Once upon a time a boy came to a place called Hollywood. He loved that place, with it's factories of dreams that littered the land like multiple Wonka Chocolate Kingdoms. Crazy that one wasn't enough. He loved the history, the mythology...even the part about the girl who jumped off the sign. His life was never that tragic, and never would be. His life was more simple. But he loved the stories. The stories were where he lived...or rather, dreamed of living...you see he realized one day, that he never really wanted to live in this place called Hollywood...he came here so he could live multiple lives...a small town fisherman, an international spy, a simple man who loves his wife, a broken man who runs the world... a pilot, a conductor, a rock star, a wizard....a wanderer...The factories were meant to be portals to so many possibilities...But now they stand, just looming like petrified giants who once held magic...or truly like Wonka's factory, as he pays a buck for a twix bar and a fantasy that a golden ticket will be inside the wrapper.
That said, sometimes science will take over our dreams...evolution, adaptation...Maybe it was science, maybe it was the spirit, maybe it was both...But these portals that he dreamed of started to appear in other places...his mind created them...in painted walls on the side streets of downtown lala, in billboards selling clothes that fit no one...even in waves that homeless people joked would soon be washing them to arizona. Then one day, He stood by one of those walls, looking like he was getting into deep meditation with a graffiti version of stone faced Buster Keaton...a bus came by...and he was gone...some said he got on the bus...some said he simply vanished...into a portal.
I heard this story, and I guess it's just a story. One that I will never really know the truth of what happened. But as a fellow dreamer, on this day, I think I want to imagine that he escaped to one life, one dream...maybe a small town somewhere on the water...Where he learns to sail and takes people on tours of the bay...and in the evening he writes his thoughts and they become books that he gives away for free at the farmers market...and he falls in love with a girl he once walked by years ago and didn't have the guts to say hello to her but now he found her again...as if Nicholas Sparks wrote his life?... thinking of him this way gives me peace this morning, as I walk down Melrose avenue...looking for the portals he may have left behind...wondering If i should choose a thousand lives...or only one.
