10/08/2010 – City of Lost Angels

A sharp sulfurous smell coupled with a rancidity of burnt oils mixed with the rot of garbage and grease oil of an ever-churning machine: Los Angeles in the middle of Late Summer. Its cool, muggy, foggy and filled with a stench. My lungs refuse to inhale, I turn my nose away unwilling to be filled with the molecules of the polluted spirit people breath in and out here, exchanging illusory smoke and blowing hot air at eachother. Ahh Lost Angeles – smoke and mirrors, and hot air. This city combusts the fossil fuels at an alarming rate. Burning the remains of our dead, as their ghosts fill the air with decayed and dead dreams, possessing the city in a gray brown cloud.

Its 4pm and I just got to my strange hotel straight from the airport. The ghosts that manned the hotel lobby looked at me with resigned apathy, as they stared at me with the sallow look of a droopy eyed cow, chew the same cud over and over again. One mooed an apathetic hello at me, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and proceeded to checked me in. When I asked her what she does when she’s not working at the hotel, her face lit up as we meandered into her stories about her joy of teaching kids and wanting to change her profession from a biomed student to education – a sentence that began with: “when I get out of this shithole”. Having helped remind her of some light of a better future, I got rewarded with 5 free ticket vouchers for free champagne, a voucher for free food from the restaurant and instructions to come back to her if I wanted more. I thanked her and donated the drink coupons to the trashcan shortly thereafter.

In the hotel courtyard and pool area, college kids played pool, arcade games, or downed beers and cigarettes while hovering over their laptop screens. Strangely the plant life grew happily and flowered in glorious blooms despite the deadness of the spirit and living graveyard of this LA hotel.

The people of this city of superficiality, materialism, and ‘looking good’ wear plastic smiles while their eyes stare blankly into nothing. They walk around the streets, heads held low in resignation, or held high in determination. If ever a place needed IV24, Spirit Burial Ground, this is it. Heated by temporary joy of the blazing heat of Hollywood starlets, uninspired, and uninspiring, they move along the streets, oppressed by pollution. The air and the morning fog obscure vision and clarity. Living on hope, rather than inspiration, I would imagine that this city would collectively manifest an entry/exit block between the Liver and Lung Official. People hopeful of monetary success, stardom with no true spiritual inspiration. VIII 14, Gate of Hope would open up to IX1, Middle Palace (Some sources refer to this point as Gate of Inspiration). Hope, once inspired causes us to get reconnected to the heavens and a higher purpose of our lives. Hope is pointless if it doesn't lead to breathing life into us in the form of inspiration?

The city lives on superficiality and false hope, as if playing a lottery ticket its whole life, blindly hoping to win. What would this city be like if each Lost Angel could once again see a glimpse of its wings?