Late Afternoon Return Trip Streams of Consciousness

Reaching the 405 at 5:04, I realize suddenly how very palindromatic my route is, how every town I pass through is the same, how it stretches into one long patchwork of buildings and walls and hills and fields that constitutes the 144 miles between us. Even the names of streets begin to be reused, an unimaginative Adam of an architect cutting corners. Euclid, Fairview, Main, Broadway, Culver, Mesa, Rosecrans, Harbor. One after the other. O my beautiful artfully artificial Southern California, may your orange sun forever burn into my shoulders. With Bass+7, Treble+3, Fujiya & Miyagi thudding like pixelated scraps of jazz max in your headlights.

A thin film of the beautiful briny Santa Barbara breeze and perspiration coats my body as cities flash by me. I can't think of them as anything else but names, as I have only experienced them as such, though I do hear that Van Nuys is very nice, and that the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen's Club is quite the place to be in the City of Industry, according to a poorly designed billboard. I keep thinking back to all of the little time we've spent together and how it seems to stretch on forever in my memory, even long afterwards. I know I'm reading too much into it, and your two eyes are too wise for my innocence, in a sense.

A sudden break in the traffic jolts me out of my thoughts at Brookhurst and Fountain Valley. Goddammit, I think. Suffice to say, if shit had gone down, bitches would have been flipped. But the cars start speeding up again, I regain my momentum, and begin velocitating rapidly towards a cool 86 mph in silence. Portugal.the.Man brings me back down into my sleepiness again, and my exit finally floats up to me out of a fog. I keep falling into this dream state, my very secret, very solitary second life pulling me down and enveloping me into blackness. Driving down familiar streets, the music recycles, and I wonder if you have seen me cry, tears like diamonds.

I may be batting a thousand, but a homerun crack at love... This is where I tell you that I know love's what I need to work at.