The Search for the Big Rock Candy Mountain

A quest for purpose in a meaningless world.

“The only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay.”

The fields I played on growing up are now full of vulgar, new build houses. The horror. This must be how the Native Americans felt. One minute you're a noble Apachi brave, the next you're outside Netto doing poppers in the back of an unlicensed taxi.

I have a photo of myself as a child in my Grandad's greenhouse. The sense of wonder is palpable. Gold trickles down the vines to kiss my pudgy fingers. I can feel the sun through the glass and smell the fat, ripe tomatoes and the moist compost. I really can't describe the unfettered, visceral fucking wonder of the thing.

Suddenly I'm finger-banging forty. I'm trapped in an ideological war for a reality that no longer exists and I'm considering becoming a wizard.

You never hear of the wonder anymore. Some say it died with the beat poets. Or that Bob Dylan keeps it in his attic. Others say it never existed at all. But I like to think it went to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Many who go there never come back. Those that do never really recover. There is no wonder to be found under a pile of chemicals or up a strangers vagina. Believe me I’ve looked.

Back when I was trying to shag my way into the middle class, I was still labouring under the illusion that loneliness is an affliction cured by people. So I went looking for them. People like me, born into a monotone world. Set out together looking to fill our bellies with colour.

There are few more audacious forces than the hubris of youth. It took me to a time and space where I had no business. Where for an arresting, fleeting nanosecond all care suspended in zero gravity. Baked in euphoria and enveloped in hopeless existential bliss.

I’d stolen fire from the gods. For this transgression I would be eternally punished to an insatiable hunger for more. Every time I flew to the sun, I fell a little further.

Mortals aren’t meant for spectral ecstasy. So the gods instead created an illusive, unattainable wonder to torment us.

They gave us a haunted, foreboding wind the afternoon before Halloween. Hearing that perfect song, in that perfect place, with that perfect person.

That’s the fucking wonder! We're talking real fucking greenhouse tomatoes here. How quickly we distract from it.

Now we’re digital primates and outrage is a widely accepted currency. People don’t seem to remember life before the rile and rage. The histrionic primal screaming of grown children deafens everything. Endless character assassinations and summary executions. Each in bondage to the psychotic notion that we are somehow accountable to the internet.

It leaves me longing for a time when the countercultural sought to rediscover wonder through untameable expression. Where are those artists now? Those feral, bohemian savants that drank paint thinner and spent half their time howling at the moon? Frequenters of Parisian brothels and lunatic asylums? Where are they now? They must have gone to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

I see the peril that faces artists now as an omnipresent challenge to mortal kind. To measure those that wither against those who come out swinging dick. That seek out wonder, immaculate and profane. The pursuit of transcendence in a world devoid of it. To redefine what it even fucking means to be human.

Trump’s sweeping victory in the United States has flickered a spark of hope where before there were none. Breaking the inertia of the war-weary vanguard. Combatants at the front of a choking reality.

I’m not a religious man, but I believe in a soul. A marshmallow like substance at the bottom of a bucket of used needles. Malnourished from years in the trenches of the culture war.

A war that is only just beginning, set against lives that are beginning to wain.

The Fates reward the audacious and punish mortal hubris. For years chaos would simply find me. Superstitiously unable to speak above a gentle whisper, so not to give cause for madness to hunt me down.

Just thinking about it hard enough could manifest a self-destructive pandemonium that placed me in the arse-end of nowhere without a minute’s thought at how I was ever getting home. All the time I was looking for the wrong fucking thing.

The pursuit of wonder is gift enough. But I was a hungry ghost, fool enough to turn paradise into a prison where everything was never enough.

Nevertheless, along the way, I witnessed some painfully beautiful things. What a fool I was to disregard them.

There’s a tattoo on my chest that reads No God Can Stop A Hungry Man. I got it in Latin because I’m a classy bastard. It reminds me that I’ve been kept alive for a reason that isn’t being a little bitch on the internet.

In a world full of erasure and the molestation of language, they can take everything from you but they can’t take your soul. First, you have to let go.

I want to feel how I felt in that fucking greenhouse before everything went south. When the winter never ended. Before I woke up in a world where everyone was terminally bothered.

To feed my soul stuffed olives and free-range jazz. I want to know what a Chilean fountain smells like. To run the bulls in Pamplona. To receive a cavity search in a Vietnamese airport.

I need to find the biggest fucking sky under the sun and lay under that big, blue bastard. When I get there nobody better speak. Not one goddamned word. I want to grow my hair and stand atop a windy moor. My massive cock waving in the gale.

I want to lay on my death bed full of tubes and morphine knowing I’ve saturated every fibre of my being with a higher power that transcends all my worldly bullshit. Then die peacefully with a smile on my face, before evacuating my bowels and let someone else deal with it.

But for the time being here I squat. Choking on the grim bureaucracy of recovery. Clearing my ruinous drug debts, being a colossal cunt and trying not succumb to scurvy.

The lone survivor of a war at the foot of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.