“Suicide Awareness Month”
“Awareness Month”
I hate that. How do you stay aware of something for a whole month? Los Angeles is not good at this. Unless it’s Halloween.
The year was 2018, and everything felt new. Ripe, aching for consumption. Begging for uncalculated risks. Everything was a haphazard discovery, a new epiphany. Our identities were malleable and ever-changing. We assembled in small armies of Chelsea boots and Saint Laurent. Malnourished, not by choice, nor injections, but by overspending pocket money from disapproving, scolding parents. The only consequences were social. Not virtual social, but uncomfortably, fleshy, social. If you wanted to control the narrative, you had to attend the party.
Thus, we spent most waking hours at night, in betrayal of the Sun, moving with a rebellious camaraderie, fighting the monotonous late-stage capitalist hellscape that we had inherited without wanting. We were stars, waiting to be discovered. We were orphans, looking for generous benefactors and fat-breasted mothers. We were aliens, terminally unique and ahead of our time. We were sick and traded medicine, administering each other tricky concoctions, comprised of whatever ingredients were left lying around. We were brothers, bound not by blood, but by purpose, to engage in a delirious fight against the dying of the Los Angeles celebrity light, a conquest for eternal notoriety. We, above all else, were artists.
Happiness equated to access, and in clans of coyotes, we engaged in a nightly game of defeating impossible odds and acquiring seats at impossible tables. Our components had more seniority, but we had far less to lose. Young, dumb, and full of rum. Our stomping grounds were disheveled hotel suites on Sunset Boulevard, sour and rotting smoking patios, decaying canyon castles, and someone else’s famous father's mansion. We chain-smoked for ambiance, not because we needed to. We fucked because we felt like it, not because we needed to. We were absurd, we were different, we were better and wiser than our parents, because we had defeated the odds, and attended the brand dinner.
Emotions were secondary to this dragon chase, this insatiable desire to make it beyond our known realities, the hero’s journey, the test before the ultimate boon: unanimous acceptance, legendary story arcs, fame, love, and money.
But as artists, we learned a level of nonchalance, a tricky skill- to dismiss the very thing we fought for.
And in our blissful ignorance, in our conquest for clout, our desire to mock the impenetrable membrane of Los Angelean cool, we eventually unknowingly fell under it, were penetrated by it, turning from the very brethren who had enacted as our stepping stones in an attempt to reserve our spaces. We mocked the smoke and mirrors and then sponged up the smoke and mirrors, until we became mirages of ourselves, diminishing one another to anecdotes and fairy-tales of getting too fucked up, competitively collecting followings who would believe our respective narratives.