La Puebla

PHOTO: unknown

There's ideas floating in LAs lights. Los Angeles. La Puebla de la Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. Tiny little ideas riding on beams of light, sunlight, electric light, starlight, moon light, reflected light. Sunlight is so filled, so jampacked, with ideas in Lahss Anjeleez, her sunlight light looks used, pre-owned. Reflected light ideas are recycled. So crowded with ideas is light in LA that both light and LA, overflow into places where light and ideas never meant to go and should have never gone. But Lohz Angehlehs needed cool and hot lights are cool.

Light crowds tight little spaces and spreads like oil, like gasoline, like fluid on anything in any space. When light disappears, little idea dust lays around, rubbing off on passing brains. Ideas are viruses. They ride light, they wiggle their sometimes-obscene little selves onto whatever host they contact. Not every host, of course, is fertile ground for an idea. Not every dark space should have light.

Light ideas get spread by neon and incandescent and florescent and lasers and tricked into performing kind of a high tech dog and pony show. Sunlight, yeah even sunlight, gets re-used, more light and hotter water and colder water and electricity and environmentally green machines and very tricky solar power light. Sun to sun. Lohs Anglehs basks in sun. El Lay gets tan every day. No stars, no light. No light, no movies. No movies, no money. No money, no people. No people, no Stars. Starlight starbright, ain’t the stars right fine tonight? Ain’t they grand? Ain't they cool?

And where do Stars, and I mean Stars with capital 'S', get ideas? I'm telling you, in the light. All that light floating around the City of Angels. The town around the Angel Queen. The City of the Queen of the Angels. Light Town. City o’ Lights. Sure as shit ain’t Paris, but gotdam its got lights! Hot cool lights.

The sun shines down on us all, everybody, not just la bella encantada la reina de los angeles, but everybody. As long as PCH is basking in sunlight, all the fashionistas, baristas, servers and sailors, producers, potheads, directors, deadbeats, builders, best boys, gonzo girls, grips and actors, and even some little toad in east LA is probably hiding under a rock to keep moist and every crack and smack dealer inside city limits is hot and trying to keep cool. Not be cool. That’s different, very different. But keeping cool helps anyone be cool. And being cool in La Puebla is way important, muy importante. To be in LA is to know the way of cool.

Get this idea. Being cool means know when the lights are on. On you. And lights on you, don’t mean sunlight. In sunlight's bright light you wear cool sunglasses. Sunlight gives you a hot tan and that's cool. The other lights you put on cool and sunglasses for are Klieg lights. If there're no Klieg lights, you put on cool and sunglasses just in case. Just in case someone sets up Klieg lights, or someone aims camera laser lights at someone, or someone wants someone to think someone is pointing camera laser lights at someone. And if they do then you move, you move like all the Klieg lights in La La Land are on you, focused on you, lighting on you, lighting you. That’s what cool is. Hot. Hot lights, hot nights, hot bodies, cool ‘tude dude. That's cool.

Remember Double Dubuque? No. No one remembers Double Dubuque. An LA that never was. Angels with no cool. A non-cool, no cool LA. A Puebla de angelinas imperfectas misremembered by WWII dogface returnees who hated La Reina's fine figure. That was, well that was a long time ago, before cool was cool. Yeah, Double Dubuque. Just a way to remember somewhere someone wanted to forget. Dubuque, somewhere back east. Double Dubuque, somewhere out west. West of the west. Double Dubuque. An easy way to put down two places for the price of one. But sad Dubuquers out east could get, and did get, and were lost in Double Dubuque and Double Dubuquers couldn't, wouldn’t, shouldn't help Dubuquers find their way home. Because out west Double Dubuquers live in The Big Orange and they don’t know where Dubuque out east is and they don’t care, won't care, and if they did, they couldn't, wouldn’t, shouldn't say, to be cool, and that’s cool.

In the City of Angels, angels roll over the, on the, under the freeways. Angeleno angels in the LaLa Land of la automobíl carry guns and gun for cool by the glide in the pride of mechanical stride. And angels shoot when one angel don't want to go with the flow. In Southland that ain’t cool. You ride with the tide, cause if you do, an idea riding light finds you. When ideas find you, Starlight, Starbright, you join the light in the night. You get to be hot and that’s cool.

Starlight starbright lights wandering around down in Tinseltown, they all know. They all breathe in all that light filled with all those ideas, they all start the glow. They all breathe their fill and they all fill with a will. They all grow on the glow. And their glow's a glow all around the globe. They're hot and that’s cool.

Luminescent, incandescent, florescent, phosphorescent, fill the fine night with idea light. The angelenos de la puebla of Mrs. Queen of Double Dubuque Southland La La Angels are feeding, la gente will swill their fill of Big Orange hot idea cool. They got cool. And they work it in La Puebla. And that's cool.

Where I Was In The West

This was originally written in 2005. It was created during what I think of as my insomniac period.

IT HAS AWAYS
SEEMED TO ME
HERE IN THE WEST,
WEST OF THE WEST
WHERE THE WEST
BECAME THE OLD WEST
AND THE OLD WEST
WAS THE FRONTIER
AND THE FRONTIER
WAS EAST OF THE WEST
AND WEST OF THE WEST
WAS WHERE I WAS.
IT HAS ALWAYS
SEEMED TO ME
HERE IN THE WEST
WEST OF THE WEST
WHERE NEW IDEAS
EXPLODE OLD IDEAS
AND OLD IDEAS
LOOSE THEIR MINDS
AND MINDS GO EAST
AND EAST OF THE WEST
OLD TO A WEST
IS NEW TO AN EAST.

The Undiscovered Country

There is something seductively interesting and at the same time fairly creepy going on in the world. The creepy part seems to be a psychic response to unvoiced questions.

Reviewing reading I have done over the years it has become clear that I, as an individual, and probably everyone, develop patterns of recognition, or psychological templates, to find that for which we are seeking. I think this is similar to fulfilling "drives". The body knows it needs certain nutrients and little switches somewhere kick on a kind of radar that seeks out those nutrients and little recognition lights flash and little buzzers buzz when the sought-after nutrient comes within range of the senses.

The pattern I am recognizing is in the reading I have been attracted to over the years. Certain books I have kept since childhood which, when I first read them, left a definite impression, an idea that there might be more in them than seen when first read. Interestingly there is only one of those books that is actually a "kid's book"; all the rest were meant for an adult, or at least a young adult. I have re-read all of these books many times and almost every time I re-read one of them something pops out that I either hadn't noticed at all or touched me in a new way. I suspect that re-reading these books programmed me in some mysterious way that I have only the dimmest of shadows of an idea about.

There are also books which I have kept because I knew their importance at first read, but have rarely if ever re-read, but images and ideas from them have remained with me quite constantly over time. Some of these books have included ideas which seem to be coming to pass, and I am not talking about Science-fiction prediction of cell phones or computer based technological miracles, although it is true that SF writers, especially "golden age" SF writers were almost always ahead of the tech curve. It has even become fun to see how far ahead of the curve they were; a recent television program spoke about imagined advances that have actually come about because techno-geeks were watching Star Trek. What I am talking about are social change ideas.

A couple of those unremarkable literary efforts (although certainly major publishing successes) was a series which included the idea of a synthesis of all major religions. While there hasn't been any such real synthesis yet, I keep reading news articles and seeing videos that approach this very subject. The approach must be very oblique considering the state of world politics. Who would, in the current climate, propose a joining of Islam to Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or any of the above to Buddhism in a serious forum? Such a suggestion might well be suicidal.

But indeed, this is the base of an idea being proposed. In my mind this is not a radical idea but a necessary idea. It is not a new idea as I have stated, but it is fascinating that it is happening now, and it seems to be happening because of people like the neo-cons in the United States and fundamentaist muslims. And I think with a little applied mental shifting one can see the reason. Simply put, survival.

Forces such as the above mentioned do not contain anywhere a majority of any population, but they do seem to promote movement away from themselves, generally it seems to me, toward the "center". It is of course, impossible to say where that center lies, but like herd animals, the greater part of the population will tend to escape from the violent fringes where the slow are also the dead. These actions of violent extremists on any side will cause a population movement away from where they perceive the violence to exist. Hence, vast numbers of people escaping, for example, Iraq.

It is a rare population, such as the Jewish population of Israel that will remain in place instead of trying to escape the hostile surround, and it is probable that without external support even they would tend to migrate. The Iraqi population has no such support and neither does the Palestinian or the internal Russian populations. At the high point of the conflict in Afghanistan there were nearly five and half million refugees living just outside the borders in Iran and Pakistan and a million more displaced within the country. All of this migration was man-made, but natural disasters cause the same sort of movement of populations. It does not matter what the trigger for violence is or was; it is very difficult to live in a zone of violence. These displaced people seek less violent environments and to the degree that they succeed, begin to influence the new environment and its old inhabitants. There is always some disturbance of previous local norms when an "alien" population arrives.

In a commercial empire such as the one based in the United States, it is necessary to have a population wealthy enough to buy the products produced for consumption. A population wealthy enough to buy such products cannot be stressed with too much violence for the above reasons. Arriving populations from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union have made room for themselves in various parts of the U.S. pushing the less socially stressed native population into fearful xenophobic mindsets. One of the new factors arriving with these immigrants is their old religious forms. It has become clear to me that every population and culture, stressed by various forces moves in a direction away from the stress moment. Religion appears to be one of those stressors.

Paraphrasing a well known writer, it seems to be true that religion bears the same relationship to the "soul" as predator does to prey. Inevitably there occurs an evolution between the pair where the predator loses its advantage because the prey has adapted a new survival strategy which the predator must then adapt to overcome and so on. No one so far has answered the question of what the soul might be or why there is a force created to pursue it, or what might make the pursuit of that substance nutritive to anything, but religious formulations are prepared for certain groups at certain points in their development and tend to become obsolete.

Can it be that as the planet tends toward monoculture a new religious formulation is coming into existance?