GRIT AND SCRUB LOVE THE SUN, ALL WASHED OUT AND NO PLACE TO GO the motto of the desert confronting the Pacific. Someone back there--my pop, my granddaddy, I don't care--must have confronted great hardship . . . fuck that! must have run up against a hundred miles of dense, barren land (the monotony! when will it end?), then done it ten times again, then hit the motherfuckingest mountains they wished they could just turn the hell away from if it weren't for them damn plains, then spent eight or eighty days daring where to cross, then hit the flat, burnt earth again before delivering the egg within the egg--a Chinese box trick--that made ME to this land's end.And for what? I could give a shit but that Laguna Beach is a pretty place to paint my toenails, bullshit, and bite down on boys in blue shorts. I gotta laugh at that frontiersman brass!
"'Zis it?" must have been their attitude. I mean, we wanna KEEP ON TRUCKIN'--if they were half the compulsive masochists for travel I'm guessing they had to be. And surely no small tide of postpartum distress and jittery malaise separated them from their panning and planting--estranged them even from the abrupt joy of a strike and its riches, the anticipated but still overpowering warmth of a gradual, good harvest. A short story: MY MIND IS MISPROGRAMMED TO REMAIN ON THE MOVE. AND HERE I AM, AT WORLD'S END. THE END.
For sure, they got a glimpse of Coronado's ecstasy if they first drank in the glory of the sea from the cliffs of now-PCH. Epistemological synopsis of 19th-Century man: THAT WAY IS ASIA--AND THEN EUROPE AGAIN. And let's not underestimate a bathe in that cool, soupy surf--especially after coming such a long way. But if there's anything that belies the whole promise land legend, it's the scorched, cracked desert diffusing its embittered sadness over hundreds of miles of westmost America beyond this narrow lip of verdant coastline. No man could truly be happy "settling" here, with that heartless beast just over his shoulder and hardly past him, ever present.
I feel the loneliness of the bones of this earth. And I know the bounty blooming here at the behest of the ocean is like a mustache of moss on a great, bleached skull--no life anywhere else down the whole skeleton's lanky length.
They say I've got a foul mouth for a pretty little thing, but it's just there to cover up a sick head. The head's there to distract from the pretty little thing, who's only around long enough to imperil a pretty frightened soul.
