The Weight of the Sky
Brief thoughts on God's most despised creation
For more background on the time suck you may be debating briefly scanning below, read my last post.
Or don’t. Be a Sauvage…
In an infamous Christian Dior cologne commercial, Johnny Depp, after performing a few uninspired licks on an unplugged Gibson Les Paul, proceeds to drive a black Dodge Charger across Los Angeles’s famed Sixth Street Viaduct, whispering as I often do myself there, “I got to get out of here,” as Amber Heard can be heard sobbing softly beyond the methodic throb of a tastefully appropriated Apache war drum. A quick cut sends oil derricks hissing and chugging across the screen, their heads lifting and falling in solemn fellatio, sucking up the soft bedrock of eons, until a buffalo plods out into the bike lane and a few yucca fronds slash across the screen.
After doing a couple donuts and finding a wolf, Depp debarks from his trusty muscle car and pops the trunk.
“What am I looking for?” he asks, carrying a shovel through a forest of Joshua Trees.
“Something I can’t see,” he says, stabbing down at the dirt. Great windmills of sand whip out over his shoulder as he whispers. “I can feel it.”
Then he kneels.
Had Johnny wanted to dig a deeper hole for himself career-wise, he might have done what I’ve done, which is to excavate the buried history of the Joshua Tree’s discovery, naming, and attempted eradication in Southern California beginning in the 1870s. At that time entrepreneurs, attempting to make a fortune and the despised trees extinct, began transforming them into paper. “California Cactus Paper.” This was right around the time when Southern California, with its newly discovered semi-tropical climate, as Charles Nordhoff famously dubbed it, was about to become the most promoted region in the history of the earth. The place was going to need a lot of paper.
Johnny Depp, digging alone in the desert, might have written it all up in a kind of experimental prose poem, its pages compiling the collective and endless irrational scorn of thousands of formerly living white Caucasians for the homely and lonely Joshua Tree. He might have printed the final mystifying and exhausting literary document, rejected by all publishers, himself on California Cactus Paper.
But Johnny Depp, to his credit, did not excavate the history buried beneath California’s hottest housing market, its fastest growing national park, and expanding Airbnb bonanza. There is only one man foolish enough to devote his days to such an egregious errand…
Instead, in the Dior commercial, Johnny Depp tosses his shovel and kneels.
He drops his jewelry inside the hole. No longer encumbered by the superficial trappings of obscene incalculable wealth, he rises, eyeing the new horizon.
“It’s magic,” he says.
And I would tend to agree. There is something magical about the relief that comes from unceremoniously dumping your most prized possessions out into the dirt.
And so without further ado, I give to you…
