I'm Alice In Wonderland

Ever since that day when I had gotten to wander around the red carpet before the Oscars, watching golden statues being unveiled from large plastic wrappers and heaps of rolled-up carpet being laid out for the stars, I had come to think of my life as being just like Alice in Wonderland. This particular epiphany had come to me courtesy of Walt Disney. Tim Burton’s 3-D version of the film was playing at Disney's El Capitain Theater, which overlooked the Oscar ceremony walk-up on Hollywood Boulevard. A poster for the film, showing some weird-looking characters with green hair, looked down as the statues stood there naked. It was with this Alice theme in mind one recent Sunday morning, that I left my beach house, which stood next to the Santa Monica Pier, and wandered down to the shoreline in search of some wisdom of the Alice in Wonderland kind. I found it on Venice Board Walk, which I had also been thinking about and declared to be a place where the chaos of life is manifested in the most colorful of forms. Think one-legged hoola-hop dancers, pot-smoking doctors and artists of the tres bizarre kind. There was even a store selling Native American paraphernalia, which I walked inside. Instead of the scruffy-looking student wearing Hiawatha T-shirts, I imagined Indians dancing through the store to the sounds of the powerful pipe music, which came from a CD called nothing other than Drum Sex! Back outside on the walkway, I sought the wisdom of a tarot card reader who spent half of the session figuring out how to get her son from London to Liverpool by train once she heard my British accent. Still, she did tell me that I had managed successfully to slay some dragons in recent weeks. I did hope she was right as the guru had been after some very dragon-like women recently, and I didn’t much like having them around. (I had struck them off all of his class lists.) That afternoon I wandered to the pool, and seeings as it was Spring Break there were lots of children swimming. There was also a man who had asked me out on several dates. When I said at the top of my voice, so that he could hear me over the squeals, that I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to screw him, he said, “hush.” And then he said, “Do meet my wife.” From there I thought that it was best to go to dance class at the Brazilian studio in Ocean Park. Then I went up to the guru’s who had gone to Tokyo, and watered his plants. I practiced my new samba moves in his evergreen garden under a full moon, which loomed large in the sky, and then I laid down under the stars and breathed into the cosmos, just like he had told me. Then I went home to slay more dragons. These particular dragons happened to be my landlords who had said that they wanted to move back into my little studio home. I looked out the window at the most blissful view I knew, which was of the distant waves washing into shore, beyond the tall palm trees, standing under the stars shining all silver in the deep blue sky. The waves were lit up in a luminous turquoise and then green for a moment, by the reflection of the big wheel, which was hidden from view on the Santa Monica Pier. And I imagined for a moment that I was in South Pacific.