Ten Sites to See in Los Angeles, California

If even private jet passengers must indulge the fascistic whims of customs officers, then discard your garrote before boarding Zheing’s Gulfstream III and indulge each customs functionary’s own iteration of pathology, e.g. ‘the gleeful bullying jock, ’ e.g. ‘the staunch defender of his nation. ’

One: If a pitch to adapt your small press novels into a six-part Network Event wearies Zheing, tilt your forehead downward in admonishment, i.e. ‘No one man’s Quixotic narrative is any less tedious than another’s Singing Competition. Regardless of plausibility or production value, we’re all passengers on the same ship of fools, Yiang. ’

Two: Arrive at LAX and denigrate surrounding Englewood as, “Kind of dumpy. ”

Three: Avail yourself of Yiang’s fine apple brandies until the wee hours, glaring at Facebook photos of Alan Raval until your eyes blur and you mistake him for yourself. Castigate yourself for dwelling in a dark basement, still stuck in the fetid Sault Sainte Marie of the mind when you’ve finally made it to the place Woody Guthrie rightly described as a “Garden of Eden. ”

Four: Mouth “Hello” to the driveway beneath your face at dawn. Marvel at the quality of the light. Recall that David Lynch also first arrived in Los Angeles by night, and “so it wasn’t until the next morning, when [he] stepped out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard, that [he] saw this light. And it thrilled [his] soul. [He felt] lucky to live with that light. ”61

Five: If light is the great disinfectant, wonder how so much perfidy and greed grew from such exquisite sunlight, e.g. ‘Fatty Arbuckle raping Virginia Rappe with a bottle, ’ e.g. ‘Weinstein’s impotent “intersex vagina”62 pissings, ’ e.g. ‘Dan

“Get in the Van” Schneider, aka ‘Dan “Hold Her Tighter, She’s a Fighter” Schneider, ’ producing so much children’s foot fetish programming for Nickelodeon.

Six: Drive Zheing’s Mercedes Cabriolet through the hills and valleys. Wind kundalini-like through the half-remembered dream of Mulholland Drive. Throw nickels at Krishnas. Speed by the Los Angeles Gnostic Centre and feel a touch of regret, here in this hotbed of cultic belief, that your gnostic period was so fickle and short-lived.

Seven: Feel a touch of bemusement over being so shameless a dilettante.

Eight: Plan to visit the Vineyard Fellowship in Tarzana where Bob Dylan was Saved. Plan an alcoholic tailspin into psychosis to honour Kerouac at Big Sur. Don’t count on spitting and punching your way through the gleaming Apple Stores to find the last Neil Cassady of Ol’ Frisco, but hope to. 61 (Lynch & McKenna, Room To Dream, 2018) 62 (Cauterucci, 2020)

Nine: If these plans are dismissed by Britannica in favour of a Warner Bros. studio tour, disparage the tourist-y nature of said undertaking and request a little grease from Yiang to visit the Hollywood Boulevard strip clubs. If Yiang hands you a thousand dollars without even counting it, as though he’d always known you’d want money, then Zheing has pegged you as the Eric Roberts character from Star 80.

Ten: If California strip club laws are wildly abstruse, then there’s no liquor if vaginas, beer but not liquor if nude breasts, and only dry clubs may promote vaginas and breasts conterminously. Counter-intuitively: only the classiest strip clubs possess buffets. Eat a great deal of fried chicken and pork ribs for a song. Wipe your greasy hands on your jeans. If you sit in the front row and throw a few ones towards a generously-endowed Belarusian, and her bountiful breasts and gold crucifix hang before your eyes, and there between the breasts is Christ on his cross, dying for all this, dying for Dan Schneider’s foot fetish, dying for Fatty Arbuckle’s apocryphal champagne bottle, and a mirror ball refracts light thereon that contains multitudes, then reach out your thumb and forefinger and hold the base of Christ’s cross, look this dancer in the eye, there in the sustain called Jumbo’s Clown Room, and know in this house of ill repute the eternal spirit that light makes apparent.