THE BRAVE NEW LAND

“COME ON DOWN!” said the flaming blue dragon guarding the gates of Sheol. The twirling fire all around crackled from the dragon’s throat as it sang along with a tune spinning into the garden from speakers unseen. We had been caught, both of our halves, and now we knew we must ride a waterslide which would probably spit us out into a realm unknown. The jaggy dragon jittered and swayed as its cute little face grimaced in pain – pain that we had caused. We lost, and... “LOST SHALL WE BE!” said the speakers pumping out sound to a near-empty audience skittering hither and thither. All of our new friends had scattered away to dark corners once they heard the ill news. We had lost. No one told us that we could be taxed from our winnings, much less being dropped from the entrance of Eden through a garden downspout, like runoff spewed onto the surface of a land unknown. Well, maybe we had been warned while still conjoined, but that was so many moons ago … I mean, come on! This sucks; just come ...

It was so long ago, now that my life has moved on in so many ways. I was worried about sweating too much on my lunch break. We were trying to build an exhibition in Little Tokyo, right near Al's Bar in downtown LA. The Temporary Contemporary, the place where I existed at the time, was the gutter-child of M.O.C.A., the Museum of Contemporary Art. I once sniffed by accident there hydrochloric acid in the back room serving as a workshop, causing my lungs to freeze up; I once had a flake of metal flicker down from my stringy blond hair, as I flung it about, into my cornea after grinding bars in front of an international artist's ode to contemporary art; and I once played a pickup game with Willem Defoe, on a court designed by Jonathan Borofsky to illustrate the ongoing Cold War between Russia and the USA. We were so young, back then, and we were so isolated and insane. Being young is a thing which lives on in memory, but changes slightly as we remember the things we'd done; bei...