joyrider

when i was a child, my parents owned a brown ford ltd. every sunday, my stepfather would take us for a drive. we would end up in the catalina foothills, near the end of campbell blvd. slowly he would turn the car through a roundabout, and i would see the lights stretched out on and over the desert floor. it pushed up through the pollution, meeting starlight in the grey-brown mix. the milk lights overhead scattered like sand on a sidewalk, and below was the seamless grid in white-orange green blue-white red white-white. i would press against the glass, squinting, and bend the light in arcs. we'd drive slowly back down, everyone quiet, the police playing on the radio, the ibm plant the brightest star on the southern horizon.


Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.
-- Jean Baudrillard, French semiologist.