There were quite a few upset readers when the short story LUCKY was released from the upcoming Firewalker anthology. The sentiment was that the ending was a bait & switch. That the emotions were played on in a way that was outlandish, inflammatory, performative…and was almost pandering, really.

But those who fuck with my words…

picked themselves back up, dusted off their butts and unpacked what needed to be unpacked according to what the tale had triggered in them.

Even though Los Angeles does not look like the war zone depicted in Lucky yet… that it deserves to be like that is the drug sold through the national news broadcasts across the United States. Where in America is there a zone more ready to be deigned the territory of infidels than the City of Angels?

Angels making an outpost… building a city …Angels coming together in the guise of a collective of Denizens , after casting themselves off of the heights of the glory of God… how psychologically more infidelish can you get? Paradise Lost is like Prime Infidel archetype mess. You don’t get much nearer to the concept of Pandemonium than Californication.

We all know the news will lead with what will make the most hearts bleed. Especially imagery-wise. Whether the pulse is racing in outrage or in celebration, it’s all draw your fire.

…And most importantly? It’s all utter bullshit.

Let me ask you some questions. You have cameramen… safely filming “protesters” dropping rocks on cop cars that all just happen to be on Alameda. Literally L A N G U I D L Y SWOOSHING THE CAMERA from the “protesters” on the right to the empty cop cars down on the left…which is NOT protesting…but outright vandalism..

…and there is not a riot-geared gnarly cop in sight to tackle these protesters to rightfully arrest them? They just left all their cars there without any oversight, below a bridge with a pile of rocks nearby?

Nevermind that those rocks neatly piled up in pyramids[ the footage caught it] are not a natural feature of those roads over the highway in dtla. Without even getting into how much my writerhead relies on walking meditations all over dtla from chinatown to Union station to bunker hill and beyond…it’d just be stupid urban design if it were a normal feature. But they are not.

This is not about “but why are they there?” Those who know…know the equipment that potentially inflammatory areas were staged with during the George Floyd protests. We know why the shit is there.

This is about…what do they want YOU to do.

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I was supposed to be down at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. I had it timed to run into Century 21 early, get outta dodge by 845am to be heading uptown to handle the last of things I had to do before flying to Juneau, Alaska after a few Maxwell shows happening around my birthday had lured me to change flights and grab tickets to see. After all that’d happened that year I was going up on to glaciers to write…because God sent me a free ticket due to all the points gathered running back & forth to Japan.

It wasn’t JUST me. I lived in Williamsburg. Both of my roommates ALSO were going to be down around the WTC for completely different reasons On the way to respective jobs. My big sister was dropping off a vintage industrial sewing machine to be repaired; her boyfriend had to switch trains there to head to midtown for work. From three different directions, aiming to set out at different times…we all were going to be circa ground zero coming or going right before 9am that morning.

MY sister saved my life. All of ours, really. In a cosmic sense I am sure she meant to, but in real time, she was being a cunt, writing to me with tears in her eyes over the passing of someone dear to her that she already knew was dead to me. Just one day shy of the day I’d had to press charges in Cleveland to put the fear of God in the enablers in the tribe I came from that’d spent a year bragging about gearing up to offer another kid to the clutches of the familial pedophile like she was Moloch herself.

My friends… had been my real family, and knew all that had happened. Had been my bedrock in the beginning, midst and aftermath of it all. & they were true friends. So they didn’t take her attempt passively. They too had escaped to NYC from fucked up families. We were all up until 6am-630 , raging. Getting it out…wringing it out so I wouldn’t go the fuck back in. We’d all crashed , clinging to some semblances of DaVinci naps to walk like zombies into the leering day, on time.

But we ALL overslept. & we, even raging all night…were not that bunch. Cussing, they set off at late, staggered times and I, who’d fallen asleep to the TV[ a thing I never did] was dead to the world until I woke, rubbing my eyes at the first footage of the plane hitting the towers. At the time my virgoan ass would’ve been ambling out of Century 21.

We all survived. That’s why I say cosmically my sister had done a good thing. Her being an asshole had exhausted us all. Had denatured all the high-octane New Yorker geterdone that we all ran around on. My(fashist) big Sis[ a blond, blue eyed daemon who clocked in at 5’4 & was Wilder than wild]? Missed the train she’d aimed for, ended up stuck on a train on a bridge for hours, sewing machine in lap, pissed, freaked out…but alive. Her dude? Stuck on a train under the river, I think. But alive.

& we weren’t the only ones in our hood. Last head count I did (before flipping into refugee mode and getting the fuck out in NYC via Amtrak, waving my plane ticket above the throngs who rocked like me, because my airline said they could get me outta Ronald Reagan airport in DC to Juneau) there were 13 of us in like two Williamsburg blocks that were all supposed to die down there that day, or at least be irreparably scarred due to it.

We still were scarred. Of course. FUCKED in the head. For a while. A variant of survivors guilt that twisted into all kinds of shit to be worked through throughout the years.

I remember God finally got me to laugh about it by flashing me a vision of my grandmother – the other virgo- recently arrived to Heaven(on JW parole), being told that MY ass was about to be barreling IN there, & her praying my sister into a manic state to get her to reach out and piss me off so much I needed a fucking nap & slept through shit because SHE was not ready to see ME …there.

But we survived. We all did. Yeah, life got weird. For a long time I was livid because I’d been ready to GO, maaan. Saw it as theft lol. But that’s a whole other tale. Okay.

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Why am I telling you this & What the fuck DOES all that have to do with this current smorgasbord of dark energy trying to anchor in LA with all this ICE shit?

Think of it as Emergency used as a way to Temporarily treat a constitutional right like a paused privilege… one that is never rescinded to saner iterations of Rights… because once you’ve re-programmed yourself of your own accord see a right as a privilege they have re-enacted parent/child dynamics.

Parents can always take away privileges at any whim they feel like.

Then, just like now, all of it was done to create the opportunity.

To put into place the very things that have most of the constituents of this country little more than lambs led to slaughter via the food they willingly consume.

All the surveillance shit we have afoot around us now?

9/11 was the Trojan horse for it all.

& there is an upgrade of that system…that they need massive, disruptive events to justify the implementation of.

They need images they can point to.

That prove that THEY are doing the right thing.

And when they can’t organically capture those propaganda images… they must create them.

Understand what they are trying to psychologically do…and rebuke it …to get through.

The theater they’re creating…without barely laying a hand on the vandals they’ve hired to perpetuate the nonsensical flourishes in all of this… is what they had suited and booted, wanting black bodies to be out protesting T-dawg this year so they could wild out. But even that was going to be the trial run.

The blood that has always been wanted spilled… is yours. They have always seen you as traitors for not being in hate filled lockstep with them, even as your GDP bails their hate-filled hearts out of one catastrophic event after another.

Just decide if you’re going to participate in them burning you at the stake or not.

I actually Love California. It’s why I can’t sit still in it. I flit up and down the backbone and shoreline of it like a condor, in love with how insanely all the atmospheres here mesh into a strange and glorious whole. California deserves to be experienced nose to nose, in all her best iterations, all the while being mindful of her worsts.

But I still saw what I saw with Lucky. because I’ve seen what… being like…California… triggers in those who could never compare TO California. Microcosm style. The Macrocosmic event horizon is always just out of reach. Until it isn’t.