jesus I gotta piss
I’m walking up Hollywood Boulevard as the sun is dropping lower towards the hills and Pacific Ocean. The weather here is perfect, immaculate. My cousin told me about this bookstore, it’s one of her favorites. Time to take a piss.
The front door is propped open by some sort of gargoyle statue with glowing red eyes. Once through the threshold you can feel the cooler air and smell the incense and nag champa burning throughout. Outside you couldn’t smell this so how the hell do they keep both of those things in the store with the door propped open?
A timid, Hispanic gentleman behind the counter greets me. “We’ll hold onto your bag for you,” he says and hands me a C47 with a butterfly drawn on it in black ink. “Sure, thanks,” and I hand him my bag over the counter.
“You have a restroom I can use?”
Sun shines through the closed floral and geometrically patterned drapery. The windows are high and vaulted. I caught glimpses of some red and black paintings on the wall of the hallway outside the bathroom and returned to exhibit once my bladder was fully expunged.
EXCERPT FROM IG:
“Morbid curiosity:
There’s a strange beauty in our mortality and these pieces represent that paradox for me.”
A brief reaction to the pieces:
Reminded me of the back of a deck of cards, loved the color combination and the majority is BLACK which makes the red pop
Ink and some sort of water color or watered down ink on really nice paper
Hyenas, around a...oh Jesus, a person, a man, missing his feet? But no blood. The absence of bleeding. Damn those are the Disney hyenas...
The play on: drawing you in then, subtly revealing what’s happening. 🤌🏻
And it reveals the morbid curiosity we all have with death. It’s the one thing that we have not been able to even touch with medicine. Yes, we have prolonged life and increased quality of life, but the ultimate end of it has yet to be prescribed.
And it’s the “rubber-necker” in all of us too. It’s what you do in sobriety too. You do it to remind yourself of what could be had you not let go and let your higher power. It reminds us of our past, which no longer defines us, but serves as the ultimate reminder of what could be.
You didn’t come here for sobriety talks, moving on.
What universal truths are associated with death?
...more on this topic later.
