My Stars And

4th of July 2023, I remember awaiting a ride out front of my family’s house on the outskirts of Goleta, affectionately referred to as Santa Barbara’s student ghetto by one of my city college teachers. You wouldn’t see this from my perspective. The sky was blushing at the hills and orchards just out of my view behind a few blocks of shabby, single-story apartments and tract homes. I was awaiting Juno, my only friend to make it out of the proverbial hood as an artist. We had spent the previous Independence Day with a circle of friends that had since dwindled and splintered, situating our current holiday plans firmly in for old-time’s sake territory. Juno, a very talented musician, was serving a number of high-profile clients at the time following the release of an excellent metalcore album. I asked how things were going and they told me: Things were fine.

We headed 15 miles into town from my parents’ house to retrieve our other friend, Alexis. This was close to when Juno was finally going to skip Santa Barbara and head for Seattle to live with the proprietors of their tape label. The sun was setting in the rear window of their old car. It was the last night I would see Juno for a long while.

We stopped at Target to see Henry, an old friend who had recently moved back from New York. I was also interested to see if the newly released co-branded Jack and Cokes in a can were any good. The store was fitted inside Santa Barbara’s only indoor mall, which had been constructed on microscale due to the city’s complex, theme park-like building codes, and converted to a relatively small Target following the death of the nearby Sears and Kmart, the latter of which had been one of the most common outings for kids in my neighborhood during my childhood. The setup had been great: you could play violent Xbox 360 games, they let you ride one of the smaller store bikes around as long as you weren’t a nuisance, there was a sit-down Little Caesars and a laundromat inside. People spent the whole day sometimes. It was a sort of neighborhood hub-world at that time. I could say now that it had become a target, both of the former Kmart’s public utilities were gone and in their place pronouns, hundreds of surveillance cameras, dorm furniture, oat milk, but this bitter assessment feels beside the point. I didn’t find Henry, and ultimately the Jack and Cokes would be insufficient for my needs, though I didn’t know this latter part yet and was briefly triumphant.

We left the target and went across the parking lot to the auto parts store where Alexis worked before becoming one of the 10% of Tesla staff laid off this year. This was around 9 P.M.. We waited outside. Juno smoked then and preferred the yellow American Spirits. I smoked too in solidarity, the only way I ever smoke, I’ve thankfully not developed a real taste for it outside the vernacular experience of sitting somewhere smoking. Alexis emerged with wiper fluid, motor oil, and a toy cap gun. The two plastic bottles were poured into Juno's car in the appropriate places, and I took a video of Alexis shooting off the cap gun, which, unusually, let off a spray of yellow sparks and a decent little noise that would really excite a kid. It was a nice night to be standing outside.We resolved to head down to Isla Vista near UCSB and see if we could see the fireworks from the beach, back in the direction of my old neighborhood and my parents’ house.

By now we were a few surviving witnesses to years of decaying sociality of

similar types of people in town. What you never hear about the end of wokeness is that before any ideas or signs began fading from fashion, the coalition of we who had been trans or communist radicals or crust punk nostalgists or blue-haired et cetera, I assume in many small towns across the America, had privately lost our minds and parts of our souls, in sacrifice to something I can’t yet provide a comprehensive historical diagnosis for. The walking deadness you saw in the aftermath or rather peri-math of the ongoing current event was a neuralgic, grasping, hitchhiking type of deep-sea slug-cyborg sociality-sexuality of a species of borderline terroristic cannibal lone wolf vagrants. Which as I write sounds much more exciting than it was. Your multi-undiagnosed ex-lesbian girlfriend would call you from out of town on suspicion of being human trafficked to The Bay by her new WASP boyfriend’s family. Strange arrangements of three or more band-shirt-clad semi-strangers would be seen noncommittally holding each others’ hands, masked, in the movie theater. You would drag your friend home, sorrowfully vomit-covered, to be cared for by their partner (scruffy, male), who would be found in a compromising position with their other partner in the house and stay in bed without offering aid, ethically. Your friend who moved to Idaho would mysteriously turn up in town without their drag performer wife selling weed on Instagram, a create mode text on a black background that looked unusually mournful and abyssal. It all had a sort of plan B, dead man’s switch aura about it, I mean in that some unnatural course-change had led here, but I wondered quietly if perhaps this was exactly what was always in the cards. A half-joke recurring as if repeated by a drunk friend feeling unheard the first time chimed in your head that you might’ve suffered less at the hands of the overwhelming torture of America than you did from the personal behaviors of your trusted anti-Americans. Another needling voice would then interject, “Easy for you to say.” You ultimately shrug. Your best friendships were all afflicted by it, and would flicker in and out of view as occasionally comforting, lethargic swamplight in such a world. There was some romance to this, the idea of an unlikely roadside picnic beside the entrance to a barren, collapsed land increasingly hard to make sense of.

I can’t remember what we had for dinner, by this time it was 9:45 and most places in town closed around 8:30, so I think it was Denny’s. My phone camera roll corroborates this. Now I remember. Alexis played Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 on the phone. That’s the one where the place is deserted and you’re huffing toxic fumes while a serial killer/child molester corpse in a rotten bunny suit comes for you. The whole thing is monotone green like the color grading older violent video games used to have, and it's unclear why you, the player character, are interned in this ruin-swamp. I ordered a slamburger and mozzarella sticks. The mozzarella sticks never came, but when I asked about it on the way out, around 10:30, they gave me some for free. We departed the place after winning the claw machine.

The streets of Isla Vista were empty at this point. The neighborhood's reputation as the site of Deltopia, the Elliot Rodger shooting, and infrequent but deadly cliffside misadventures and sexual assaults had over the years fully rearranged the holiday calendar in accordance with police curfews. It was clear something had gone on earlier–unusual trash piles, trash fire burn marks on the road, and depopulated tableau vivant of aborted frat parties remained on the many lawns. I loved this neighborhood because the bulk of the population lived in homes with yards, lending a slight dignity and holistic air to the ribald spectacles that occurred there.

It often inspires me to think that the light on Elliot Rodger’s face in his infamous car vlogs is the same unbelievable sunset that I had, over the years, been anointed in many times. I wonder how many other people sent cosmic torturous waves of gloating energy through that kiss of that sunset by having sex during those exact moments under the same cosmic light. I don’t wish this, it merely occurred to me.

It's so literary in the worst way to think some trite nothing like that and announce it. It's the kind of thing that makes me very sick of ideas. Lately I’m on this kick of hating ideas, ideas being a mistake. I’ll say that sometimes. “Ideas were a mistake.” It's pretty dumb especially in this context, but what if somebody with pull decided I was right?

We brought our container of mozzarella sticks and Jack and Cokes down further from Juno’s old apartment past a New Age triangular church, which sat behind a vegetable garden with a pride-rainbow sign it shared with the Unitarian church: “GOD IS STILL SPEAKING.” The sky was starlit and increasingly black as it neared the coast. The middle of the street is the best place to walk, especially slowly. I observed a few flags and remembered my father’s, which my sister and I had in previous adolescent years demanded he not fly on the Fourth while we still lived in the house. I had since softened on this policy. Many of the houses were just hanging over the edge of the bluffs that dropped off to the beach, and our routes were restricted to shaded alleyways that drove tunnel-like into the increasingly white-noisy oceanward darkness. Instead of the beach below, the many staircases down the bluff descended directly into the high tide, which crashed theatrically against the stones and soaked the stairs. We all agreed it was really cool. From the near bottom of the stairs we caught a glimpse of fireworks coming off the pier some miles away at Goleta Beach. In the other direction was an oil rig that was constantly glowing gold off the coast to the north by night, and contained at least as much if not as rare an enchantment to me as the fireworks. By now it was near midnight and the moon was roughly equidistant and west-pointing between the two other light monuments. Our path toward it had made a sort of sign of the cross.

I briefly thought-exercised about these three lights, and considered if I went into the dark water by way of the stair’s invitation, whose shore would I land on of the three? And what might it suggest?

Goleta beach fireworks barge

The oil rig

The moon

Taking these sorts of bets, or bets at all, seems central to a life of faith, at least in a faith where proof of faith is important. I had decided a while before that I was living one of those. The whole enterprise of gambling and going under and emerging someplace is lifelike, especially in the life and afterlife of the Bible. It naturally follows life, and explains the sin of suicide, which I do not personally believe should be a sin, but I am not the boss. However, it makes a degree of sense to consider it such when it is like pulling out of a bet. Going into the sea in hopes of landing upon one of three lights was surely a suicide though, unless(?)

It was about this point in the train of thought I forgot my Denny’s takeout container on the stairs. I concluded finally that a walk into the ocean that was the result of a staircase leading into the ocean could not possibly be a suicide in the eyes of God. Imagine I nodded to myself like a cartoon character and carried on.

I couldn’t help trying to photograph the whole event and got some pretty good pictures. We returned to ground and went staircase to staircase by way of the street parallel to the bluff. The first stretch contained a tile mural of brightly-colored dolphins and other aquatic creatures frolicking under an arch that adjoined two lower-story parking places. The staircase here was occupied by other strangers who might’ve been fucking. We moved on. Between this and the next we passed a skunk very closely who was rummaging the trash and Juno shouted back and forth to a guy on a bike, some music thing I couldn’t decode. They hadn’t known each other but had found this unclear thing in common. I have an insecurity about references I don’t understand and people who seem to hoard them. A prideful and bitter part of my brain likes to think that Reference People construct a mental library as a way to offset and discredit people with my natural, though memory-challenged, gift of looking at and liking things as they appear to me. The next staircase was walled off by caution tape and the stairs were hanging undone high above the water. We passed the barrier and walked out on it. I got the best photos of the other two here. We stopped for a cigarette. Alexis vaped the only vape flavor I like, which is supposedly unflavored but has this harsh, clean menthol taste. It's some off-brand that looks less like a Tamagotchi in its shape than the ones most people use. A no-nonsense piece of equipment. After this last stair, the street opened into a field that adjoined a vaguely-bordered conservation area that was free to walk at this time of night. We sat again, briefly, on a concrete bench near the edge of the bluff facing roughly toward the still-lit oil rig. I have a memory of this same spot, this memory takes place after the fact, but for the purpose of this account, we will say I recalled it at this moment.

On this same bench after the same walking route with a different mixture of the same friends, I was shown an astronomy app that would locate and assemble the constellations as you pointed your phone at them. We were slightly more drunk this time and we got a good twenty minutes of entertainment out of trying to guess what stars were connected to which, and

then confirming. Back eastward over a distant row of houses, maybe a dozen lights lined up together were ascending at a gentle diagonal, sweetly twinkling, toward the upper sky from north to southwest. The whole scene became sort of Neolithic. There were no lights around, and we were between a field and the sea, witnessing something none of us had seen or anticipated. This was a constellation like what must’ve invented constellations, a flying serpent of distant lights causing much narrative tension and primeval thought and feeling, of animals among ever larger animals and with limited capabilities, witnessing their vast unalikeness in size and way of being with apprehension. In such a situation, proximity to the herd instinctually holds a degree of importance, perhaps more so or differently than the sorts of novel demi-threats most modern individuals frequently anticipate in the dark or outdoors. Nobody else was out that night to see it with us and when I later asked other friends living in town they had missed it as well. How is one meant to deal with something they alone get to experience?

The trail of lights was a set of SpaceX satellites being launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

I remembered this and thought that in this way, on that night, the Elon Musk global project had triumphed over mere membership or actorship in the culture, and momentarily brought to me some unnamed sense. This sense perhaps is named power, though from the perspective of the relatively powerless observer such power is softer, glowing, in a way that is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but mighty, and, if it is allowed, wondrous. If I was destroyed by some cosmic beam from them that night, even the moment just before would’ve perhaps still been wondrous. Though in truth observers like me were the students, teachers, artists and viewers of this power, and to us it belonged, I supposed.

I looked out from this memory back away from the bench at the oil rig, and then, in my imagination, at the fireworks that had finished bursting in the other direction. In this spectral, unacted mental glance my eyes passed the moon between the two man-made events of light. The moon and the stars must’ve given birth in the mind to the firework and the streetlamp, in a holistic, made-up timeline. And now the three of us, the moon, the firework, the oil rig, and the American calendar, had signed the cross out to sea. In a conversation a few nights ago on the topic of America, I said I liked the people and the land. I hear the weather is better some other places. Many people live only on one land, I feel I must insist to you. All of us standing here tonight were among those people.

We continued to walk increasingly into brush and dirt paths, with the last of our Jack and Cokes, toward the wildlife refuge beach, which might still be above water. We made a game of drunkenly walking into the bushes and reemerging to scare each other or make the sound of pursuing feet behind us. These Boy Scout games led us tentatively past the small office building that blocked off the beach. It was an office in the granola sense, perhaps more of a station with an overnight-abandoned truck parked outside and a few informational placards on native birds, many of whom, as a few holdout online infographics had informed me earlier that day, might be disoriented or driven mad by the festivities of the holiday. I never actually heard the phrase “driven mad,” in the online descriptions of what would happen to them, but I’m quite sure it is what happens at least sometimes. Why would they not say the birds were driven mad? Why would they not say people are driven mad? There surely are things in this world that drive people mad, spectacular abominations of invention, cruelty, excess, knowledge, demonic winged jungles of things that block out the sun or explode the coolness of the night into berserk color. It was strange and sad to me that people consistently announcing the doom of all things never saw fit to use such language.

After our procession to the beach I retired for my second or third indecent public piss break of the evening among the rocky nooks of the hill on which sat the wildlife office. By this time the entire beach was lit brightly and bluely by the moon and we looked straight out from the coast toward the oil rig. It was just the two lights now, the moon and the rig, white-blue and white-yellow. They recalled to me my favorite shot from Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, where the titular rogue planet sits side by side with the moon in the sky above a palatial courtyard, observed by frightened and awed onlookers, as a non-diegetic orchestra plays a part of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a favorite of my aspiring opera singer ex. There is a brief, complicated, doomed glory. Not quite right, not doomed. I realized I am tired too of things being doomed. (What if) There’s no doom, (what if) not for me or us. Or maybe not being doomed could be enough to wail and fret over in itself. A love that can only end in death, Tristan and Isolde’s, which would be ruined by its consummation or is maybe consummate only in death is perhaps Von Trier’s joke about two planets coming together, do not correct me on this if you know the real reason. I don’t care. I prefer this idiotic idea of planets kissing to anything that could go on in the mortal drama of people with cars and emails, and especially more than that annoying filmmaker’s own life. The love potion and the poison of real unsightly romance, of being the raw material that puts rodent asses in seats to watch the owl kill the kestrel for flying too close to her bell tower and then the sound of the marmot calling the spectacle corny and problematic to the squirrel. I think for a second that of all ideas, the worst ideas might’ve been the ideas about ways to live and love and be happy without killing and dying. And Tristan and Isolde attempted no great conquest or colossal feat of strength, or magnum opus of world-changing art, and it was not for this they were persecuted. The life that demanded prevention by the king and his men, by dramatic imposition of psychotropic poison and planets clashing with planets, was-is a life that in most part would consist of going to work and folding laundry, and sitting in the dark gazing at the stars, forgetting doom and destroying it with the banality of not-evil.

We sat closely on the beach for a while and then went back into town, to the car and to bed. The tide came even higher to embrace the Denny’s to-go container, abandoned at the step, which in its innocence washed up on the shores of the moon the next morning after offering generously of itself to the nocturnal fishes and seabirds. When the sun kissed the earth first, the consummation was eternal death, and it then rose on America the day after her birthday. Death rose and I rose eventually with it, with a new happy memory.