oil and farm pesticides and the
indefatigable climb of the Euro.
I will miss the Santa Monica Pier.
The day that the world ended Boston was hit hard, then New
York City, then the Nation’s capital.
Grand Central Station was empty that day.
Times Square stood quiet like an installment from Spencer Tunick.
Central Park and the Battery and Hell’s Kitchen were
so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
We couldn’t have known that it was ending, because there
were simply too many blogs to surf through, too much of yesterday’s
trivial news to sort out, a sea of inconsequential celebrity
minutia to swim through, just to figure out where we stood in
the geography of reality’s ever shifting, postmodern landscape.
Drudge Report.
FARK.
MSNBC Dot Com.
Fleshbot.
Yahoo!
We were still reading all the emails about how we could acquire
unlimited supplies of Viagra without a prescription, Cialis soft
tabs, cheap Vicoden, and Paris Hilton sex video clips. It came
through spam filters no matter how high we set them. We were
buried alive by them, every hour on the hour, like snow from
a blizzard.
We were expecting live time coverage to tell us how we could
save ourselves but there was no one there to cover Armageddon
with a handheld camcorder, no satellites left to transmit the
signal of the war that lasted a single day and left a field bloody
for two hundred miles in every direction.
Wolf Blitzer.
Paula Zahn.
Sean Hannity.
Geraldo Rivera.
We weren’t meant to be saved.
We were meant to be an example.
The day that the world ended those who had seen the rapture
coming years in advance and tried to warn us, as well as those
chosen from Israel, the sacred number, the one hundred and forty
seven thousand with the mark of God on their foreheads, watched
on in Heaven, having already transcended the pain and suffering
we came to know but did not understand.
None of us were saved.
None of us deserved to be.
None of us were anything close to the saints we all hoped we
might one day become when we were small children, when we still
really cared about one another.
None of us understood that we were trading with the mark of
the beast until it was too late, until after the worlds economic
markets had collapsed and the ulcers and boils were upon us,
only then did we start to suspect that something was drastically
wrong.
Often I had wondered if herpes was the mark of the beast, long
before the day that the world ended.
The day that the world ended Utah thought that they were prepared
for it. Most of Salt Lake City walked out of their homes and
raised their hands over their heads, like lambs to the slaughter
while Azrael hacked them to pieces. Some stayed inside, huddled
in prayer together, repentant in the end, but still not saved.
Most of them saw the face of the angel from the Pit and were
sedated, as if they had taken a tranquilizer.
Lucifer was once the most brilliant of all angels before he
fell. His other name was morning star.
Those who saw the face of the angel of death did not know they
had been killed. It happened so fast. Their bodies fell off of
them like charred skin from a corpse thrown into the lake of
fire.
I will miss Fat Burger and Tommy’s.
I will miss IN-N-OUT.
It hit us on the West Coast last, being the farthest away the
day that the world ended.
It hit us unannounced, as we rose, like a great tidal wave
rolling in on top of us, a terrible thunder, only it didn’t
come from the West, like we had always expected some cataclysmic
event would. It came from the East.
It was awe inspiring in an Old Testament kind of way.
The day that the world ended there were Hispanic men with thin
mustaches painted over their cherry lips, beaded with thin sweat,
selling cotton candy in the parking lots of strip malls in North
Hollywood, along with trademark protected cartoon characters
they had illegally silk screened onto large, cheap pillows.
I will miss the Beverly Center.
The day that the world ended there were no children screaming.
That should have been enough right there to serve as a warning.
In life, and sometimes in the afterlife, there are always children
screaming and there is nothing you can do about it.
I will miss the Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the butterfly
garden at the Huntington, and both Getty’s.
The day that the world ended they were still shooting porn
all over the San Fernando Valley. That ‘Other’ Hollywood,
the bastard cousin, was churning out scores of titles, with pretty
young girls performing lewd acts under hot lights.
I will miss the La Brea Tar Pits and the Miracle Mile.
The day that the world ended I took off all of my clothes and
swam out into the great Pacific Ocean. I left my pants, my wallet,
my car keys, all of my identification lying in a pile next to
the Santa Monica Pier and just kicked as hard as I could until
I had passed the breaking waves, passed the point of ever coming
back, until I was out of breath and could no longer swim.
I will miss Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles and Mann’s
Chinese Theatre and the beautiful new Red Line.
I floated there panting for a while but like Lot’s wife
the temptation to look was just too great.
I will miss driving on the 101 freeway from the Valley, swooping
up past Laurel Canyon and dumping down into Hollywood with the
Capital Records building there to greet me at Vine and Cahuenga
and all the ridiculous Angeline billboards.
The day that the world ended Disneyland was like a ghost town
and there was no one on the Matterhorn. There was no line to
wait in. You could have gone on it a million times in a row.
You could have ridden Space Mountain a million and one.
I will miss the windy roads through the tree covered hills,
the hidden places where blood and culture flowed through the
arteries of this great city and out into its extremities, trickling
down to MacArthur Park and the Watts Towers and the beauty that
is Long Beach.
I turned to see the streets on fire and the city crumbled in
one terrific ruin extending to the sand, laid to waste, like
burning tar, and there on the shore were the four horsemen of
the Apocalypse, watching me, and a single man in a white gown,
walking out over the tumultuous waters towards me.
Only Jesus had the right to break those seals. He was the only
one who deserved it. He was the only one had could say who should
and shouldn’t have been saved the day that the world ended.
He had hung on the cross the span of three unbearable days earning
that right, with his side pierced and his skin stinging and blood
drooling into his eyes from the thorny crown he wore.
I knew then that I didn’t deserve his mercy.
I knew then that he couldn’t possibly think I was one
of his children, couldn’t possibly forgive me for voting
in Schwarzenegger, even if I was only hoping that he might change
things for California in a way that only a moderate could.
I knew then that it was over and I was glad.
I only hoped his judgment would be quick and painless.
I only hoped he might blink me out of existence entirely.
I waited for him as he strolled calmly to me and I thought about
the city I had lived in my whole life, the city that had seemed
so permanent only an hour before.
Oh sweet angels in heaven with your beautiful faces! Oh holy
mother Mary and all the beautiful saints now glorious in Heaven!
How I will miss this city of lost angels that I was born and
raised in and that is now gone forever from this earth.
My grief was too enormous for words.
I cried as I watched the last of the palm trees ignite, their
bushy tops a fiery beacon to match the blood red waters I was
floating in, waters filled with dead sea creatures and decaying
fish.
I cried to think of the books burning, of the low riders melted
into the sludge where the asphalt used to be, of every store
on Melrose gone forever.
There will never be another city as great as Los Angeles. New
Jerusalem cannot replace this wonderfully bemusing town, even
with its streets made of shiny, translucent gold.
Oh wanton Mecca of pop culture and trivia, you long forgotten
Babylon, like mother’s milk, sweet dream of a city I cannot,
I will not forget, running forever more through my veins.
You were something greater than could ever be imagined.
You were spun from the fever dreams of long dead Indians burning
in hell now.
You were breathed into existence by sin and blasphemy and rebellious
hope, the kind that smolders but will not be put down, the kind
that Milton immortalized.
Oh paradise forever lost! How can I go on without you?
I could drive down your streets forever, like a mystery drug
in an unseen syringe headed into the veins of a desperate junkie.
West Hollywood.
Beverly Hills.
Century City.
Westwood.
Santa Monica.
Home sweet home.
I watched you burn on that last day, as the world ended, your
hills all filled with fire, and thought of Jim Morrison.
I will miss Book Soup on Sunset.
USC and UCLA both devoured in a fiery tongue, both laid to their
utter and final ruin.
The day that the world ended half of Los Angeles just thought
it was part of some Hollywood movie in the making, like another
episode of Fear Factor. We had seen the city destroyed so many
times before, and earthquakes were nothing new to us, not to
native Angelinos.
I will miss all of your bright and shiny buildings made of glass,
swallowed up into this obscene stew, victims of this holy matricide.
The day that the world ended Jesus had a relieved smile on his
face, as if he was glad to be done with his labor. It seemed
like he took an eternity to reach me. Time seemed to literally
slow down. The water was so thick with death and blood that I
didn’t even need to work to keep myself afloat in it. It
was sickeningly warm and sticky.
The day that the world ended I was the last man alive, the
last to cross over.
The day the world ended I was consumed by a surreal clarity,
watching human history end and waiting to take my place in heaven
with the rest of you.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
intellectually starving and politically naked to the point of
hysteria, dragging themselves through the once American streets
at dawn and looking for an angry Libertarian fix while angelheaded
hipsters burned alone on ceremonial crosses like witches for
their sins of free thinking and expression, and the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night failed us, leaving us all hollow, straw
men meant to go up quickly when dipped in this dirty oil we had
taken by force.
Our eyes were on Kabul.
We used to get high and contemplate jazz once, before the great
divide, before the suppressed rage became our new morally sanitized
drug of choice and we stopped listening, stopped trying to see
the entire picture, before we dreamed only of our honeyed revenge
and waited, sharpening our claws and teeth, for the right moment
to strike.
Our eyes were on Tehran. We were waiting for just the right
moment to pounce.
I saw them swing so far left that they seemed to cross over
into a brave new world, into the other side, that they woke up
in bed with Coulter and Limbaugh and found themselves snuggling
up to the brash optimisms of a repentant Dennis Miller, born
again Republican.
Our eyes were on Syria.
I saw them give up and take to chewing handfuls of Paxil while
they watched the television screen with an empty grin as Abu
Ghriab and Guantanamo and Ashcroft flashed past them, while Gonzalez
whispered in the ear of Little Horn who told Rice to then speak
lies to power no matter what the cost in lives nor how much blood
soaked into the sand, and still they did nothing, were worse
than silent, because instead of withholding their wisdom or burning
themselves in protest they took Rove’s crib notes and became
Andover cheerleaders reborn.
We let them do this to America, wholesale, and inadvertently
to the world, because we were afraid of the lessons of Stonewall,
afraid of rising up and out of the dark and seedy streets and
demanding equality. We let them bash fags from the national podium
while we sat by and idly jittered like nervous schoolgirls on
a first date.
I saw them surrender their high priced lofts in Manhattan and
flee to Spain, to new homes in Madrid, where the Euro was the
new King that would not disappoint as the Asian banks grew weary
of listening to Greenspan prattle on about a never ending recession.
Oh where were you then radicals and anarchists and Guevaristas,
when we needed you most to show what Thoreau had warned us about
decades earlier?
We laughed as we turned Che Guevara into a pop culture icon,
then sold his image on sweatshop manufactured t-shirts as a symbol
of rebellion, proving once and for all that the revolution might
not be televised, but it could be merchandised.
I will miss my Virgin Mary nightlight.
I saw them all, a sea of faces from every nation, every race,
color, creed, and religion, passing before me and falling away
into the lake of fire.
We used the image of a pretty, yellow ribbon to assuage our
fears about this terrible monster we had empowered, the fascist
imperialist braying in the darkest corners of our soul, waiting
to lunge forward and drink blood at the first sign of weakness.
I saw the greatest city in the world fall and I fell with it,
my heart a shred of tatters that would not heal, not for a thousand
years, even in this wonder-filled purgatory.
The day that the world ended it took forever for the world to
actually end.
There was only one man who could finish what he had started
that day.
Only Jesus had the power to break the seals.
Only he could defeat his doppelganger.
He approached me, this man I had never believed in, with the
most serene and placid smile on his face, as if the world had
not just ended. I gasped in the final moments of my life as I
looked up at him and saw that the sky above his head had turned
a deafening medley of bruised colors I had never before witnessed,
while a host of angels and demons fought. The angels descended
brightly, illuminated from within by the light of God, pouring
forth from a tear in the clouds and riding brilliant shafts of
pure light down towards earth like chariots while the demons
emerged mangled and disfigured and towering with wrath, dark
and twisted in every conceivable manner, from the gaping ruins
of Los Angeles.
The day that the world ended I was no longer alone.
The day that the world ended I surrendered the fear I had carried
with me my whole life.
The day that the world ended I finally understood everything,
just by looking in his eyes.
He reached out his hand to me and spoke.
“It’s time to go home now.”
[END]
© 2005 Devan Sagliani - Contributor's
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