Warning: Lethal, Gurgling Simulacra
That’s what the warning sign says. Proof that fiction can kill you. If trans fat doesn’t get to you first. Or your satanic neighbor. In hindsight, I wish I had taken many more pictures during my three week sojourn in the burbs of California. It’s hard to pick out whats significant if you are totally immersed in a seamless landscape of illusion stitched together by things like this. By “Things like this” I mean higher degree simulations, copies of copies that have no traceable origin in something that is not an image. Only, but welcome, reminders of an alternate reality were a few black hawks and a flock of turkey vulchers that had convened on a housing association’s club house. For me, there is a fundamental difference between something like this and, for example, immigrated Welsh farmers of Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia making themselves at home by the continued use of the Welsh vernacular, or their neighboring German immigrants doing the same by planting cherry trees.
Oh yeah, and those stairs really don’t lead anywhere ”¦
I shudder to think my existence could end then and there in the foot deep rippling reflection of Hadrian’s petrified mirage of the Spanish Steps ”¦
