I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant ema ans.
Id never get used to California. After three years, still the ented visitor. However frequently I had been disappointed, I still couldnt help it, I still tingled with expectation, still always thought that something wonderful might happen.
Call me the I Abroad.
All the same, you take the boy out of London but you t take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lihusiastic but shaky. I call gas "petrol", and so on. I dont io go native, Im not here food, Im here upon a pilgrimage. I have hied me, like a holy palmer, from the dishevelled capital of a foggy, three-ered island oher side of the world where the light is only good for water-colourists to this place where, to wax metaphysical about it, Light was made Flesh.
I am a student of Light and Illusion. That is, of ema. When first I clapped my eyes on that HOLLYWOODLAND sign ba the city now five hours hard drive distant, I thought Id glimpsed the Holy Grail.
And now, as if it were the most everyday thing in the world, I was on my way to meet a legend. A living legend, who roosted on this lonely cliff-top like a forlorn seabird.
I arked in a gravelled lot where the rough track Id painfully iated since I left the minor road that brought me from the freeway terminated. I shared the parking lot with a small, red, crap-caked Toyota truck that, some time ago, had seeer days. There was straw in the back. Funny kind of transportation for a legend. But I knew she was in there, behind the gated wall in front of me, and I needed a little time along with the o before the tryst began. I climbed out of the car and crept close to the edge of the precipice.
The o shushed and tittered like an audience when the lights dim before the maiure.
The first time I saw the Pacific, Id had a vision of sea gods, but not the ones I knew, oh, no. Not even Botticellis prime 36B cup blonde ever came in on this surf. My entire European mythology capsized uhe crash of waves Britannia never ruled and then I khat the denizens of these deeps are sui generis and belong to no mythology but their weird own. They have the stra eyes, lenses on stalks that go flicker, flicker, and give you the truth twenty-four times a sed. Their torsos lumines every shade of teicolor but have h, no substano dimensionality. Beings from a wholy strange pantheoiful -- but alien.
Aliens were somewhat on my mind, however, perhaps because I was somewhat alienated myself in LA, but also due to the obsession of my room-mate. While I researched my thesis, I was rooming back there iy in an apartment over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a sce fi freak Id met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the timacy of the mutual runs in Bara. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on, ahem, intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the people you met oreets were aliens ingly simulating human beings. He thought the Venusians were behind it.
He said he had tested Hirokos reality quotient suffitly and she was clear, but I guessed from h