The Last Road Trip (II)

The road trip is starting to resemble a prelude and fugue. Yesterday was the prelude -- we were three itinerant minstrels, humble musician/entertainers, taking a one-day automobile excursion to the desolate and savage wastes of Los Angeles, and it was a nightmare straight out of Kafka’s tubercular night sweats.

There’s no way to appreciate the death throes of the American dream unless you’ve experienced Southern California first hand, with its endless clogged freeways, its interminable vistas of tacky stucco housing and file-cabinet office buildings, and its numberless identical strip malls, all exact replications of the same fast food shacks, muffler shops, furniture outlets, and fantastically ugly five-acre parking lots. Its bleak and joyless landscape seems deliberately designed for the express purpose of crushing the human spirit, and butchering any beauty or harmony that are the natural endowment of a natural life lived on God’s green, natural earth.

This is where the great god Automobile has finally taken us – the illusory promise of freedom and mobility is finally stripped away in Los Angeles to reveal the true destination: a vast prison of concrete, roaring engines, joyless commerce, and toxic smoke.

Of course, the two worst things that could happen to you in LA happened to us yesterday; we had a front-tire blowout on the freeway and we got lost. Both can easily be fatal, the blowout for obvious reasons, and losing one’s way because you might stay lost forever, driving the identical, perpetual streets in stop-and-go traffic until dehydration, starvation, insanity, a ruptured bladder, and an empty gas tank combine to end your life in a nightmare of gridlock, blaring horns, shrieking tires, and smog-induced cardio-pulmonary collapse. So the fact that we survived the experience, and are here to tell about it is the good news.

The bad news is that LA exists, and it’s real. In it we see the follies and illusions of the American dream, a hallucination of unlimited wealth, abundance, and freedom, with no muss, no fuss, no pain or inconvenience, and no obligation whatsoever to repay anything at all, ever, interest free for all time or until the gas runs out or the bomb falls, whichever comes first, made tangible, concrete, implacable, relentless, and carnivorous. In LA, the dream cannibalizes itself.

Twenty years from now this immense clusterfuck will be a ghost town. I plan to live long enough to see it. But first, tomorrow, I’m going to load up my bug and drive in the opposite direction, escaping from Generic America’s death rattle.