indelibleface
Bluelight Crew
This is a story I wrote one night a few weeks back. It's partly autobiographical, but mostly fiction in many ways. Tell me what you guys think. 
"The Suburban Me"
I turned around that familiar street corner in my busted up Ford piece-of-shit for the first time in many years. I remember there used to be a 24-hour diner on the corner. It used be our local meeting place back in my high school days -- the restaurant we'd hit up at three in the morning when our appetites couldn't be satiated by just any microwavable midnight snack. No, we settled for barely respectable, most likely microwaved, cheap diner food. It was a placebo effect: we assumed it was better since we ate out somewhere other than at home (where our Jewish mothers would force all kinds of hit-and-miss meals down our throats) and therefore it was somehow superior. At least it was satisfying to our young, moldable perceptions, which was really all that mattered anyway. But, in all honesty, it wasn't about the shitty food. It was our spot. We lived there. And now, it was gone -- an empty lot slowly being transfigured into something uninviting and cold. An integral part of our upbringing had succumbed to what I considered fascist city planning. Dead, without a memorial.
Driving down that familiar road through the center of my hometown, I realized that there were plenty of things that hadn't changed. For one, the weather was still positively smoldering during the summer. But, of course, that's how we liked it. We were residents of Los Angeles; we were Agourians; we were the sons and daughters of the dry Californian heat. The traffic lights were all still there where they were supposed to be, and it made me wonder how often they really do replace those aging metal arches. The roads still turned, stretched, and snaked around town just like the old days, and even then after all those years I could have probably navigated down the streets with my eyes sown shut. I even recognized the shape of the heat-baked parking lots and numerous shopping centers dotting the sides of Kanan Road. The same filthy apartments sat over to the right as I drove along that had been there since I was a kid, and I'm sure the same filthy people still lived there, or possibly their filthy offspring. Perhaps new filthy people inhabited the place. Who knows. I sure didn't. I hadn't been around these parts in a long, long time.
Sure, the layout of Agoura Hills stayed the same, but in addition to (and assuredly because of) the fact that many of the stores and people within had cycled on and away to new, possibly fascinating lives elsewhere, all the feelings and emotions floating through town, riding saddle-back with the Santa Ana breeze, were completely different. The deep, interwoven vibe of the land had changed. The place was on the outskirts of Los Angeles County -- an extension of the big suburban sprawl that started at the San Fernando Valley just north of the inner city. A caravan of track homes and strip malls based there sawed its yuppie way through the hills and woods northbound into a desolate brush only made habitable by irrigation. It's amusing to think that all of these perfect green grass lawns and too-good-to-be-true flowery jungle gardens would be replaced by a plethora of sun-singed yucca and dead oak tree stumps within a few years without a constant source of water. Agoura Hills was a desert like most of Southern California -- we just liked to pretend by artificial means it wasn't. We liked to pretend a lot about Agoura. We immersed ourselves in the idea that our soccer mom society was the way the entire world was engineered. We knew there was such a thing as crime, but we only saw it spewed forth on the overly dramatic and embellished television news, juxtaposed next to fictional cop dramas and mindless cartoons. Crime was an intangible, distant thing to us. We lived in a sheltered paradise compared to the rest of America, and we were oblivious to it. Once we came of age and realized the full scope of reality beyond our precious tiny sect of suburbia, we dubbed our town "The Bubble", and we knew we had to escape.
So I stepped into the world outside, once I realized there wasn't much left for me here in a place where innocence trumps awareness, me having reached the excitable age of eighteen -- I saw as much as possible, experienced as much as possible, and hurt myself many times over the next few years away from home. All of the hedonism I had read about and seen in stories was there right in front of me, and I bathed in it all -- a profound lake of dirty riches and pleasures. I tried all the drugs I had read about. I had girlfriends, and I cheated on them. I found friends that were as irresponsible and as willing to partake in madness as I was, and we both reinforced each others' behavior through amphetamine-fueled rationalizations and nonsense justifications. We were wild youths parading about the cities, unnatural chemicals coursing through our thumping veins, the pupils in our eyes as wide as our inflated egos.
Eventually though, the once raging fires of our need to experience the sick, the twisted, and the decidedly un-Agourian fell to pitiful dim embers. I had seen enough. My directionless pleasure-seeking was a direct result of my isolation throughout my childhood. I was raised on one extreme and I tumbled willingly into the other, if only just to experience something other than the quiet, safe normality of the typical American youth proudly displayed on the sitcoms. We were supposed to be like Home Improvement on our way towards adulthood, and like Seinfeld or Friends once we got there. I openly rejected that path and chose to try something completely the opposite, and I suffered. See, I've never understood the middle-ground between conservative living and conscious self-destruction. I watched those who adopted that elusive creed of balance, moderation, and self-preservation make the dreaded and tumultuous transition from high school to university and become something real and genuine -- something not based on popular expectations or cheeseball fabrications of what we all thought adulthood should be like. These people found their own special niche out of their own accord, and prospered.
So where was I in all of this rambling philosophical diatribe? I was still driving in my busted up Ford piece-of-shit through Agoura Hills, the place that raised me -- the place that taught me their perceived concepts of right and wrong -- the place that I believed led me to my current state of confusion. Truly, where do you travel from here, when you've experienced both utter naivety and real, indelible corruption? How do you find that seemingly incomprehensible balance between two polarized, incompatible worlds? I thought the answers would come to me after returning home, because I had assumed that since people did quite often leave Agoura in one piece with a college degree, a stable income, maybe a few dogs, a wife and some smart kids, and perhaps an expensive luxury SUV, I could start over here and trace their footsteps. I'd simply rewind the VHS tape of my life, and proceed again, this time with the foreknowledge of all the proverbial land mines in the path ahead that would explode and misdirect me to all the depravity I had once let rain over me willingly.
Alas, things were not what I expected. Where once I had the incredible comfort of safety, security, and optimism, I now felt shockingly alone. It was a vague pain that impaled my gut, twisting my emotions around in impossibly complex knots. There was, without a doubt, no new insight to be gained here, coasting along in my automobile between my old elementary school and the park I used to skateboard around with childhood friends now long since graduated from ivy league schools back east. What separated me from them? How did they manage to move beyond "The Bubble" and actually forge a worthwhile and lasting life, while I fell under the radar and stagnated in temporary meanderings awash with the highs and lows of intoxication, casual lust, and false hopes?
The soccer kids were now doctors and architects, the soccer moms were now either divorcees in the midst of dramatic mid-life crises or proud parents of honor students off to elite graduate schools in far away locales. Maybe the answers I sought would become apparent with time. Perhaps I would be able to someday shed my worldly preconceptions of the white and the black -- the narrow-minded focus and the gross misdirection -- the straightlaced conservatism and the daily hallucinogenic mind-fuck. Would I be able to map out a course somewhere between the saccharine right and the Dionysian left?
I continued driving straight through and beyond the borders of town. I knew I was never, ever going to return, and I never once turned my head to whisper a goodbye or brief eulogy. The time for those sorts of rituals had long since passed. I slumped back into the cracking red vinyl of my car seat, watching the odometer tick by silently, waiting for some kind of magnificent revelation. I watched the sun -- that same exact sun that rose and fell every day of my wonderful childhood -- set slowly that afternoon into the same atmospheric swirls of blue, red, and orange that I watched with my Dad during all those joyous 4th of Julys, sitting in lounge chairs next to that dinky barbecue in my old backyard. I continued to rest my leg on the accelerator and waited patiently.
"The Suburban Me"
I turned around that familiar street corner in my busted up Ford piece-of-shit for the first time in many years. I remember there used to be a 24-hour diner on the corner. It used be our local meeting place back in my high school days -- the restaurant we'd hit up at three in the morning when our appetites couldn't be satiated by just any microwavable midnight snack. No, we settled for barely respectable, most likely microwaved, cheap diner food. It was a placebo effect: we assumed it was better since we ate out somewhere other than at home (where our Jewish mothers would force all kinds of hit-and-miss meals down our throats) and therefore it was somehow superior. At least it was satisfying to our young, moldable perceptions, which was really all that mattered anyway. But, in all honesty, it wasn't about the shitty food. It was our spot. We lived there. And now, it was gone -- an empty lot slowly being transfigured into something uninviting and cold. An integral part of our upbringing had succumbed to what I considered fascist city planning. Dead, without a memorial.
Driving down that familiar road through the center of my hometown, I realized that there were plenty of things that hadn't changed. For one, the weather was still positively smoldering during the summer. But, of course, that's how we liked it. We were residents of Los Angeles; we were Agourians; we were the sons and daughters of the dry Californian heat. The traffic lights were all still there where they were supposed to be, and it made me wonder how often they really do replace those aging metal arches. The roads still turned, stretched, and snaked around town just like the old days, and even then after all those years I could have probably navigated down the streets with my eyes sown shut. I even recognized the shape of the heat-baked parking lots and numerous shopping centers dotting the sides of Kanan Road. The same filthy apartments sat over to the right as I drove along that had been there since I was a kid, and I'm sure the same filthy people still lived there, or possibly their filthy offspring. Perhaps new filthy people inhabited the place. Who knows. I sure didn't. I hadn't been around these parts in a long, long time.
Sure, the layout of Agoura Hills stayed the same, but in addition to (and assuredly because of) the fact that many of the stores and people within had cycled on and away to new, possibly fascinating lives elsewhere, all the feelings and emotions floating through town, riding saddle-back with the Santa Ana breeze, were completely different. The deep, interwoven vibe of the land had changed. The place was on the outskirts of Los Angeles County -- an extension of the big suburban sprawl that started at the San Fernando Valley just north of the inner city. A caravan of track homes and strip malls based there sawed its yuppie way through the hills and woods northbound into a desolate brush only made habitable by irrigation. It's amusing to think that all of these perfect green grass lawns and too-good-to-be-true flowery jungle gardens would be replaced by a plethora of sun-singed yucca and dead oak tree stumps within a few years without a constant source of water. Agoura Hills was a desert like most of Southern California -- we just liked to pretend by artificial means it wasn't. We liked to pretend a lot about Agoura. We immersed ourselves in the idea that our soccer mom society was the way the entire world was engineered. We knew there was such a thing as crime, but we only saw it spewed forth on the overly dramatic and embellished television news, juxtaposed next to fictional cop dramas and mindless cartoons. Crime was an intangible, distant thing to us. We lived in a sheltered paradise compared to the rest of America, and we were oblivious to it. Once we came of age and realized the full scope of reality beyond our precious tiny sect of suburbia, we dubbed our town "The Bubble", and we knew we had to escape.
So I stepped into the world outside, once I realized there wasn't much left for me here in a place where innocence trumps awareness, me having reached the excitable age of eighteen -- I saw as much as possible, experienced as much as possible, and hurt myself many times over the next few years away from home. All of the hedonism I had read about and seen in stories was there right in front of me, and I bathed in it all -- a profound lake of dirty riches and pleasures. I tried all the drugs I had read about. I had girlfriends, and I cheated on them. I found friends that were as irresponsible and as willing to partake in madness as I was, and we both reinforced each others' behavior through amphetamine-fueled rationalizations and nonsense justifications. We were wild youths parading about the cities, unnatural chemicals coursing through our thumping veins, the pupils in our eyes as wide as our inflated egos.
Eventually though, the once raging fires of our need to experience the sick, the twisted, and the decidedly un-Agourian fell to pitiful dim embers. I had seen enough. My directionless pleasure-seeking was a direct result of my isolation throughout my childhood. I was raised on one extreme and I tumbled willingly into the other, if only just to experience something other than the quiet, safe normality of the typical American youth proudly displayed on the sitcoms. We were supposed to be like Home Improvement on our way towards adulthood, and like Seinfeld or Friends once we got there. I openly rejected that path and chose to try something completely the opposite, and I suffered. See, I've never understood the middle-ground between conservative living and conscious self-destruction. I watched those who adopted that elusive creed of balance, moderation, and self-preservation make the dreaded and tumultuous transition from high school to university and become something real and genuine -- something not based on popular expectations or cheeseball fabrications of what we all thought adulthood should be like. These people found their own special niche out of their own accord, and prospered.
So where was I in all of this rambling philosophical diatribe? I was still driving in my busted up Ford piece-of-shit through Agoura Hills, the place that raised me -- the place that taught me their perceived concepts of right and wrong -- the place that I believed led me to my current state of confusion. Truly, where do you travel from here, when you've experienced both utter naivety and real, indelible corruption? How do you find that seemingly incomprehensible balance between two polarized, incompatible worlds? I thought the answers would come to me after returning home, because I had assumed that since people did quite often leave Agoura in one piece with a college degree, a stable income, maybe a few dogs, a wife and some smart kids, and perhaps an expensive luxury SUV, I could start over here and trace their footsteps. I'd simply rewind the VHS tape of my life, and proceed again, this time with the foreknowledge of all the proverbial land mines in the path ahead that would explode and misdirect me to all the depravity I had once let rain over me willingly.
Alas, things were not what I expected. Where once I had the incredible comfort of safety, security, and optimism, I now felt shockingly alone. It was a vague pain that impaled my gut, twisting my emotions around in impossibly complex knots. There was, without a doubt, no new insight to be gained here, coasting along in my automobile between my old elementary school and the park I used to skateboard around with childhood friends now long since graduated from ivy league schools back east. What separated me from them? How did they manage to move beyond "The Bubble" and actually forge a worthwhile and lasting life, while I fell under the radar and stagnated in temporary meanderings awash with the highs and lows of intoxication, casual lust, and false hopes?
The soccer kids were now doctors and architects, the soccer moms were now either divorcees in the midst of dramatic mid-life crises or proud parents of honor students off to elite graduate schools in far away locales. Maybe the answers I sought would become apparent with time. Perhaps I would be able to someday shed my worldly preconceptions of the white and the black -- the narrow-minded focus and the gross misdirection -- the straightlaced conservatism and the daily hallucinogenic mind-fuck. Would I be able to map out a course somewhere between the saccharine right and the Dionysian left?
I continued driving straight through and beyond the borders of town. I knew I was never, ever going to return, and I never once turned my head to whisper a goodbye or brief eulogy. The time for those sorts of rituals had long since passed. I slumped back into the cracking red vinyl of my car seat, watching the odometer tick by silently, waiting for some kind of magnificent revelation. I watched the sun -- that same exact sun that rose and fell every day of my wonderful childhood -- set slowly that afternoon into the same atmospheric swirls of blue, red, and orange that I watched with my Dad during all those joyous 4th of Julys, sitting in lounge chairs next to that dinky barbecue in my old backyard. I continued to rest my leg on the accelerator and waited patiently.
