I've always been a fairly introverted person. It's getting a little worse as I get older, and before long i'm sure i'll be chasing kids off the front lawn with my cane.When I travel, I tend to always go where i'm most comfortable, I just like to be exposed to familiar surroundings. In my younger days that were filled with road trips across the US of A, I must have been thrown out of every county from California to Maine. So wherever I go down there now, I think there is a poster of me in the post office with some ridiculous reward for my capture dead or alive. It feels like people are looking at me all the time.
Whenever I go to the U.S. now, I go to Palm Desert. It feels like home to me, I always find myself there, and I always leave a part of me behind when I leave. Pictures do no justice to the beauty that surrounds this area. When I am there, I wake for every sunrise, and await sunset with equal anticipation. And I never get the feeling of being watched.
I've been dealing with many vexing people lately, and that tends to quell my creative flow. So today I will pass the reins to Douglas Coupland. I've always dug Couplands writing because he only writes about the places I know and love. The North Shore, and Palm Desert. One of his books was even based on a street I grew up on. I packed around a dog-earred copy of Generation X for years.
On one trip years ago, Mikey and I were racing through Joshua Tree, we were miles away from anyone and the big skys seemed endless. I had left the road a ways back, and was testing the limits of my rented convertable (I went through 3 of them on this trip). We came upon an oasis, and I parked the car under a large palm. If you have not found your own oasis before they never cease to amaze. There was a small waterfall that flowed through a cave of palm fronds, and the trees were filled with thousands of tropical birds. I opened the trunk to find my survival kit, a six pack of Budweiser, I tossed it out to Mikey and found my worn copy of Gen-X underneath. We laid back on the hood of the car (or what was left of it) and I read the following story out loud in my most animated stylings.
"Imagine you're standing in line at a supermarket, say, the Vons supermarket at the corner of Sunset and Tahquitz-- but theoretically it can be any supermarket anywhere--and you're in just a vile mood because driving over you got into an argument with your best friend. The argument started over a road sign saying Deer Next 2 Miles and you said, 'Oh, really, they expect us to believe there are any deer left?' which made your best friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat looking through the box of cassette tapes, curl up their toes inside their running shoes. And you sense you've said something that's struck a nerve and it was fun, so you pushed things further: 'For that matter,' you said, ' you don't see nearly as many birds these days as you used to, do you? And, you know what I heard the other day? That down in the Caribbean, there aren't any shells left anywhere because the tourists took them all.
"Your friend then exploded, called you a real dink, and said, 'Why the hell are you so negative all the time? Do you have to see something depressing in everything?'
"You said back, 'Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone very very cuckoo?'
"The whole argument goes nowhere of course. That sort of argument always does, and possibly you are accused of being unfashionably negative. The net result is you standing alone in Vons checkout line number three with marshmallows and briquettes for the evening barbecue, a stomach that's quilted and acidic with pissed-offedness, and your best friend sitting out in the car, pointedly avoiding you and sulkily listening to big band music on the A.M. radio station that broadcasts ice rink music down valley from Cathedral City.
"But a part of you is also fascinated with the cart contents of the by-any-standards-obese man in line up ahead of you.
"My gosh, he's got one of everything in there! Plastic magnums of diet colas, butterscotch-flavored microwave cake mixes complete with their own baking tins (ten minutes of convienience; ten million years in the Riverside County Municipal Sanitary Landfill), and gallons and gallons of bottled spaghetti sauce...why his whole family must be awfully constipated with a diet like that, and hey--isn't that a goiter on his neck? 'Gosh, the price of milk is so cheap, these days,' you say to yourself, noting a price tag on one of his bottles. You smell the sweet cherry odor of the gum rack and unread magazines, cheap and alluring.
"But suddenly there's a power surge."
"The lights brighten, return to normal, dim, then die. Next to go is the Muzak, followed by the rising buzz of conversation similar to that in a movie theater when a film snaps. Already people are heading to aisle seven to grab the candles.
"By the exit, an elderly shopper is peevishly trying to bash her cart through electric doors that will not open. A staff member is trying to explain that the power is out. Through the other exit, propped open by a shopping cart, you see your best friend enter the store. 'The radio died,' your friend announces, 'and look--' out the front windows you see scores of vapor trails exiting the direction of Twentynine Palms Marine base up the valley, '--something big's going on.'
"That's when the sirens begin, the worst sound in the world, and the sound you've dreaded all your life. It's here: the soundtrack to hell--wailing, flaring, warbling, and unreal--collapsing and confusing both time and space the way an ex-smoker collapses time and space at night when they dream in horror that they find themselves smoking. But here the ex-smoker wakes up to find a lit cigarette in his hand and the horror is complete.
"The manager is heard through a bullhorn, asking shoppers to calmly vacate, but no one's paying much attention. Carts are left in the aisles and the bodies flee, carrying and dropping looted roast beefs and bottles of Evian on the sidewalk outside. The parking lot is now about as civilized as a theme park's bumper cars.
"But the fat man remains, as does the cashier, who is wispily blond, with a bony hillbilly nose, and translucent white skin. They, your best friend, and you remain frozen, speechless, and your minds become the backlit NORAD world map of mythology--how cliche'! And on it are the traced paths of fireballs, stealthily, inexorably passing over Baffin Island, the Aleutians, Labrador, the Azores, Lake Superior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Puget Sound, Maine...it's only a matter of moments now, isn't it?
" 'I always promised myself,' says the fat man, in a voice so normal as to cause the three of you to be jolted out of your thoughts, 'that when this moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time remains and so, Miss--' he says, turning to the clerk in particular, 'let me please pay for my purchases.' The clerk, in the absence of other choices, accepts his money.
"Then comes The Flash.
"Get down,' you shout, but they continue their transaction, deer transfixed by headlights. "There's no time!' But your warning remains unheeded.
"And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet--the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below--
"--And just before you're pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines--
"And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and burst into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward--
"Just before all of this, you best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, 'There. I've always wanted to do that.'
"And that's that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you've been imagining since you were six, it's all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn't you say?"
I closed the book. By this time I had been marching in circles around the car as I read the story. I looked up at Mikey. After a brief pause he asked, "Can't you ever be normal?" I laughed and bent down into the water to grab the beers. "Lets go see this sunset" I said. Leaving the oasis behind we walked out into the desert to see what the gods would paint with their brush that night.
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