Apologia for Alienation
By: Adam Andros Aronovich
Tags: Gonzo, Los Angeles, Street Photography, Existentialism, Stream Of Consciousness

Soda Pop and Ice-Cream, Venice (IG: @adamandros)

“…Othering the other while knowing there are no others…”

Venice Beach is without a doubt my favourite place in L.A. It is, probably, one of the best places in the world to practice the sublime art of people watching, camera at the hip, hunting for a visually interesting slice of unfiltered, raw humanity, people being people, icky and cute, precious and mundane all at once.

Better still, sitting on a grimy bench letting the novel repertoire of comic and tragic ephemeral characters unfold before my eyes like an endless stream of product placements, vaguely familiar faces flickering in my mind, mumbling their lines and leaving no trace behind. The ultimate catwalk and fashion show, God’s own creations, upgraded, degraded, re-imagined and irremediably branded walking advertisements in the beating, bleeding heart of consumerist culture.

And even though there are only two or three meters of dirty, scorching concrete as buffer space, I am usually able to create an artificial and precarious emotional and intellectual distance between myself and the Others; They’re all Non-playable Characters in my voyeuristic, cowardly pleasure. Now and then somebody will try to talk to me, momentarily breaking the spell and forcing me out of my solipsistic fantasy.

People mostly just want my spare change, or they want to sell me drugs, or to “give” me a CD with their crappy trap music. Today, they like my Nike golden sneakers: “Thanks, they were a gift from my wife.” The more genuine they seem, the more suspicious I am. At the end of the day, I know that everybody’s just looking for an excuse to break the artificiality of that distance and try to connect with another heart.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, I had more patience. I’d talk to anyone and everyone made a point to connect with the vagrant, unhinged and hungry ghosts of the Open World, the refugees of a broken healthcare system that never gave two flying fucks about the human soul, whatever that is.

These days, communication feels like a miracle. My empathy and compassion are cosily curled up in an insulated and padded pocket of my heart and most people can pretty much sense that I have neither the patience nor an authentic desire to bare my soul to a raving stranger just across from a fucking greasy ripoff of a corndog, pizza and soft-serve stand.

The audacity to yank me off of my self-absorbed silence and solitude. Move along buddy; I honestly just want to check my phone and pretend that you’re not here. These days, we all tend to mistake authenticity for exhibitionism anyway; the need to be heard seems to be trending. Well here’s me being hashtag authentic, mindlessly nodding and staring into the void.

I don’t think I’m a misanthrope, although the naive optimism of my youth has definitely evolved into a healthy cynicism in regards to the human condition. I do very much love people and humans and cities and stories, particularly when they move along rapidly and never look back in their muscle shirts and sundresses and sunglasses holding leashes to small ugly French bulldogs, puggles and maltipoos who take CBD oil and go to acupuncture twice a week.

A dude with a huge orange iguana on a string walks past and a few ladies giggle and take pictures of it. The guy smiles and you can tell the iguana is so over it. How can anyone not hold humanity in their hearts with tenderness and sympathy, as we facepalm in awe and exasperation at the obscenity of it all?

I guess that the one thing that remains a constant in my outlook is the glowing awareness of just how fucking weird we humans are. No matter where I am or what I do or how old I get I can’t seem to ever shake that fascination with the sheer strangeness of it all. How can anyone ever hope to feel fully at home, inhabiting this mind-boggling meat suit, with its infinitely complex circuitry of nerves and synapses and ears and noses and toes, cellulite and facial hair and eyes that inexplicably gaze and harken back all the way to the beginning of space-time, just protons, neutrons and electrons reshuffled like a bad poker hand.

And yet behind those hideous $900 Ray-Bans, under those cosmetically enhanced eyelids, that inevitable and eternal pair of eyes; we slide past the cringe and swoooosh, out goes all the judgment and we instantly remember that each one of us freaks is nothing but a self-aware battery cell with its dendrites buried deep inside a living, sentient rock orbiting a burning star. A lump of organic, rapidly decaying stardust with bad anxiety. “You just need to do some breathwork and connect with your body”. Give me a fucking break.

For me, that’s the anchor — the absurdity of it all, the awareness of how funny and magnificent and idiotic and ridiculous and utterly, hopelessly sacred it all is — whatever it is — , the sacred and the mundane, Maya, the illusion, the computer simulation, or the malignant, perverted nightmare of a demiurge, or the gift of a benevolent God looking down on His creation.

As long as we are here, as long as things keep weird, who the fuck cares?!

That smug asshole and his leashed orange iguana pass by, the cretaceous creature dumbing around with its gelid reptile dead stare. Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my favorite poets, once wrote:

“…The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.”

Long live this race of absurd talking monkeys, I think as I stand up to leave with the southern californian afternoon sun bleeding into my eyes, blinded by the pungent smells of the stale french fries cart and a mexican radio station blasting on the boardwalk and just a little to my left, full throttle in a bright pink scooter that makes me smirk and roll my eyes a half-naked, skinny oiled-up dude holding a tiny chihuhahua with a tiny knitted vest and I cant help but think, who would win in a fight, that dumb dog, or the orange iguana?