It's impossible to be jet-lagged from an hour-and-a-half flight that doesn't even result in changing time zones, but that's how I feel. It was a rough flight, and I ended up pretty sick by the end of it. I survived, but I still feel pretty "off."
I got to meet my new team, though, in-person! I got a better feeling of what the job entails. I hope I'm a good fit for the position. I'll actually have some guidance and training, but I worry that I'll be dragging everyone down while I get my bearings, so I feel a great sense of responsibility not to mess things up… It's impossible to be great at everything you do from the beginning, so that's an unrealistic expectation, but I don't want to be too much of a burden. I want to get better at doing all of this as quickly as possible.
( there's really no reason to be anxious, you know )I looked up at the sky on my commute back into the city from work the other day, and there were radioactive pink clouds, unusual in that they existed at all in the Los Angeles sky, reflecting the sunset, in a sky that hadn't yet started shifting away from bright blue.
Ah, a pink cloud is floating across the sky…
For a while now, I've been wondering about the connection in hide's later works to his experiences of LA. I know he spent time here both as a kid and then as an adult when X Japan entered their International Era. But the way he describes the sky in this city — this endless blue sky, this unchanging sky that never reflects anything of the seasons or weather — those descriptors seem to perfectly encapsulate the madness I felt living here for the first two years of my own California Era.
Every day feels the same. Sameness stretching into infinity. Only the people, only the man-made structures change beneath an unchanging sky. The city decays, breathes, heaves sighs, and seems to consume the youth of its constituents. Only the palm trees grow taller while all of us humans hunker under the blue dome of the heavens.
I don't hate LA, but I remember overhearing someone say that this is a city people live in so that they can accomplish something, and then once they've done whatever that is, they leave. No one tries to build a life here. Not really. It's too expensive for that. It's not real. It's somewhere between hyperreality and unreality. Surely, there's something real underneath all of it, but to find that, you'd have to scratch open the surface of that blue sky, like taking a coin to a scratch-off card at the gas station.
But I don't want the kind of "life" that other people try to "build." I know what that person was talking about. Marriage and family and all of those things. That's what common sense tells us we're meant to want. I'm completely uninterested. So it's fine if I try to live, rather than just accomplish something, in this strange city with its endless blue sky. I just have to accept that I will be consumed by this city, decaying under an unchanging sky.
I'm gonna have fun while I rot. I'm gonna rot in style.
Runnin' through, under the sun…
Something like that.
