prompt: wake, title: and you were there, and you, and you in "the next big thing" flash fiction

I mean, I’m hardly the first person to notice something fundamentally uncanny at the intersection of Sunset and Gower, the Gower Gulch strip mall or Denny’s there. To the spot where the actual ranch hands came in search of a little side cash as extras but ended up transubstantiated into Film Cowboys instead. Where fact sublimated into fiction. Where the real was assumed into dreams.

Echoes of this recognition are strewn all over the popular arts, where some creator or another saw it, consciously or subconsciously, and the idea found its way to the screen, into song. David Lynch’s film about a young starlet disabused of her fantasies by the truth of getting into pictures “Mulholland Drive” had a scene there, or anyway, used it as an exterior for a similar chain diner in the exact same place. The video for Aimee Mann’s song about trying to make your money off the entertainment industry then getting out before it ruins you “Calling It Quits” used the façade of the Japanese noodle bar at Gower Gulch as an opening exterior, similarly. Hell, when Frank’s (so he claims) former boss Warren Zevon wrote his epic on hungover disillusion in Hollywood, “Desperados Under The Eaves, he ended the song looking away down Gower, with the regretful tone of a soldier remembering some war where his side lost. Others, others far more notable and talented than I, saw this and noted it too. But as I am not them, am only myself, must note it too.

Whether this residue is Actual Magic or something more mundanely written into the American collective pop-cultural subconscious, I could not say. I am, of course, just a half-clever washout telling you about a conversation with the last sasquatch, there in the failing heart of Dreamland.

But if you have to ask me, I think that it’s something like the imperfections in the bottom of a champagne glass that allows all those pretty bubbles to spew forth. They put little flaws in the bottoms of those glasses, you see, so a gas trapped in a liquid has places to coalesce and form into pockets that can bubble out so uniformly, so spectacularly. Scientists call it “nucleation”, same reason you put a stick into a microwaved drink so the air coming out escapes slowly as bubbles in the cooking process, so that it doesn’t all explode at once when you agitate it when you pull it out. You add some kind of foreign body so it happens in the way that best suits you.

Maybe Sunset and Gower is just a nucleation point for all that energy, that exploitation, the machine chewing up fantasies to get the rich richer and the pictures made. But then, in that metaphor, are our fantasies the bubbles churning up to dissipate or are our lives the bubbles tickling wealthy throats as they fade away? If you devote your whole life to dreams, what happens to you on thae day when you inevitably wake up?