El Tropico NightClub

One of my many end points was that bar in East Los Angeles. It was not circumstance that brought me there. That part of the world had some answers for me. Some of the answers where in the ring, at the boxing gym where I would train everyday. Some of the answers where in the women, whom I switched every few weeks. Some of the answers lay with the whispers of the dead, and the advice of the living.

It was next to huge cemetery that had been around for ages. Apparently the first settlers in El Pueblo de Los Angeles had buried their dead in that very spot. The city grew around it and we have a Club that specializes in hookers, transvestites, cocaine, and ghosts. I befriended the owner after looking for gigs to play. The place had an ad in a local weekly rag announcing punk rock nights. It was an interesting joint, with a ton of history. It oozed the slimy secretions of scores of lost dreams. It was full of rats, shit, and booze. I told the owner, after a gig played to an audience of 10 ( 5 of which where playing next ) that we were just cruising along, looking for a place to land. I don’t know what the guy saw in me. I’m guessing it’s the same thing that happens to me when I know, I just know I have a relationship with someone that I need to unfold. I like to say that the angels whisper in my ear. He must have heard it too because he offered me this deal: “Help me out with the bar and you can stay in the back.” Not a bad way to land, being that we had been homeless for the past couple of months, living out of our car in the lot by Santa Monica pier. The owner was a large man, larger than most Mexicans. This gave him an edge when he needed to throw out another drunk, punk, or junkie. But he was getting old, tired. And the prospect of one more fight, one more argument, one more hustle was beginning to wear on him. Wear him down, wear him out. He had become the reluctant gatekeeper, holding back the torrential laments of the melancholic dead, the incessant dissatisfactions of the living, and his own impending death. He carried a skull around his neck and on a keychain. “Death brings me luck, I don’t know why” He wasn’t too far from the truth. In true Castaneda fashion, Death was his advisor. By keeping death near, he always knew it wasn’t his time. But Death has a funny way of skewing your perception and seeping into your worldview. Not the healthiest thing an old man with a lot of enemies can do. No wonder he would always complain with aches and pains. Hanging out in the Underworld will do that to you.


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I'm going to tell you some stories...

I’ll try to make them varied and interesting for you. I tell you now with every part of my self that what I will share with you is unequivocally true. It is as true as the solidity of this bench I sit at and its myriad of parts, bolts, wood, or fake wood (molded plastic). I look closely, I hunch and stare, looking deeper, trying to see the fibers that construct this object. It is, as all things are, being held together by a series of atoms (really they should be called intentions, and not atoms. Hey, my .02 cents for my fellow lab coat geeks) that at the quantum level only have a tendency to be there, and only based on observation. Kinda like when the scientist says “cheese” and the world stops for a pose.

This is true, by the way. Scientists, in their infinite wisdom, have stumbled upon the surprising uncooperativeness of matter, at the quantum level. Why can’t a chair be a fucking chair, a table a table. As Scientist peeled back the layers of the infinitely small and took a closer look, they realized that the Newtonian expectations for all things under the sun had gone out the window. Atoms, the stuff that stuff is made out of, only have probabilities, or tendencies, to exist. They only behave and literally react, when being observed. You can’t really blame the poor atoms. Who wouldn’t sit up and act “right” if you knew some scientific stiff with a clipboard was about to pass judgment on your very nature? Who knows what goes on when were not looking. Some ultimate party we’re not invited to (with lots of chick, cuz all ultimate parties are full of em). Maybe God is back there, in the realm of the unobservable, staring back, amused. The world is created upon observation, and we are the observers. Question: What if we were to all blink at the same time? The odds are against it, surely, but it may certainly be possible. Would this collective cessation of creation create some sort of cosmic hiccup? A blip in the fabric a space time were, just for a moment, we ceased to be and became a tendency in the cloud of space/time. Shaking hands with the almighty. Maybe that’s why dreaming, fucking, drinking, and getting hit in the face all feel the same at some level.

My writers bench, a green looking thing with an excellent view over a place called derrusy park. I’m right above the palm trees and can see Diamond Head volcano from here. It’s good.

The Point!

Of this; Here. Words. Now. is to discombobulate the norm. Throw out the standards. Avoid all conventions. I read somewhere, sometime, that "excellence by definition is a deviance from the norm". So we shall deviate. We will be deviants. And in that re channeling and exploring I expect to connect dissect and project an ever growing nagging impulse that demands that I put down, in words, these thoughts.

For you.

Right Now.

Here we go...