A depressing yet contemplative drive east out the 91. Through East Yorba Linda, Corona, and Riverside: watching the unremarkable surroundings pass by in silence. I know those neighborhoods that flow down from the top of those dry hills are beautiful. I know those people are successful. I know the average car model there is a BMW or Mercedes, and I know of those custom granite kitchens and designer-furnished backyards with huts and cool blue pools. I hope those people are happy in their own minds. But from here it looks...tedious. Unappealing. Unfulfilling. And they are just:
Artificial green banks slapped on top of tired, resigned, smoldering brown hills.
But I turn away, my attention caught by Neil Young's guitar. As he played, I was thinking:
All of my thoughts and feelings are riding a single white strand of molten metal.
And as he sang, I was thinking:
I have to believe the wrapping of my words in soaring melodies will cut through to you.
And that's what I want. I want to make those words and those snapping electric lashes that sing like some sort of silver, wounded, splashing mass of abstraction.
It hurts me that so many of us want a house like the ones spilling over those sorry, dull hills to be the crowning achievement of our strange, confusing, toiling lives.
Stone the man that feels imprisoned in what is supposed to be a paradise, for he is an ungrateful wretch.
Ah but that's the ugly side of the double sword that is this strange bipolar journey...through peaks and valleys and all that.
Ugly thoughts get all twisted up with pretty ones to form a truly bizarre species of sculpture. It's all in the process I guess. I just hope I get to make it to the day when I can see the product.
Anyways. You pass through Corona and Riverside: the gray-brown sprawl of workers' barracks that they call suburbs, and then you pass through wretched San Bernardino and climb up into the mountains and the air grows cleaner and the sky is clear and blue. You look back and regret the smog soup behind you as it laps at the base of the mountain. Then as you climb further up into the green pines and blue skies you forget.
There are plenty of times I am grateful to be an American child, I'll give you that. Or if that is too chauvinistic, a child fortunate enough to exist among the smaller group of world inhabitants that are above the poverty line.
We sat out on a nice porch and ate good food and I drank champagne and whiskey. We watched hummingbirds and blue jays feed and a B17 thunder over the tops of the trees. I sat on top of the labor of generations and was grateful for that as we sat and talked.
Stand on a porch overlooking a mountain town and you can hear everything. Sound travels well in the mountain air and the topography of the town allows all the noise from the bustling village center down on the lake to make its way right up the mountain.
You can hear people laughing and talking, children yelling, dogs barking, birds chirping, and boats roaring up and down the lake for miles. You could sit in the thick of the sound and be immersed in a sonic picture of the bustling activity of the region on this holiday.
As the sun left and the surroundings darkened, the experience blurred along with my progressing intoxication. We smoked and walked the mountain roads in the dark, listening to all of the activity up and down the mountain. Orange lights glowed above and below us. People celebrated in their houses encased in the inky-black dark of mountain night.
We stopped at an overlook and beyond the black outlines of trees we could see the shimmering sprawl of Arrowhead lake. Miles below boats were scattered all over the lake. And we watched the fireworks as they shot out of a barge that sat in the middle of the glittering cluster of lights:
Expansive neon dandelions suspended over a flickering white exhaust cloud colony sparkle in the dark plum blue sky.
Below, the quivering quicksilver lake shimmers in electric flashes, mirroring the spectrum of colors the fireworks put out.
Thousands of sparkling spores rained out from explosions that were mirrored on the waters below. Thunder claps from the explosions slapped their way up and past us to continue up the mountain. You could hear the sounds pass in waves of a rich geometrical structure.
And to think that a species invented neon color explosions for the wonder of it alone. Festivity is fascinating. What a sight it would be for a non-human to come across this globe full of micro war zones taking place from coast to coast: where expanding globes of colorful fire spores appear and fall over glittering towns.
There are some incredible idiosyncrasies to this human race.
Yeah. I understand I have the habit of writing mainly when I'm down. A lot of these posts do take on a negative quality. But half of my life is spent in awe and wonder before human phenomenology. When I'm not struggling to understand what it means to be human, I am sitting back and enjoying it. This was one of these times.
