prompt: show, title: as above, so below in "the next big thing" flash fiction

California’s earthquakes have nothing to do with the curse, of course, earthquakes are just plate tectonics reminding us there are far weirder things lying beneath than what looms above. We’re all on alert for danger from the skies but the unknown-unknowns below are usually what get us.

Most of the tremors I experienced in Los Angeles didn’t even register to me as earthquakes. At my sister-in-law’s house, I’d feel the rumblings of tractor-trailers making short cuts on Victory, attempting to circumvent the One Oh One’s gridlock, so often I wouldn’t think anything was an earthquake. The brouhaha was just some driver trying to get local avocados to Albertsons, so he could afford his car payment. It’s easy to assume the best or worst, whichever most jives with a personal narrative, especially when magic’s urging you to think in those exact narcissistic ways.

These days, they call this ‘Main Character Syndrome’ and the Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone is its most powerful vector. You get so caught up in your own wants, you forget the world doesn’t revolve around you. People exist only as extras. You’re on the main show, and in that lead role.

Once you start to believe you’re the center of the universe, invariably everything starts getting wildly minimized or wildly exaggerated, depending how either would fit what you believe the hero-arc of your life. One hang-nail can feel like the end of the world when you have a case of Main Character Syndrome but also an earthquake that didn’t affect you in any meaningful way can just fade back into the distant thrashing of noisy trucks. If that earthquake had mattered, it would’ve knocked a sentimentally-appropriate photo off your wall and broken it symbolically. Maybe a beloved deceased relative? Maybe your recent ex? Whatever makes you feel special!

But as with The Curse, if something comes and snaps you out of it, you’re left to struggle with how differently the world works without that filter, how blinkered your life actually was. How little some hang-nail meant, how much the earthquakes really hurt others. Suddenly, the focus corrects and you no longer see things as through a cell-phone dimly, instead from face to face.

‘California tumbles into the sea,’ Steely Dan states in ‘My Old School’, ‘that’ll be the day I go back to Annandale.’ ‘And if California slides into the ocean like the mystics ‘n’ statistics say it will,’ Warren Zevon (who Frank roadied for in the Seventies) sings in ‘Desperadoes Under the Eaves’, ‘I predict this hotel will be standing until I pay my bill.’ Our debts always coming due.

Those rock-and-roll singers, maybe they’re all just crazy enough or high enough to occasionally peer through the haze of mystic self-involvement, just long enough to write a song or two about it before returning to their yachts. The rest of us are stuck learning the hard way, our dreams not just denied but also disproven and debunked. Only disenchantment can pry our eyes, I’m afraid.