prompt: place, title: reflexive pronouns in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Just to be clear, none of this is to say I hate Los Angeles. That’s far from the case. It’s beautiful. It might be the most gorgeous place under all the blues of heaven. But that’s sort of the problem.
Beauty’s pounced at, placed upon unstable pedestals, coveted, hoarded, despoiled and exploited.

Hollywood’s too beautiful than for us greedy little apes to not get really weird about it. The fault isn’t with the walk of the stars, dear Brutus, it’s firmly with us. Magic’s never as powerful as the graspingness of fools. Grasping fools like me. With our petty short-term machinations, mundane or magic, mystic or statistic, for vengeance or avarice, we ruin places like Los Angeles. The land isn’t cursed after all, nor the air, nor in what little water hasn’t been consumed by the exurbs. Us. People curse LA. We’re the curse. Wanting more than we need. Wanting to be known more than wanting to do good work where we can, when we can, if we can. This horrible fantasy of infinite conquests and unearned laurels, born in Greece, then transmitted to the seven hills of Rome, then Londinium, through old New York that was once New Amsterdam until finally settling in Laurel Canyon’s parched ravine. Two continents scoured over by rich old idiots trying to accumulate so much that others might believe them as gods. Then scoured again by poor young idiots following behind, thinking themselves merely temporarily-embarrassed rich idiots, just one more step away from god-hood than the foci of their pennyante confidence-man idolatries. The American Dream.

I’d hoped the yawning Pacific might finally quarantine this contagion, our ancient delusions that men become immortal if they’re famous enough, that Neolithic heart-sickness named in England as “The Protestant Work Ethic”. But gaze across that azured glass to all the sweatshops churning blood into cell-phones and MacMansions in China. I fear the sea isn’t quite deep enough to stem those tides of false achievements, counterfeit gods and broken dreams. But their origins aren’t in any place, they’re in ambiguously-enchanted schmucks and recovering-narcissist idiots like me.

Los Angeles isn’t the breezy electric ladyland of Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story” where all you need do is hang in there until destiny floats in on The Santa Anas. L.A. isn’t the vapid magnet drawing the girl you believe you own away into the arms of the empty-headed boys who play guitars, like in Woody Allen’s sick fantasia “Annie Hall”, either. Just a mirror that reflects whatever baggage you stowed away on that bus from East Possumtits, Iowa. In your dreams, you see yourself as in a mirror dimly. Blinded by the glitz and the glamours, you will instead see yourself, face-to-face.

But that Los Angeles might simply be beautiful palm trees beside an endless ocean. But that we might not be our expectations of ourselves, rather just people living lives, just humans being. If we could only love ourselves as much as who we were “Supposed To Be”, this would be Eden.