ON GOD

The road out of Los Angeles and into Palm Springs is a road that separates worlds.

Tents, shoddy houses and humanoid creatures shamelessly flaunting the derelict parts of themselves fade into pristinely kept hedges and spotlessness. Where Los Angeles urges its inhabitants to consider their own veiled form of schizophrenia, of a paranoia that forbids even an inkling of imagined solitude, Palm Springs quiets those ideas in a fell sweep. If not for the hum of cars that pass these 1960s post-modernist living sculptures, I’d believe I was alone here. A planet away from society.

Floating in a pool designed by a man famous enough to have his works published in 500 dollar coffee table books, eyeing the blue an unhindered skies above me, watching birds of great predatory species glide lazily overhead on the drafty desert air. It’s easy to imagine this as a heavenly place. Powder your brain with enough modifying agents and the head and the heart will absolutely agree with the idea of heaven. Here it is manifested as perfectly chlorinated pool water to not offend the skin, the eyes, the hair. Here it is in the blue and never ending sky that cradles the Earth’s surface in a warming blanket. No matter, this is a place that will remain untouched by the carelessness of other inhabitants. What is shall always be.

My body rolls from its position as corpse-like and adrift. Air fills my lungs to tide over the brief period for which the flow will cease. I am underneath the surface with my eyes closed. I am a dragon soaring. I am a mermaid scavenging. I am a bird of prey, lazing. Four limbs stretch, push and pull body through medium. Mind builds a world in the blankness of closed eyes.

Heaven is returning to the games of youth in a private world. A world unmarred by horrors witnessed one day past. The savagery of man is the innocence lost and returned as apathy and self-interest.

My feet splash water while my body writhes, liberated from a cynic’s wisdom. Lucky lucky, lucky me.

Who is God?

Once I knew Him. At least, a part of me was tapped in and participating. The departure from it; severance may be a more appropriate term, actually. Like taking the rope anchoring your dinghy to a place of reliable resource and slashing it in favor of unknown. I cope. Sometimes.

The mind is a carefully sculpted version of the self built over decades of observation and deduction. If I were to visit the hypothetical image of it, I’d see a foundation in crumbles. How this base can support anything is beyond me. Maybe it doesn’t support anything and that’s the problem. The rest of it is the antithesis of cohesion. Haphazardly put together at varying intervals. The thing as a whole hardly screams functional. Does this translate? Splish splash.

Wise up, soldier. Life is a game to be enjoyed. If God is real or not is no concern right now. The atrocities I saw in the City of Angels leave no smudge upon life in a house on Coachella Valley.

Powder finds my nostrils and swims up to my brain. Once again I am adrift in a place close to heaven. I am a dragon at rest on a planet far, far away.