Read Online David's Inferno by David Blistein - Free Book Online Page A

“Petrochemicals come from way-ancient plants, you know,” I point out, feeling an uncommon solidarity with primordial ooze.
    â€œIngredient X?” I respond thoughtfully. “It’s hard to get it out of the formula, because it’s one of the primary ingredients in water. Besides, what did oxidants ever do to you?” (It even takes me a few seconds to understand what I mean by that.) “Cruelty?” I ask with, I admit, a certain degree of indignation. “Have you ever heard a flower scream when you pick it? Believe me, it ain’t pretty.”
    When the next person comes up, I switch gears and explain that
our
products actually are all natural, cruelty free, and don’t have
any
of that nasty ingredient. I’m not trying to deceive anyone. I just like entertaining different points of view—if you haven’t noticed.

    Just up from downtown Laguna Beach, California there’s a long, narrow oasis of calm in the midst of the touristy storm. It’s called Brown’s Park. You’d think it was just an ordinary alley except for the mosaic brickwork wall and the bronzed chairs, table, and book at the entrance. The boardwalked alley leads to a low ironworkrailing that looks out over the Pacific. In the center is a poem that’s written in wrought iron and set in a stained-glass frame:
    In this fleeting moment
    what extravagant respite
    as booming surf speaks its
    mystical passage across
    the undreamed depths
.
    I come upon this railing just before sunrise one morning in March 2006 during my jittery daily stroll. The poem … the view … the sounds of that surf … I know I should feel some fleeting extravagant respite. But I don’t. It’s like being given a gift you can’t figure out how to unwrap. If anything, the experience just emphasizes the divide between the poem’s spirit and my own.
    I try, really I do. I take ten deep breaths with my eyes closed and then open them to the “booming surf.” I do a few basic t’ai chi moves, with a yoga Salute to the Sun thrown in for good measure (even though the sun is in the opposite direction). Ultimately, all I can do is take a lot of pictures to try to at least capture the experience I seem incapable of having. If only I could focus on the outer scenery as ferociously as I do the inner.
    March 27, 2006: Laguna Beach, California to Las Vegas, Nevada. 290 Miles
. Las Vegas is a great place for an agitated depressive. Shaken, not stirred. Because the agitation you feel inside manifests all around you—that insistent drive for the next moment, born of intense dissatisfaction with this one. Just as the vibration in my solar plexus is on alert 24/7 to demand “just one last” gasp from my exhausted adrenals, so the town is always trigger-hair ready to demand just one last gasp from the slightest human fascination, compulsion, addiction, or obsession. The town truly never sleeps. Even at dawn, it tosses and turns. I feel right at home: The endless piped-in music. The insistent smell of fake flowers. The dazzling pumped-up colors of real ones. Guys polishing floors. Dealers polishing chips one by one.
    Monuments to and from the past rise again—daring you to mock their pretensions. The Arc de Triomphe. Eiffel Tower. Caesar’s Palace. Luxor Pyramid.
    Bob Dylan is playing here soon. Waylon Jennings is playing here soon. Wayne Newton, Don Rickles, Barry Manilow and guys I’ve never heard of are playing here soon. What, no women? I walk into The Imperial and G-l-o-r-i-a is playing right now.
    Revolving doors keep opening for you. Taxis keep waiting for you. Ramps and stairways keep appearing to shuttle you back and forth across the Strip.
    Guys keep handing out cards with pictures of naked women. They’ll come to you. Direct to your room. Totally nude. $49. Special. Anything you want.
    Anything? What I lust for is a trick I doubt they’ve ever