Kalifornia Dreaming

There's a desert in my room. There's a pit in the middle. My bed's down at the bottom. I sleep with trash and the animals who have fallen in and were unable to escape. So far, it's a dog, a deer, and a bird that drags its left wing. I dream that I'm asleep dreaming. I put the left side of my face on the pillow, crawl up in the foetal position, and shoot a bullet into my mouth. In the dream I wake up from the dream and see that I've just shot the trapped deer in its mouth instead of myself. I wake up from the dream, and rеmember wherе I am. I'm in the Amerikan vacuum, cut off and isolated from other Amerikanas in the rest of the world, and choked off by pavement and stores. The Amerikanas don't know where their food comes from, but it keeps coming, and they can't eat it fast enough to stem the flow. Every sign for every fast-food agency advertises bigger and cheaper, almost daring the Amerikana to step up and try and eat it all. Freedom holds them hostage. A sense of entitlement they don't understand or are able to acknowledge makes them headstrong and catastrophically brave. The Amerikan is easy to kill. Colourful, loud and slow-moving. Telegraphs every intention with a sense of duty to let everyone know. The bottom line is unheeded. The warnings from scientists, environmentalists and financial advisors are waved aside with ignorant contempt. The food is bad, the water is dirty, and the Americana can't see the real enemy. They look everywhere but where they should. They make it up to suit their ever-changing moods. All non-whites are token non-whites. All women are token non-whites. Americans are the self-fatted calves shunted off from the world, walking unescorted onto the belt, enticed by bad music, fatted food and drugs. You need a lot of chemicals to wake them up, and snap them out of their coma-lactic state of the union. But it's not a union they have, it's an entanglement. It's broken treaties and infected blankets. It's men sleeping under highway overpasses. It's a bone lodged in the throat. It's nymphomaniacs holding each other at gunpoint and calling it art, or just another day of annihilation. Amerikanas cut off like a tied-off arm full of narcotic-saturated blood. They host their own parasites, so they're always hungry and thirsty, always eating and drinking, but never full or quenched. Happiness is rarely found, but items are bought and sold non-stop. Amerika is turgid with resources but many feel empty. The privileged are terrified. The ingratiated feel alienated. The alienated feel ingratiated by alienation. Bus stops, hand outs and the crawlspaces in which they live out their character arcs on the outer rings of psychosis that radiate from the city centres like vomit from a Tilt-a-whirl. Work hard and get stuff so you can worry about the stuff and work harder to protect what you've worked so hard for. The Amerikan buys items to indicate to others that he's a more prominent and dominant slave to the grind. In no other culture of the world is this arduous task tackled with more single-minded intensity. Amerikanas are inspired to build mountains so big they cannot be climbed and achieve the unachievable so the rest of the world knows its place, and knows what whatever achievements they might accomplish are small in comparison, and will engender patronising overenthusiastic accolades from the superior ones. Like a grandson who won the science prize, or that dog who can catch the Frisbee every time.