Higher Truths
“Are you hurt?” “Injured?” “Se Habla Español."
It is with a heavy heart today that I must inform you of a tragic development…
Perhaps you have noticed over the past several weeks a refreshing lack of content trickling out of this wannabe little blog? Maybe you have wondered why, rather than informing my flagging readership of the alley’s latest atrocity, or boring them with more bland backstory from my moribund book project, I’ve resorted to posting scraps from some crap I wrote about the Joshua Tree, yucca brevifolia.
“Yuck,” you must have caught yourself scoffing after clicking another one of these dull yucca dispatches, “Barret’s bullshit blog has resorted to regurgitating old unpublished writing,” and in this harsh assessment you would have hardly been mistaken. In fact, as a tribute to your good taste, I have decided to retitle that manuscript simply that: YUCK.
So what happened exactly? Why the silence and subterfuge? Did I mistakenly murder my muse? Shouldn’t the alley behind my bedroom be supplying an unending stream of flaming hot refuse ripe for your morose delectation?
The truth is no. The alley is not there anymore—at least not for me. In a sudden unplanned reversal utterly undermining to the premise of this blog…
I MOVED
And not to a mental hospital, as friends and family have often anticipated, but to a spacious new apartment in a serene and sunny neighborhood several miles up the road.
My failure to post is a direct effect of a major life change.
Deprived of my dumpster fires, the dying chickens, the dark aura of aggression abiding outside the men’s gay sex club, I haven’t felt miserable enough to sit down and write. I keep listening for the shopping cart’s rattle. The sobs of the doomed as they shove the needle down. The aroma of Amazon boxes roasting in the moonlight…
Instead, it’s only the meat smoke pouring off the new gas grill beyond my master bedroom. The stakes are lower now, and the steaks are done. “Christina! Food!” In the face of this relative calm, insulated from catastrophe, able to step outside for the first time, I feel creatively castrated. I have no more need for spleen. “Should we buy a TV?” The black seeds of vengeance that once nourished my eloquence wither in the sunlight of a naked complacence. Putting reality in my own words becomes a needless assault. “Please pass the salt.” No longer sickened and defeated on a daily basis, insulated from rot and pain that feeds the city’s asphalt veins, my lust for language has languished; I have nothing more to say.
Birdsong bathes my mind in a baffling blankness.
To a certain extent, I always feared that this might happen. What if things improve? But I never imagined it could really be this bad.
When I applied several weeks ago for the job as the rent-free live-in manager of the upscale medium-sized apartment building, I had no experience and no expectation of a callback. I immediately got a text. The guy wanted to meet me at Starbucks. “How will I recognize you?” I told him not to worry. “I’m a burn victim.” I’d deployed a similar tactic years ago on Craigslist after posting a personal ad seeking platonic conversation over coffee. The girl who showed up was gorgeous, and if not relieved per se then at least pleasantly surprised to discover a guy whose face did not resemble a puddle of melted cheddar cheese. We spent the rest of the week unclothed in her queen bed in Mission Beach. I figured a similar strategy might work with employment and it did.
Much to my literary detriment.
The guy who interviewed me said he got it. “Burn victim!” He’d Googled my name, given the wannabe blog a quick little gander. “Dumpster Fires! Hahahahaha. So you’re a fiction writer?” And now, after flipping the terrifying electric chair switch locked in the basement of his building, successfully restarting the elevator, this after topping off the jacuzzi, letting in the laundry machine tech, and accessing the roof to reattach a loose air conditioner fuse, somehow I find myself seated alone at my desk, a dark canopy of orange trees drifting just outside the window, and beyond the rubbery rustle of their autumn leaves, hidden in this sudden bright sanctum of undreamt-of peace—liberated from the frictions of my former life—I stare for hours at the blinking insertion point on another blank Word doc, utterly incapable of bringing forth a single spark.
Hearing my sobs, several friends came over and started newspaper fires behind the pool. But it just wasn’t the same. Chris said he’d pretend to smoke meth. Nick even volunteered to cut himself, head butt the palm tree, and scream racial obscenities, but it didn’t seem safe, not if the cops came and word got back to the property management company that it was all a coordinated effort to help the resident manager surmount the luxury of his new lifestyle.
Of course, though, they couldn’t fire me. Not in California. Being a burn victim comes with certain benefits.
Only once in my life, I think, have I encountered writer’s block this bad, and that was in 2018 when Christina told me that she’d cut off my dick and masturbate with it while I bled to death if I went on writing the book about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s nuclear meltdown. And that was another thing the guy who interviewed me at Starbucks had to ask about. He wanted to make sure Christina and I were good before he invited us to move in rent-free and manage the company’s latest luxury apartment building.
“So you are a fiction writer, right?”
I guess now is as good a time as any to air out these putrid pages with the fresh ocean air only a free stock photo can provide. This sad corner of the internet is a verifiable…
I actually do—or did—live behind a slaughterhouse, as a previous post detailed. Ditto on The Slammer, the notorious gay sex club right around the corner. And the incessant trash fires? You only have to tap the highlight button on my Instagram labeled “Dumpster Fires” to enjoy a dozen different videos of red-hot illegal arson action. And what of those pesky nuclear meltdown posts? ALL TRUE. Everything except for a few minor details, not included among them the fact that it actually was Christina who threatened to kill me as I portrayed in a previous post titled “Death Threats.” Christina, of course, was not working for the Boeing Corporation. She was working for herself. When she threatened to kill me in the summer of 2018, she was then a member of a women’s writing group that met weekly in Echo Park. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, the ever-popular 1992 self-help book by Julia Cameron, which “teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills,” was the required text.
Yes, Christina, my voluptuous Valley Girl, grew up beneath the meltdown, and it was she who was going to write the best-seller about Santa Susana. Not me. Or so she decreed.
But it turns out there is something worse than the wrath of the competitive, armed upstart. True creative castration, it would seem, follows not from a girlfriend’s steak knife but a placid, new, overly large apartment situated among the freakish greenery of West Toluca Lake.
And so it is with heavy heart that I must confess a tragic turn of events: Today, much to my chagrin, I find myself thumbing through what I once took to be the trite and impotent pages of Julia Cameron’s classic tome of soporific self-help: The Artist’s Way.
Will I ever discover a spiritual path to a higher creativity?
“Well, I’m glad you and Christina are okay,” the guy I met at Starbucks said. There was only one more hang up beyond the lack of experience and the tasteless 2007 burn victim banter that made him wonder whether he should hire me. “When I look at your living situation, I see someone desperate to escape…” He paused, scratching the arm hair behind his wristwatch before taking another sip of espresso and settling on the proper term.
“Hell.”
But guy had it all backwards. I wasn’t desperate to escape—for years I’d been determined to enter. For years I’d felt certain that the entrance to the Hell had to be hidden somewhere in the vicinity of our hundred-year-old apartment building, particularly among those unfathomable five-point intersections that, like a series of impossible Satanic pentagrams, surrounded our building on all sides, and over which always loomed the bright neon billboards of the injury attorneys, their sinister faces always staring down, smiling politely. “ARE YOU HURT?” “Injured?” “Accident?” YES, I wanted to scream. YES! But more often, not wanting to attract any attention from the alley, I simply dialed toll free. (800) 888-8888. (800) 777-7777. (800) 666-6666. Forever I thought that whatever remained potent within me, penetrating and purposeful still, it derived form that particular demonic energy that throbbed all night throughout those terrifying, tenebrific streets. Forever I’d been determined to find it. There was a darkness that someone had to harness, a very real horror that demanded to be heard.
If I couldn’t write about the nuclear meltdown, I’d write about the human meltdown. Whatever, over the past hundred plus years, lured a hundred million souls down to Los Angeles, the bottom corner of the continent, that gaping insatiable dumpster of a city clogged with the fly-clotted infinity of dreams dragged across the age-old frontier for restless endless centuries.
Something drew us all out here, to the dead end far across the west, and it wasn’t heaven. It wasn't climate precisely, or TV. NBC. ABC. No. But I never did find it, although I think I came close.
“Are you hurt?” “Injured?” “Se Habla Español."
Some sunny cheerful Sunday sometime soon, peering out my window past the canopy of orange trees, the sprawling sycamores, and fan palms, perhaps this burn victim will discover the higher truth.
Every real artist knows the entrance to Hell is hidden in himself.
I like Joshua Tree National Park, but I've been wondering where you're headed.
I think you should have moved into the alley, but you're fucked now dude! You're going to end up writing sitcoms in Hollywood, sipping lattes on Rodeo Drive on Sunday mornings, reminiscing about the good old days, wishing you were less successful.
Chris and Nick showing what TRUE friendship is