It is impossible to convey with words the insatiable dreamy beauty of the past few weeks but i shall try.
A trip to San Francisco; golden city, home of the bridge of the golden gates wherein you and i perch like broken angels atop hazy tarmac hills, hanging precariously from the stars. A visit to the City Lights book shop - i sniff the summer air for the lingering smoulder of the smoke which must surely follow the flames those brilliant minds streaked across these streets, but all i find are tourists, a bored looking girl at the sales desk, a man who tries to convince us of his wonderful affinity with Neal Cassady's son and the girl from Twilight, before trying to charge us to have our photographs taken in the 'real' car used in the upcoming 'On the Road' film. i slipped an anthology of Beat poetry into my pocket, unseen. It seemed necessary in the overpriced, corporate world that seems to have sprung up over such a holy site. Cassady would have approved i'm sure. A woman pushed strings of skulls and peace symbols into our hands on street corners as sushi is served in floating boats. There is a bleeding sunset on a beach at the edge of this sprawling city and we are greeted by a flying pig. I distinctly remember flying over hat golden bridge all those months ago, its burning lights a familiar symbol in a world of murky apprehension. That is the point at which i realised i will be drunk on life forever, and nothing will be the same again.
We hire a van and drive. Curling coastal roads clinging to the edges of cliffs as Dylan, Jarvis and Lou Reed croon into the waves. That large egg in the sky forms and breaks again each day, letting her yellow sunshine yolk spill carelessly into the horizon, staining the water pink. We talk about everything and we talk about nothing. The wind rips the hair from our bewildered skulls as we stop for warm beer in glass bottles at the edge of a cliff. We pick delicious sounding names from our map and spend the night at a place called Ragged Point to the sound of frogs croaking in the clear midnight.
We have breakfast in a garden before setting off on the road again. There are one hundred baby elephant seals basking in the sun by the side of the road and a giraffe strolling through the centre of Santa Barbara, where pink trees line the sidewalk. We listen to a folk band called 'The Rainbow Girls' as we watch the farmer's market pass through the bottom of a wine bottle dappled with sunlight, amused at the way in which life slips through our fingers like quicksilver. Barbara seems an appropriate name for this place, which is strangely reminiscent of a wealthier but equally as elderly Benidorm, however we do wake to white sands and wash the morning sunbeams that trickle across our bare skin away in the cold ocean.
We cruise onto Sunset Boulevard accompanied by none other than Eddie Argos. We really are drinking Hennessy with Morrissey on a beach out of reach somewhere very far away, where our problems can never find us. We do stop to write a few postcards home though, after a meander along Venice Beach. We trail feathers and friendship bracelets behind us, as a paint-stained man turns to leather from amidst his work in the sand which screams 'fuck art school!'. A police helicopter prepares to give chase above our heads as a drummer provides the beat to which the weighlifters grunt and groan by the side of a building emblazoned 'freak show'.
Glimpsing the 'Hollywood' sign in the hills was unexpectedly reminiscent of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from the plane. Seen by my naked eye yet still intangible, surreal and yet real simultaneously, a potent simple of the wonders this world has to offer, all ours for the taking, simply if we dream them into existence. We slept in a cheap motel on Hollywood Boulevard and danced in The Viper Room, treading carefully on the pavement by the door where River Phoenix died from an overdose on the night of souls some nineteen years ago, when the coals within my own soul were yet to be ignited.
We drove out of Los Angeles as the sun was setting, and entered the desert via one hundred spinning wind turbines, their lights flashing in the darkness, glaring into the windows of our little world on wheels. We stumbled upon a midnight market and floated through the streets, delirious. Children barked like dogs from pushchairs and old men rode Harley Davidsons adorned with fairy lights up and down the street, as middle aged women in leopard print maxi dresses reveled in the coolness of the darkness. The daylight coaxed awe from our wide eyes as we awoke to mountainous red rocks surrounding us, and the searing ground upon my bare feet informed us that we truly were lost in the middle of the desert. After hours of searching and some crafty wristband spotting, we finally spied white tents and a ferris wheel in the distance, a mirage in this hot dense place. We left our camels by the door and descended into the white-hot balmy paradise that is Coachella.
A lucid melting-pot of music and dancing, of ice cold lager in the shade and of lemonade bubbling in the van, boiled by the sun. A glutinous cacophony of feathers and of flowers, of silent dance parties and James in the eternal afternoon sunshine. Tangerine sunsets and scorched yellow grass, handsome miners from Wyoming shotgunning PBRs with dirty woodstock fairies, a place of tasselled waistcoats and morning yoga, a place where the sun makes rainbows in the water and phosphorescent palm trees and chinese lanterns are indistinguishable from balloons in the sky. We lay on the roof of our van and let the stars take us as one of their own as we sipped hot wine from the bottle and Tupac came back to life. A flat battery in the morning meant we were stranded forever, until an oasis named Ernie appeared in overalls and shocked our engine back to life with a quick bite of his jump leads.
Unwashed and unafraid, we drove slowly through the Joshua Tree national park. Fat beige rock formations languished in the sun as furry cacti taller than our heads peered down at us, curious furry creatures protecting their hot dry nirvana from the sticky palms of prying humans. The Joshua Trees themselves were a comical army holding their arms up to God. I fear he has forsaken them , and they will be left to singe in the unrelenting scorch of the Californian desert for eternity.
We carried on our way through the Mojave desert in search of elusive hot springs. We stumbled upon a railroad which stretched for miles across the cracked expanse of America. A thousand names were spelled from blackened rocks along the tracks, where a thousand weary travelers such as ourselves had stopped to take in the vastness of life, and to leave their mark on this unchanging landscape in a desperate attempt to find meaning. We jumped over snake holes as freight trains rumbled past us and wondered at the liquor bottles lining the sides of the sandy road. The heat made puddles on the road in front of us as we drove straight across the country feeling for once in our lives as though we had purpose and meaning, and we were going somewhere.
Full of doubt, we followed a fake address a hundred miles across the state, past a man made salt lake into a world of trailer parks and life lived on the peripherals. We found our way to slab city, a community build on the remains of a World War Two marine barracks, guided by the enigmatic 'Salvation Mountain', emblazoned with colourful messages of God's love by past resident Leonard Knight, who claimed to have had a spiritual experience and came to inform the Colorado desert. There is something undeniably eerie about the abandoned state of Knight's intricate bed nestled in the side of the mountain, complete with what one can only assume to be trophies from his childhood, of photographs and letters left abandoned under the sun. The community itself is inspiring, life made simple, making art from debris, fairy lights strung between ramshackle trailers. We left the slabs feeling like Chris McCandless and stuffed with dreams of alternate lives and visions, before running straight into the arms of aggressive border patrol, demanding to see our visa documents and to let their dogs run through our temporary home. We spent the night by the side of the road in a truck stop, before grimacing over hot dark coffee in a roadside services where time seemed not to pass, complete with church. We let The Black Lips lure us out of my liquid sunshine California haven and into the wide expanse of Nevada.
Las Vegas. Unreal city, where everything is made by man. Eiffel tower. Statue of Liberty. Candy striped neon fireworks enticing, leering, mocking, goading. A distorted Shangri-La of vice and of possibility, of Donald Trump's sugar coated promise to transubstantiate your problems into fairy dust around every corner. It is fascinating, it is repulsing. I looked into the eyes at the man in front of us at the ATM, lamenting because it had torn his one hundred dollar bill in half. I wished i could get caught up in the metallic thrill of gambling but i couldn't. We won little but lost nothing and purchased a sparkly hip flask to remind us of this place of juxtaposition. Even the clouds glowed pink neon. We stayed for one day and one day was enough. Everyone seemed dead. Fear and Loathing, indeed.
We drove ten hours and hundreds of miles back to the place i call home. We drove through insatiable silver streaks of lighting and the threat of thunder in the heavy clouds. Raindrops washed the dust of the desert from our car until dusk began to fall and the sun came to bid us a watery goodbye as she fell through the sky to her bed for the night, we really, truly drove side by side into the sunset.
We returned to the redwood coven of Santa Cruz and clinked glasses by the lilac sea, we drove through the forest and we scoured the thrift stores. We fell into an art auction in San Francisco where wooden horses guarded a stage and pink peacock feathers were up for auction. We left irishmen and kind cab drivers named Norman in our wake and sat up all night talking, never wanting tomorrow to come.
Bubbles wafted down the street and people leaned out of windows in the carefree Haight-Ashbury sun, as the deep violet green underwater bitter wrench of goodbye entered my life once again, an all too frequent occurrence in these recent years.
Yet soon i will be saying goodbye again, to this world that has given me so much.
Remember: 'Tylko trwa wieczna chwila'
- 'only the moment is eternal'
(Czeslaw Milosz)
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