Angel's Ride

Part 3

It's hard to believe now that the whole cause célèbre out on the West coast about this time was over an underground theme park-a goddamn ride? But out there, somewhere under the dry foothills it did actually exist, and impressively-if you were to believe the press touting its astronomical statistics: "A million miles of fiber optic lines . . . state of the art robotics . . .holographic people and creatures interacting with visitors in virtual reality. Authentic Grecian warships, careening down a river with rapids and caverns. . .The River Styx is alive and churning below you . . . vibrating and coaxing all souls above. . ."

Unfortunately, due to Crash II people had recently become distracted and little-interested in the ongoing efforts to complete the massive project. They paid little attention to the thousands of laborers, technicians and designers who disappeared underground each day, east of the city for almost three years. The epicenter of the region where the ride lay silently seething below the surface, was no more than a wasteland in 2013. In happier pre-Crash times, this eastern boundary of the Los Angeles basin would have gradually morphed into just more malls and knotted ribbons of freeway-expected fare for the unwieldy organism LA had become.

Few people really knew, or perhaps now remember, when the ride opened to showcase what had actually been created under those arid badlands. I too, was one of those who in those early days of the ride's inauguration, could not have told you with any certainty what it was that inhabited those scores of miles in tunnels. And yet apparently, the mythological realm was amazing as the media came on board, touting it's engineered brilliance as the handiwork of people educated by California's greatest institutions-Cal Tech, Stanford and UC Berkeley. That various-leveled complex which honey-combed the California chaparral above it, was once home to rattlesnakes, rabbits, and weekend armies of three-wheelers. But what was soon to be going on in that techno-underworld of Jason and his Argonauts-pitted against harpies, sirens, sorceresses, Scylla, and even the great living whirlpool, Charybdis herself-was far more dangerous than the poisonous reptiles or loose-cannon adolescents on motor bikes who once frequented the area in healthier, economically sound times.

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I'm not sure why I'm recalling all this for you now. Certainly not for any posterity I want to keep. Perhaps only as a painful celebration of what we were once capable of creating as a culture of dreamers. But today those times of reverie, that season of vision, seem all but gone. Maybe it's just a wake-up call to a now-fatigued and distracted public to whom the grandeur of The River Styx, as an ideal, was soon corrupted beyond any moral acceptability and quickly put to rest. Most notably after the Crash, when the economy went drastically south, people became more concerned with enough food for their families than any engaging entertainment. Yet, the world of advertising-a field I still labored in as a photographer, was hard-pressed to die. People I knew, however, were more worried about protection from killer-gangs on the surface of the street than with any theme park that pedaled imagination somewhere deep below it.

It was this same public that grew to remember bitterly there had been some invisible, governmental project which took a very long time and a lot of money to complete. To them The River Styx was all just a doomed initiative, the purpose of which had long lost its relevancy. People began to ask, as the park finally opened and the promotional tactics ratcheted up to speed, what such an attraction's usefulness was in a world with little phantasmagorical yearnings. It became obvious that The River Styx would never transmit any of its wisdom through metaphor to a public which might have once been receptive to it back when it was conceived. As this mythological nary world of symbols-possibly depicting our own present plight--had become too lofty and of no merit to a now restless and desperate state. its legendary themes would no longer be seen as valid allusions, even though, perhaps, they were foreordained or even intended for us by a more ancient and wiser people to see them.

And so the accepted zeitgeist when Angel and I first metin 2014 was that ourworld was in a moribund state. It was, in fact, economically bleeding to death, and we, without any relevancy to past ages or any connectedness to a lost aesthetic, had begun to die with it. In less than a decade after the first economic shock waves of 2008, society significantly devolved and began to turn nihilistically inward. Tragically, Angel was compelled to enlist in the campaign to bring this ailing public to The River Styx for a profit and at any cost. Unfortunately, her own personal aims to participate were no loftier or sincere.

My own hamartia in all of this was that I fell in love with this young woman. And through her I quickly began to actually believe in this 'myth' of a myth. It was with Angel's obsession about the ride--this new amazing thene park, that I became swept up as well in the anticipation and great diversion it promised. She seemed to be the quintessential survivor of our times by bringing me to the gates of this underworld, a place which I too became enthralled to enter. But her actions, and how River Styx had been hijacked by its greedy promoters, only now bear witness to how such desperate times could have navigated us to such desperate ends. Through her and the machinations of the ride itself, I would become the victim of a crime which has yet to be defined in our own age.

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