Alligator Alcatraz Tour

I get a call from my agent. They want me to cover Alligator Alcatraz.

“Alligator Alcatraz? Is that like a prison for evil animals?” I say, eating an apple. It sounded like the plot of a hit film, a kind of zoo for animals that had committed crimes. And then they escape.

“Its more of a detention centre for immigrants.”

“It’s a concentration camp?”

“Well no, it’s a compound used to hold immigrants located in the Everglades. The idea is that even if you escaped, you’d have to contend with the alligators and pythons that live in the swamps around it.”

“Sounds like a concentration camp to me. Why not Alligator Auschwitz or Snake Sobibor?”

“Will you just go and report on it?” they say. I nod, although as it’s a phone call, they can’t see it. I take a U-turn on the highway just as I’m about to hit the Louisiana border, driving down towards Miami, towards the Big Cypress National Preserve, towards America’s future.

I park my car on a dirt track, the air conditioning in the car working double time. It was so hot and humid in Florida that you could taste yourself, your sweat barely evaporating and creating a human flavoured fog around every individual. I play GTA6 on my Steam Deck, sighing at the NPC dialogue, thinking how when they first started making the game they were aiming for parody, yet now it seemed like a cosier version of the reality of Florida in 2025. I get bored of the game, delete it, then play Balatro 2 for a few minutes. Somebody taps on the car window.

“Can you roll your window down sir?”

“No.”

“Are you refusing to comply with-“

“Its broken, okay.” I say to the cop. Both of his hands are on the grip of the pistol hanging on his belt with a piece of string.

“Sir, step out of the vehicle.” He says. I roll my eyes, open the car door and look at myself in the cop’s mirrored sunglasses.

“What you doing out here?”

“I’m just chilling out. What are you doing out here, were you going to have a wank in the bushes or something?” I say.

“Show me your United States birth certificate.”

“Why would I carry that around? You want to see my swimming certificates too? You going to add me on LinkedIn?” I say, smiling.

“Sir, I’m arresting you on suspicion of being an illegal alien.”

“Haha, okay. Is this a prank? Are you promoting a Men In Black sequel?” I say, looking up and down the dirt track for some teenager with a phone. Instead, there’s just scraggly bushes, with crickets chirping all around us. The cop grabs me and pushes me against the Hyundai.

“What you got in your pockets?”

“Why don’t you find out?” I say. The cop obliges, plunging his hand into my pocket and screams in pain. He pulls his hand out, with the needle of a syringe running beneath a fingernail. As he goes for his radio, I move my hand up, push the plunger on the syringe and inject him with 30mg of heroin. His eyes roll up into his head and he collapses to the floor, I kneel next to him and pat him on the face.

“First time? Try and enjoy it, you fucking pig.” I say, oinking a few times. I look over his limp body and get an idea.

 

Twenty minutes later I am dressed as a cop. I found his motorbike up the track and was now riding it towards Alligator Alcatraz, hitting the vape as I rode towards the old airport. The cop was naked back in the trunk of the Hyundai, with an IV of heroin to keep him docile until I got back. I hadn’t needed to take his underwear, but I wanted to get into character. I was a piece of shit American cop. All I cared about was eating fast food, shooting people in the back and being illiterate. My kids would grow up to hate me, if I didn’t kill them, then myself, first. As I pulled into the parking lot I was playing ‘Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta [Explicit]’ by the Geto Boys on my bike stereo. One of the prison guards is already running towards me, flailing his arms in the air.

“What the hell are you listening to? Don’t you know law enforcement are only allowed to listen to Coldplay and Taylor Swift?”

“I forgot man, sorry. Is this Alligator Prison?”

“Yup, welcome my brother. You here for a tour or you bringing someone in?”

I look behind me. There is nobody there.

“I’m just here for a tour, brother.” I say. And with that, he leads me towards Alligator Alcatraz.

We pass a McDonald’s and a Denny’s, freshly built amongst the remnants of the air traffic control tower that used to be here. The floor is littered with dead Miami Blue Butterfly’s, the whole area had been flooded with toxic gas a few weeks previously. My tour guide, Private Hank Hanks, explains to me how building the immigration facility had been dangerous.

“Turns out building a prison with a moat is dangerous if the moat already contains hundreds of alligators.”

“Moat? What’s that?” I say, picking my nose.

“Ah, its European. They used to build castles with a ditch around it, then fill it with alligators.” He explains helpfully. We pass the gift shop, where Governor Ron DeSantis sells t-shirts with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on them, as well as severed taxidermy alligator heads, Key Lime cookies and saltwater taffy. The cashier behind the counter has a pet flamingo she keeps in a cage, where visitors are encouraged to feed it with a bag of peanuts you could buy for a dollar.

Past the gift shop are dozens of RVs, where the immigrant workers who had built the facility had lived before being deported to Mexico. Private Hank Hanks laughs as he tells me this, before giving a long monologue about him seeing the President when he visited the facility earlier in the week. I keep laughing and slapping my thigh to encourage him to continue with his witless story as we pass chain-link fences.

“Here it is. Ain’t it beautiful?” says the prison officer. I look round.

“Its just tents?” I say, looking around. It was just tents and chain-link fences. I remember my cover just in time. “Ain’t that genius. Hoo-boy!” I yell. A man barely five feet tall comes running over to us.

“Private, who in the hellin’ heck is that?” he says, pointing his gun at me.

“Easy there, he’s one of us.”

“Yeah. I didn’t graduate high school.” I say. The man is wearing camouflage trousers and a t-shirt with the Punisher logo on it printed on top of a blue and black U.S. flag that says ‘Blue Lives Matter’ along the bottom. He wears a baseball cap that says ‘Fish Fear Me. Women Fear Me.’, and he scrutinises me beneath the shadow of the brim.

“What you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d come take a look before the liberal media come with their helicopters and try and make the tents blow away.” I say, leaning against an RV. I root round in my pockets and find a half-eaten burger, so start to chew on it.

“Don’t worry about that brother, you should be worried about the protestors who are going to try and dig a hole underneath the ‘traz. They gonna try and flood this place with gators.” He says.

“Ah yeah. I hate it when people try and get in the way of what we’re doing here.” I say, winking. The little man nods.

“Exactly. This goddamn country needs martial law. We need to go from town to town, cleanse it of any criminal activity, and rebuild America as it should be. The strongest country this Earth has ever seen, so help me God.”

“Hallelujah. As I was saying at a KKK meeting the other day, we should nuke Los Angeles and those goddamn progressives trying to summon satan.” I say, nodding at the guys. All the guys stand around nodding with their thumbs tucked into their belts.

“Lookie here son, I’m the warden here, Warden Gordon, you lookin’ to transfer over? We could use men like you.” He says.

“Ah, I don’t know about that. I’m already under investigation for bombing a retirement community. The amount of goddamn forms you gotta fill in, I’m like, why can’t ChatGPT do this shit so I can get back on the streets to hunt down commies?” I say. The warden laughs, with Hank Hanks joining in. We start walking towards a cluster of tents.

When we enter one of the tents, there’s more chain-link fences, with as much room as possible filled with bunkbeds. Had they designed this in Prison Architect? There was barely any room to stand. Bare lightbulbs hang around the fabric ceiling, with mosquitos flying around lazily.

“I’m surprised you’ve given these guys beds. If I was in charge they would sleep on a bit of wire that electrocuted them randomly.” I say, spitting.

“Its about optics, son. You remember Guantanamo Bay?”

“Yep.”

“Exactly. We don’t want anyone to remember what we’re doing here cus of the cruelty. Matter of fact, Trump himself stayed the night here, he wanted to prove that this was a humane facility.”

“Wow, Daddy stayed here? I thought it was more like a concentration camp.” I say. The warden laughs.

“We don’t use that word round here. Concentrate. Its because the goddamn liberals at city hall say that concentrating is ableist against prisoners with ADHD. This is more like a containment facility.”

“Like in Ghostbusters?”

“I ain’t seen that.” Hank Hanks says. I shake my head. Its so hot and humid in here I start to feel faint.

"What about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean?" I ask. He blinks.

"Wha-"

“I notice there’s no real walls or bars here. What’s stopping all the inmates from piling against one of these fences, breaking it down, then going from tent to tent, murdering the prison guards with their bare hands.”

“Don’t you worry about that, these fences are made from American steel.”

“And what happens if it floods or there’s a tornado?” I say. The warden spins round with an evil grin on his face.

“What do you think would happen? All the alligators would get caught up in the wind and fly around. We got a storm shelter for our guards, as for the prisoners, well. Let’s just say…they’d be dead.” He says. I give my own evil grin back. This guy didn’t deserve to live, but I couldn’t just wait outside Alligator Alcatraz, follow him home and run him over as he made his way to his front door. No, karma had a funny way of working things out, except for all the times that it didn’t. I could imagine a shiv, covered in shit, made from a broken bit of glass, would find its way into his belly soon, but who knows? Maybe he would actually read the Bible and find out his entire worldview was in opposition to the religion he said he followed.

As I left Alligator Alcatraz, all the prison guards lined up to wave goodbye. They had given me a free t-shirt and a pack of collectible stickers featuring inmates they had illegally rounded up beforehand. I was touched. Even the most hateful person, who had dedicated their lives to cause violence and death against unarmed people, seemed to do it out of genuine care and affection for who they saw as their own kind. It was almost touching, seeing this group of fascists hand over gifts and pat me on the back as I passed by them.

“I guess I better go back to Miami. Thanks for the tour of your detention centre, my brothers in blue. My beloved guardians of justice. My saintly holocaust enablers.” I say, waving at them. I opened the pack of stickers and started slapping them on my bike, then drive back towards the Hyundai.

As I dumped the drugged-out cop naked on the dirt track, I wondered to myself about justice, the law and incarceration. It seemed absolutely cruel and meaningless, that the country had long ago lost its perspective and seemed intent on either killing or locking up the working classes that it had forced into addiction and squalor. The United States had the biggest prison population in the world, where people would be locked up in maximum security penitentiaries to undertake slave labour for decades. The next step was to criminalise all citizens so that they lived in a constant state of fear and paranoia, either ratting each other out for the smallest infraction, or throw themselves into the thresher of ultraviolence should they try and fight back. The ageing elders hoarded all the resources, voted for a clueless child emperor and rotted away in neighbourhoods monitored by privatised security forces, dying in a prison they had built around themselves as they watch Netflix movies and eat microplastics.

None of this needed to happen. None of this would stop happening. And as I drove away there was a whisper on the wind, like God was speaking to me.

“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” It seemed to say.

Florence Pugh And The Machine

Florence Pugh is an oddball. Her career ranges from arthouse horror to multimillion dollar popcornbait, and the newest addition to her filmography adds even more variety to Pugh’s archive. Thunderbolts* is the new smash hit film from Marvel Studios, starring Florence Pugh as the enigmatic Yelena Belova.

The movie star sits opposite me, drinking a can of sugar free Monster and smoking a Marlboro red. Anytime that she looks at me I immediately start blushing, and so to try and calm myself I slouch low in the chair and look at the ceiling. It is cut into oblong sections with orange pipes, contrasting against the concrete gray of the rest of the ceiling.

“Do you have any questions?” she asks. I glance down.

The pipes must transport some form of gas or liquid. Yet there are so many pipes, could they all transport the same thing? I could just make out the sound of pumping, it must be coming from another room.

“Florence. What’s the deal with your dad’s café making a £900,000 loss? Does he not know how to make a cup of tea?”

“I’m not talking about that. Do you ask other people about their fathers businesses?”

“Well, yeah, but look – I’m sorry. I’m a bit nervous.” I say. I notice there’s a pipe against one of the far walls that is insulated. Would this be to keep the contents of the pipe warm or cold? I guessed it was heat due to the placement of the pipe as if it was meant to be kept cool it would be placed at the bottom of the wall, maybe even beneath our feet. I wondered if there were other pipes beneath where we sat. Where does it all go?

“Florence, have you seen Hot Ones?”

“Yes, I’ve been on Hot Ones.” she says impatiently. I look back at her.

“We’re going to try doing our own activity as part of this interview. Its to add a bit of flair, relax yourself, gives the interviewer something to riff off. How does that sound?”

“Okay, what are we doing?”

“We’re going to find out what the deal is with all these pipes.” I say.

 

We begin walking through the facility with flashlights, following the pipes running along the ceiling.

“So in this new movie, Thunderbolts, you jump off the world’s second tallest building. Was the world’s first tallest building not good enough?”

“No it actually fits in the story, if you watch the movie you’ll find out.”

“Do you have any funny stories?”

“Like what happened on set?”

“Okay.” I say. We go through a set of double doors and up some stairs. This section of the facility appeared entirely abandoned, though the pumping sound was much louder.

“Right, one day we were shooting this chase scene, I was with Sebastian and Wyatt and Jake, the director, he yells action. But we all had our airpods in and couldn’t hear him.”

“Do you think these pipes are carrying a gas or a liquid?”

“Maybe a solid.”

“It won’t be a solid.” I say.

“Why not?”

“How does a solid pass through a pipe?”

“Maybe it doesn’t need to pass through, maybe it needs to be solid.” she says. I stop.

“You know what, you may be onto something. Rather than being a way of transporting something…”

“The pipes act as a structure which a solid can exist throughout a larger structure.” she says, looking at me. I examine her eyebrows. These eyebrows have won awards. Each hair on each eyebrow is perfect. These are the eyebrows sent from heaven.

“We better keep moving.” I say, getting flustered. We follow the corridor to where the pumping is coming from.

 

We enter a room so big that we couldn’t see to the other side. It went on and on into blackness. The beams from our lights cut across thousands of pipes, they streamed out of the wall behind us and towards a central mass.

“What is it?” I whisper. We walk towards it, seeing the pipes connect, becoming larger and larger, wrapping around a core. The pumping noise was slow, repetitive, a percussive clunking then a hiss. Florence and I crawl along the floor beneath the nest of pipes, condensation speckled across the orange metal tubes that now surround us. In front of us was a huge pumping device, a metal neck connecting to a shaft of chrome, slowly moving up and down. We watch the machine pumping.

“Have you played Balatro then?”

“Us celebrities already have Balatro 2. We’re much more technologically advanced than your average human.”

“Can I have a go?”

“No.” she says. We both look up at the machine.

 

Thunderbolts is in cinemas now! When getting your ticket use the promo code 'PILE20' to receive 20 free tickets. Enjoy!

The Aesthetics of Fail Videos

Now so more than ever moments are caught on glass retinas, recorded, uploaded, observed. The culmination of this technology are short films in which people are injured then edited together into a ten minute compilation video titled 'Fails of the week'. Like 19th century optograms, the sight and sound of people losing control of their bodies is watched after the fact by hundreds of thousands of people, cheering and laughing in the near future. I find them to be of cultural value, the aesthetics of each video has a certain quality that is so far removed from reality and cinema it lends itself more to a dream.

Each snapshot is captured from the point of view of an observer, although occasionally the victim is holding the camera. The accidents vary in violence and banality, although most feature an urban setting, often involving human powered vehicles, such as roller skates, falling afoul of architecture and Newton's laws of motion. There is often a cosiness about the background, they are the places people go to have fun. American streets, ski-resorts, boats, sport days, the family home, out in nature. Each serve as the scene of a potentially lethal accident, through the lack of foresight in an individual or insane luck. The accidents themselves have a painlessness about them, even though the footage is caught in eye bleeding high definition the video cuts off soon after. We don't get to see the consequences of the acts. They are bloodless, there is little emotional response to the accident besides shock. We don't see the interior of hospitals where mothers sit in empty rooms drinking coffee, looking at the setting sun with faces dried by tears. Whilst watching this malarky we are jet around the world as it is today. The fashion technology people could be the same as the one's standing outside your door (waiting for you), although we are taken to such exotic locations as Russia or America. This is a version of the world away from news channels, as polished television drama, as documentary footage and so on. It is a window into a world that is normal to those in it, yet becomes increasingly alien as time goes on.

The viewers of these videos dub themselves 'The Fail Army', who scour the digital globe for the juiciest accidents and attacks for splicing. These vulgar nerds respond to accusations of sadism that what they are doing is slapstick and light-hearted, suggesting that for the video to be uploaded in the first place that there was an element of consent, an acknowledgement of survival. Not only is it amusing, it is inspiring how the human body reacts to falling down a flight of stairs or being hit by a tree whilst riding a motorbike. We are a durable species, it reminds us that the world isn't necessarily safe, yet that in itself can be overcome. Yet there is still an antiseptic nature to the videos. Though the event happened, the viewer is watching it remotely from the safety of a chair. The end result is still the simulation of violence rather than being in any actual risk. There is a sub-sect of 'The Fail Army' who call themselves 'The Pain Lords'. This group has a much more misanthropic view of the world. They spend hours collecting the screams of pain and making them into bizarre soundscapes they listen to in their sleep. They hang around accident black spots with night vision cameras, giggling to themselves as they wait for the next car containing a family to wrap itself round a tree. They watch snuff films on their phones as they ride public transport, not caring that the people around them are torn between curiosity and disgust. 'The Fail Army' is trying to distance itself from these sociopaths, yet they do have the best taste when it comes to selecting footage for the annual 'Fails of the Year' videos.

It is empathy that makes the videos worth watching. Is it more valuable to place yourself as the cameraman at a distance, or as the victim of the accident, imagining your vision spinning as your head tumbles over a fluctuating centre of gravity? To imagine the smack of concrete against an elbow or having a metal fence rammed between your legs brings out a more satisfying enjoyment of the videos. That way when the day comes in which you suffer a horrible accident, you will have already felt it a thousand times before. And maybe somebody will be filming you as it is happening.

Extracting The Verge: Lessons In Urban Biwheeled Transport

I entered the shopping complex with my wallet brimming with counterfeit money. I had George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Franklin in my pocket, multiple times, faces pressed against faces, moolah, cheddar, scrilla, dosh, cash, greenbacks, sawbucks, dollars, pockets full of that cheese. Eager to enter some of the world's most cheapest shops I duck into the first one I pass, it turns out to be a knife store. A store that only dealt in knives or knife related paraphenalia. I grab two hundred dollars worth of gear off the walls and place it in front of the clerk before taking my wallet out of my pocket and pluck bills from it, letting them drop down onto the register whilst I shake my head from side to side.
“That's how we do it though.” I say slowly.
I take the knives down to a fountain with me and begin to drop them in the water amongst the coins and milk teeth.
“Say mister, why you throwing knives in the fountain?” said a smart ass kid. I turn over my shoulder and flashed my eyebrows.
“What's it look like I'm doing kid? Cooking a pot roast?” I say.

I am in the car with Bill. We are searching for a parking space.
“How's your family Bill?”
“Not bad. Eldest just got a job in a Subway.”
“You know, I always wanted to know why Subway is such a big franchise. Like, they only make sandwiches. Why not other breads...other spreads?”
“I can't find a place to park.”
“Just park there. Over there by that palm tree.” I say. The car is parked and I look around. It was strange to think that I was there at that moment in time, unknown to anyone outside of that space, as if my existence at that point was neither here, nor there, yet in a state of flux, as is the shape, of space and time. I measure my pulse. Ninety seven. I take out my cell phone and access it's apps (programmes), viewing a three dimensional rotating image of myself. I upload data.
“What you doing over there?”
“I'm using apps. Want to look?” I say. Bill looks over my shoulder and whistles.
“That's a killer app you got there.”
“Take a look at this, I designed this one myself. It tells you if a celebrity is dead or alive.”
“Cool!” says Bill. We turn to each other and smile.

The nightclub was hot enough to make me sweat, dancing to minimalist house in the dark. Green lights rotate inside mirrors, flashing the faces of drugged Americans. A woman reaches out to me and starts shouting in my ear. I shout something back and we dance. I signalled I was going to the bar to get a drink, my feet sticking to the dance floor. Pushing my way through I bump into people, leaning on them for comfort. The teenager behind the bar is wearing yellow framed sunglasses and a leopard skin Sumo suit. By the time she reaches me I have forgotten what I wanted to drink.
“You wanna beer?”
“No...no...water. I need water.” I said, eyes rolling in my head. She passed me a warm plastic bottle and I stagger away, pouring the water over my head, down my back. There's no vomit left once I heave. For a moment the entire world seems to tip upwards and I realised that I had perhaps had enough. I nearly collapse into someone, pushed away as I stumble towards the exit. I need to be outside. I feel like I can't breathe.

I was running down a road in the night. Fat insects flew around the glow from street lights and parked cars, sometimes smacking against the floor. I climbed over a low wall and begin to try and cross the interstate, eyeing up the traffic for too long. A fog had rolled in off the Pacific, making everything a fuzzy blur, the gaps seemed impossible to judge. I ran.

“How's your search going? For the edge of L.A?” said Bill.
“I don't think I found it yet.”
“Want me to drive round the outskirts, see what you can find?”
“Yeah, why not? I doubt I'll find the edge at the actual edge, but you never know. Maybe it's there all along.” I said. We took the 405 north, the slightly elevated interstate a constant artery of tarmac and metal. The evening was drawing in just as we drove onto the Antelope Valley Freeway.
“We just left Los Angeles a moment ago.” said Bill. I tell him to circle back around so I can get out. The air smells warm, there is the faint aroma of cannabis somewhere nearby. Besides the road everything is bumpy, the rock raising up covered in dirt and scrub. Bill is lit in the soft blue from his new iphone, yammering about how this spot was in Los Angeles and this spot was Santa Clarita.
“This is what I mean though. Does this feel like the edge of Los Angeles? Does this feel like the edge of anywhere?”
“Well, there ain't nothing else here.”
“Exactly. Where's the tipping point? There's no lines in the ground, no sense of the binary. This is just a little road that could be anywhere.”
“I guess. Want to drive back?”
“Not yet. Let's follow the border for a little while, see where we end up.”

We spend the next few hours carefully driving as close as we can to the Los Angeles city limits, I occasionally get out to get a sense of whether or not I have found the certain edge. The city of Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles. The state of California. The state of America. It seemed anytime I tried to find the edge of civilization it split, forming more bubbles of civilization, more motes of L.A. Floating in the agar-like continuum of reality. Motels, bars, strip clubs, diners, car parks, industrial units, houses, forests, mountains, highways, freeways, interstates, parks, hospitals, abandoned buildings, factories, beaches. I could tell for certain when I wasn't in Los Angeles and when I was, but never exactly where these two points met. I didn't believe that there was a gradient as such, that Los Angeles would simply fade into not-Los Angeles. We'd been driving for hours, fueled by roadside meats and gatorade. Bill watched as I stumbled around in the dark, kicking the detritus of people around; food packaging, used needles, dirty nappies, cigarette butts, discarded clothing, rotten plastic, clumps of human hair. Would I even know when I had found the edge? I questioned my practice as I looked into the shadows, pupils fully dilated, spit drying on both sides of my mouth. Now and then Bill would ask if we'd found it yet.
“No, no. Not yet. We need to go further.” I would say, beginning to suspect that Bill may be leading me on a wild goose chase. Nevertheless we traversed the outer orbit of the city, San Fernando, Verdugos, San Gabriel, Pomona, down to the Harbour and up along the coast. As dawn started to break I sat in the rolling surf on Santa Monica beach, watching my shoes fill with sand.
“Want to go home?” said Bill.
“Yeah.” I said, dragging myself up. It appeared as though I wouldn't find the edge of Los Angeles by going around it. I would need to employ some other methods.

The next day I went to a motorbike rental place and loaned a Suzuki SFV650 Gladius. I hadn't much experience riding motorbikes but after half an hour at a nearby parking lot I decided I was ready. I'd had an idea sitting on Santa Monica beach. Perhaps I wouldn't find the edge in such a careful, controlled manner, but experience it amongst the uncontrollable chaos life occasionally threw at you. I huffed a significant amount of nitrous oxide and set up my bike partway along Venice Boulevard.
“De fumo in flammam.” I mutter to myself before engaging the clutch. The bike lurches forward at first, but I quickly work out the gears. Before I know it I am already hurtling down the boulevard at sixty miles an hour. I feel the wind in my hair as I keep spinning the throttle, laughing madly to myself, lost in the wind. Cars and trucks speed by at a blur. Eighty miles an hour. I fly through an intersection, narrowly avoiding a BMW. The engine is screaming in protest between my legs as I quickly flick through the gears. Once I can see the beach I'm doing a good hundred and ten miles an hour. People, cars, road signs all become a violent rainbow streak as I propel myself closer and closer towards the sea. All around me are the honking of horns and the screams of people as the Gladius reaches its top speed, propelling me ever-quicker towards the coast, I'm unable to breathe. My head is thrown backwards so much so I struggle to see what's in front of me. With a spine twisting bump I feel I've hit the sand, the bike hurtling at one hundred and fifty miles an hour down the beach. Just before I hit the water I feel something.

Time seems to have stopped. I look around at my surroundings and see a whole crowd is on the beach behind me, faces locked in a slow motion scream of horror at the biker that has passed them all at such ludicrous speed. In the distance I think I can hear some kind of choir, the holy sounds of seraphim. The water beneath me is such a beautiful blue, I'm aware of the constantly shifting currents underwater of oxygen and hydrogen reflecting the pure, brilliant sky above me. Seams of gold appear on every corner, as if the world is just a door to heaven. Had I been successful? Was this indeed the edge of Los Angeles? The true edge of civilization? Before I can truly answer the question time seems to speed up again. The bike appears to bounce on the waves once or twice before it shoots out from beneath me like some kind of strange insect steed, it begins to flip and somersault itself apart until sinking below the surface of the water. I myself am miraculously unhurt, though for the second time in less than six hours my shoes are full of sand. I turn back to the beach and wave.
“Don't worry everyone. I'm fine. I think I experienced the true edge of Los Angeles, but you'll have to read my blog for a more detailed description.” I say. In the distance I can hear sirens, the type on top of police cars rather than the mythological kind. I consider my experience as I swim away, wondering if that was indeed the edge, or if it was instead what one experienced when driving at high speeds on a motorbike heading towards the ocean. Could it be replicated somehow? Was there more than one edge, or more than one way of experiencing it? I'd have to continue my search regardless. Yet after the night of disappointment the high speed seaside crash had exhilarated me more so than any simple tour of the city. As I floundered onto the shore just beneath the pier I decided I would try harder to substantiate that which was and not was Los Angeles.