Preparing For The Los Angeles Olympics

With less than four years to go, Los Angeles is starting preparations for the 2028 Olympics. The XXXIV games, or 'LA28' to locals, is set to take place across the city, and there’s already a buzz in the air. This is partly due to thousands of buzzsaws cutting through wood, rebar and concrete at construction sites in every borough. From preparing arenas for the future athletes, to getting down to the nuts and bolts of how L.A. worked as a metropolitan area, the Mayor's Office has opened up a special Olympics Department just for the event. As I enter the offices there's a certain kind of excitement at what lay in store for the billion dollar sporting explosion, whilst also managing the extreme poverty in the city by ensuring it was displaced and hidden from the prying eyes of sport tourists.

Donny Glacky is no ordinary five year old. Not only can he run really fast, he's also the Head of Transport and Logistics at the Olympics Department. He shows me a 3D printed scale model of the city, with his ideas demonstrated in transparent green plastic that curve across the cityscape like a mix between Hot Wheels and Megalopolis. Donny talks excitedly about his plans, pointing out how he needed to make the city car free whilst simultaneously also having space for millions of vehicles. He takes out a toy car from an empty icecream tub filled with other toys, and begins to push it through the miniature city streets, making engine noises or quietly screeching as it turned a corner. I pick out a car from the tub and join in, tucking in my bottom lip and emanating the rising tone of an engine. His car drives over to me.

"Excuse me uh, do you know the way to the Olympic stadium?" He says in a high-pitched voice.

"Oh, I don’t know maybe it’s that way." I say in a low voice.

"Okay, let's go together." He croaks. Our cars then join an onramp to one of Donny's speed roads, driving smoothly over the city on the clear green plastic, before our cars begin to float in the air and begin to fly.

I hit the city streets to find out more. I interview people with my phone on a selfie stick, wearing a large wig beneath a baseball cap, my microphone decorated with the LA28 logo.

"WhatdoyouthinkabouttheOlympics?" I'd say quietly behind people, making them turn around and jump. I interviewed my reflection in a shop window and from the darkness behind the glass there appeared a pale, bald head and it shouted at me to go away. As I walked through the city I saw try outs for the opening ceremony, public auditions for cheerleaders, acrobats, dancers and clowns. I watched a street magician cut his ear off, place it on a velvet pillow and present it to a Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator.

The idea was the whole city would be the opening ceremony, with the Olympic torch carried through its famous streets before the whole city would have a party. Just as Danny Boyle orchestrated the 2012 opening ceremony, California had chosen a director from LA who could handle the highbrow cultural bullshit as well as celebrating the city he was from: Paul Thomas Anderson. And with him come a whole host of ghouls that Hollywood has given birth to: Leonardo DiCaprio and Shia LaBeouf to name but two of the ceaseless discharge of actors that flooded the city for over a century. Beverley Hills, Compton, Long Beach, Santa Monica and many other cities part of the greater Los Angeles County would also represent themselves with special guest stars.

Snoop Dogg would use the Olympic torch to light a giant bong. Stoners will gather round waiting to light joints from the smouldering bucket of weed in the hopes they could keep their own part of the ancient Olympic flame alive, lighting the next joint just as the other would begin to die. In essence this meant they will stop breathing air but smoke for the rest of their lives (or until it went out).

There was an exciting section planned where Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to drive down the LA aqueduct in an open top 18-wheeler, flying the Stars and Stripes and wearing his famous leather jacket from the film Total Recall. The previous governor would then pass the torch to Gavin Newsom, who’ll be running for President by the time the Olympics happen, and will wear a t-shirt that says ‘Do Epic Shit’. If Donald Trump is still alive he'll fire a flamethrower into the sky, painting the air with flames. You may be wondering to yourself, aren’t celebrities some of the most principled people on Earth, and would boycott any opening ceremony where Donald Trump is also taking part? Here’s the thing bozo, the Olympic Games aren’t political at all, and so if Tom Cruise wants to jump off the Hollywood sign in a wingsuit whilst people shoot fireworks at him, you better damn well like it!

Competitive sport has a way of bringing people together. Does this mean that the inverse statement is true – that uncompetitive anti-sport drove people apart? But what is anti-sport? Well, like many college essayists, I shall open with a dictionary definition (as the most important book at college is the dictionary) – a sport is an activity with rules, often physical, sometimes with other people. Look. We all know what a sport is, okay? So, the inverted concept – a non-activity with no rules, sometimes mental, often done alone – is an anti-sport. The inverted idea of football would be holding a block in place with your arms. The inverted idea of golf would be firing a cube from a hole with the aim of missing a golf club. The inverted idea of a hundred metre sprint would be to walk backwards for a hundred metres as slowly as possible. And so on. But how did you win at an anti-sport? If the most skilled or most athletic or most strategic tended to win other sports, the person who played at each anti-game the worst would win. However, to win would be seen as undesirable in an anti-sport, to lose the most would be deemed the best outcome. This is where we enter a strange environment, where people would competitively try to be the worst at each anti-game, whilst the objective of each of these games was also to lose (for example, coming last in a race or missing a golf club) – therefore to truly lose, you would have to win. And as each anti-game was also comprised of anti-rules, the objective wouldn’t be to slowly walk backwards for a hundred metres, but to run as fast as you could in the other direction. Now we have arrived at a state where anti-sports appear exactly the same as normal sports – so what has been the purpose of all of this? The concept of an anti-sport also inspires the notion of anti-athletes. And these anti-athletes wouldn’t attend a Non-Olympics, held every minus four years at the opposite side of the world as the regular Olympics. This meant the non-Olympics had been held somewhere in the ocean between Madagascar and Australia, not attended by millions of people. Had these Non-Olympics done the opposite of bring the world together? If you read the news it sure looks like it. Therefore to prevent the next Non-Olympics happening in 2028 somewhere East of the Canary Islands (corresponding to the 2032 Olympics in Australia), millions of visitors should flock to see anti-athletes winning at anti-sports on the open seas. This is the only way we can break the cycle of doom and despair that follows every sport like a homicidal shadow.

A History Of Hollywood

The city streets were shape shifting, caught in a transmorphing temporal wormhole of culture generated through the Hollywoodland media cluster. The combination of population density, money, technology, crime, topology and cinema had made Los Angeles transcend from reality into a metaphor, exemplifying humanity's utter present, using the city as canvas. It's architecture a continuous set for the people acting out potentials, the asphalt and concrete and glass and metal sprawling outwards, increasing in citymass hour by hour. There are times in the year when stood at precise points across the city that its entirety reflects back at you and you are caught in the composite eye of Los Angeles and it burns you with a million reflections from windows in high rise buildings, the shafts of light are caught against your retinas then stabbed into your brain, the concentrated beam melting through your neurons like satan's lasers.

The city of Los Angeles. Home to Hollywoodland, built in 1902 by the Warner Brothers. The Hollywood sign now rests on the side of mountain, an old ad gimmick, white letters arranged amongst rocks and scrub land. It is a kitsch icon, a set of modernist erected fonts each as tall as a building that further went on to dub it's surroundings as Hollywood in 1947. Hollywood is home to several film studios, including the empty sets of the olden days you may have seen in pictures at your local cinema. All of the Hollywood executives ride around in expensive cars and they wear nice suits, they have the final say in the taste in style as they're the ones that decide which film is going to be made! The producers often have big piles of money stacked up on their desk, ready to give to the best director. The director then takes the money away and begins to hire writers, camera crew and actors to be in his picture. These stars and starlets of Hollywood are as follows: Johnny Depp, Simon Agby, Brad Pitt, Joanna Lumley, Sarah Jessica Parker, Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, Johnny Knoxville, Angela Carter, Channing Tatum, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, John Travolta, Courtney Cox, Nicholas Cage and Michael Cera. The film executives often spend a few hours a day looking through glossy black and white photos of potential actors for their films, muttering to themselves whilst smoking cigars. Meanwhile back on the sets of Universal Studios the film will begin to be made whilst the marketing gurus begin to advertise the picture, using social media, alternative reality games, merchandise, trailers, the web, billboards, newspaper articles, events and a word of mouth campaign. The film will be broken down into its basic components before being reconstructed by CGI. All of the best films nowadays are 3D and shown on cinemas around the globe, with 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound and comfortable chairs. Some cinemas even offer popcorn to munch throughout the movie viewing experience as you whisper to your friends;
“This movie rocks!”
“I don't know what to say, I love it.”
“The ending...it's a killer!”
“That was one seriously funny movie.”
Viewers are then persuaded to go home and think about the film as they lie in bed, unable to get to sleep. They can't stop thinking about it! For the next few days it will be all they will be able to talk about, often stopping people in public, physically restraining them by the shoulders, and telling them about the film. They would speak immensely quickly and sometimes get their words jumbled up, often being pushed to the ground by other people due to the enthusiasm they display in talking about the movie. There bodies would begin to convulse and blood begin to leak from the ears, nose and throat, muffling their voices in the sticky iron redness. The eyeballs would melt out of their sockets and the face would begin to turn inside out, the roof of the mouth being pushed out of the lips as the entire skull cracks. The organs begin to dissolve the skin and tissue surrounding them, displaying a bed of human entrails sitting in the body cavity that thump and twitch along to the rapidly beating heart and everything begins to bleed and rip itself open and scream. The director walks in front of the camera and yells 'Cut! That's a wrap.'
The actor sits up in his prosthetic latex suit.“How did I do?”
“You were great!” says the camera man. The crew begins to clap and the actor looks around, smiling.

Early Morning Sunshine

The flimsy sheet of x-ray sensitive film blows in the breeze slightly as Ray Milland warms up the x-ray generator half a mile away. He was attempting to create an x-ray image of the landscape by blasting entire horizons with radioactive beams. There was a thudding noise in the background as Milland showed me his earlier work. A field of horse skeletons. A street of ghostly cars and the blurs of humans walking around with no skin or muscle. A section of forest, lit up like the night sky with the abundance of animals, birds and insects standing out in stark contrast on the blue, black background. "I plan on aerial photography next." he said to himself.

Clean

The patient enters a booth in which they are dosed with a mixture of radiation, arsenic and antibiotics in order to kill every single bacteria, fungus and parasite inside their body. They are then shaved of all body hair and washed in ice baths before entering the clean room, set up for patients who have been afflicted with diseases or allergies that make them susceptible to falling foul of living a day to day life.

A problem with removing all bacteria from the body, which outnumbers our cells ten to one, is digestion. Bacteria is quite intrinsic to breaking down certain foods and without them the patients have a diet consisting mainly of pre-digested soup. For the most part the patients are happy, although they miss cheese.

Sat In Your Lap

The faked moon landing was faked on the moon, faked, it was on Mars. The mysterious planet of Ceres, the bullshit planet. Like Eros. Like Eris. Spaghettification of fact, the serpentine infinite paradox of lying liars and the lies they tell the truth about. Essentially. We landed on the moon, there's a mirror on it. It reflects the ghost of a long quantumly dead chrononaut. He points to an abstract point in the deep field where he left alien pornography magazines, the centre folds displaying crystalline genitals splayed open in ultraviolet. In infra-red. In side.

Teenagers

Fungal Infections throughout History

Catoblepas!

Forever Folding Flesh

Millions have been donated into researching possible similarities between machinery and athletes. Particular experiments include inserting sponges into the anal cavity of athletes and then measuring dampness on exposure to various powertool demonstrations. Angle Grinders and Impact Wrenches were found to be the most arousing and interviews carried out with the subjects afterwards showed an increased interest in both construction and demolition sites as possible areas to practise for the upcoming 2012 olympic festival of games. Touching is encouraged.

Regeneration

The history of sport is based primarily around the events of the 1968 olympics taking place in Atlanta, Florida. One of the most amazing events was the appearance of Sun Ra performing an open-air concert amidst the hop skip and a jump challenge segment. It was also recorded as being voted one of the most cool olympic games in the 20th century, the runner up was the 1908 summer slam event taking place in Austria, Germany.

Javelins spear through the air like wet butterflies, pointy sticks earning medal made of gold. This is the introductory line of the 2012 national olympic booklet, a description of a magnificent sporting achievement for a country with an athlete good enough to be an olympian. Miss Spukarcala watched through chrome binoculars at a five thousand metre sprint between the nations, the beating of the feet in perfect synchronization, millipede of men followed the orbit of the track. A 13th and a 20th place, each athlete choosing a tarot card before they begin the event. The big finish of a winner, bunched up and depressed. All they needed was the warmth of the olympic village. Wild parties happened at these olympic villages, orgies of electrolytes. Old physical education memories hum in the funk, dehydration became one of the worst injuries off the field. The great british public can only wonder what kind of amazing lifestyles the olympians have!

Dreams About Success

Divers leap off diving boards at different heights whilst lights flash off their bodies faster than the rest of colour can be shown due to the large amounts of sleep deprivation and sugar everybody in the audience was dosed with. High speed cameras record it all and show the reality of what was happening above in stunning high definition, the quakes of skin and muscle beneath damp nylon and spandex captured on computers and broadcast across the hot earth. Intercut with this are some of the all time greatest moments in history with new audio commentaries by those involved to give a deeper insight into the mechanics of value. Armitage Shanks watches, wondering where he could get some snacks from. He lazily lifts a swollen palm and shouts "Who do I have to blow to get a burger around here?"

At the bottom of the olympic swimming pool is a performance artist protesting capitalism, demonstrating it by having a circular cage around his waist containing an eel and motion sensors. As the eel circulates his midriff, small sensors are triggered to release thousands of dollars in unmarked bills into the chlorinated water.