Breathless

Who needs advertising? A paramedic came into the store yesterday. Works out of Sacramento. Weekend before he'd made a run to pick up some idiot who'd apparently downed a quarter of a bottle of Da Bomb, Beyond Insanity on a bar bet. The idiot won the bar bet. The idiot also went into severe laryngospasm.

On the incident report, someone had written: Bought the hot sauce in a hot sauce store on Cannery Row in Monterey…

Aha! thought the paramedic. I like hot sauce! And I'm going to Monterey next weekend…

This was the bright spot in an otherwise really really miserable day brought on by one of those hollow mirror epiphanies earlier that morning that sound so absolutely banal when written down except (deep breath) it's my journal and I'll bore if I want to.

I'd dragged Robin up to the mall for a haircut. The day was very bright – we are either in the middle of a hideous heat spell or at the beginning of a severe climactic change – and the mall was eerily empty.

Last time I'd been in the mall was the weekend before for dinner with Robin and Max, and I got a little weepy thinking of that, my big boy launched never to return, the memories of his childhood all around me because in backwaters – and trust me: Monterey is a backwater – malls loom large in the adolescent social ecology.

Walking back to the car that night, I'd noticed the tone in Max's voice – "That's where Fletcher and I…" "One night Erin and I got all messed up and we…" "I bought Youth In Revolt there, but wait! Didn't it used to be a Walden Books? When did it become a Barnes & Nobles?"

These were no longer places, you see. They were Stations of the Cross.

And then I had this sudden flash of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn between Lefferts and Lincoln circa 1960. One of my surefire methods for lulling myself back to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night is to imagine the little commercial district I grew up near. I used to be able to recall all the little stores in vivid technicolor 3-D detail but now I can only remember two of them: the candy store where I had my first adventures in shop lifting and the little delicatessen that used to sell tongue. I can't remember any of the others and I have no certainty they ever even existed. If I went back there, it would be all different now, that neighborhood. Very upscale. It wasn't then. But all those places are now is fragments of mutated memory.

And some day maybe Max would perform this exercise against insomnia and all this mall would become fragments of mutated memory. It would no longer have corporeal existence. If it ever had.

And then I floated off. Billions of fragments of mutated memory attached to billions of human beings' heads by comic book balloon strings. All the people who ever walked this planet once or who walk it now. None of it real. And I was having my own laryngospasm, I mean it was difficult to breath. I felt like I was drowning. I felt the vortex growing and spinning, a great white vortex.

I snapped myself back but it was an effort.

And the strangeness stalked me throughout the day.

In other news, had an hour-long phone call with JDK in Mexico at 6am Friday morning. He's panicking: business is down. Texas, Okalahoma, New Mexico, southern California – all up twenty percent. Come San Jose and it's a sixty-foot tent with fifty people scattered in the bleachers.

I rather think he's hit the curse of the San Francisco Bay Area. There are just too many entertainment venues competing for the public's dollar, and anyway the public doesn't want to leave its house, the public would rather not fight traffic – it would rather cocoon with take-out Chinese and the fifth season of Six Feet Under on DVD from Netflix.

I offer this as a theory to JDK who snaps, "Well, you're wrong!" and the upshot is that I now have a $2000 budget per month for hiring ancillary staff to help with the push. And I'm thinking, Oh, fuck. Hiring people? Training people?

At what point do I get to lay down and say, I just can't do any of this anymore?