When you stand above the city and look down on it, it glows like a spiny, encrusted sea animal made of neon tubing. We built this. People built this. I wonder what we were thinking?
If you put enough rats in a small enough space, they start to kill each other off. We crowd in intentionally. Liking it and hating it. Humans are pack animals, but we can't ever actually get inside the mind of anybody else. So we cram ourselves into our ever-expanding sculptures of concrete and asphalt, and do our damndest to forget. Telling ourselves stories about the Golden Age, buried deep in the future or past, where we can't touch it to fuck it up.
I am walking down Guadalupe Street at night, listening to the click and the hum and the shouts of the skateboarders. They are, for the moment, free. I am sitting on a Greyhound bus sliding through the West Texas night, watching two strangers in the seat across the aisle from me, who met an hour ago, making out. They are, for the moment free. I am letting the acid and the bass beat soak into my being, coming on so heavy that I can't remember my name or what my face looks like. I am, for the moment, free.
Ain't there any way out? Not for the moment, forever, not for you or me, for everybody? Ain't there no way to get home? Jesus is the answer. Dialectical materialism is the answer. Money is the answer. Sex is the answer. Power is the answer.
So how come we're not there yet? Why can't we all live like the people in advertisements? I want to be handsome and beautiful, and I want everybody to love me and understand me, always. I want to do something I know matters for a living, instead of something I know doesn't. I'd like to go home now.
But I can click my ruby slippers till my heels start bleeding, and I'm not going anywhere.