“It is the greatest cocaine rush you can imagine.” The hearseman said the first thing when I entered the passenger side of the van. Bob was blue-eyed and blond and appeared to be a LEGO model brought to real life with every strand on his hair pixel perfect. He has lived his whole life in LA coming from Poughkeepsie at 5 and was more LA than any other native LA.

Word in the street has it that he got fired from Falck, AMR and Lifeline all in the same year for being caught with substance. Heroin, coke, oxy, xanax… hell he had the whole apothecary cabinet in his system when he got busted. God knows what kind of neuropharmacology experiment and blood transfusion he was carrying on at the same time while moonlighting at EMS to pass the random tests with flying colors!

“It takes exactly 1 minute to go from Vermont to West 3rd when the coast is clear thanks to this bad boy.”

He said momentarily turning on the siren. Looking at his sleeve tattoos which had a pair of koi intermingled with Polynesian bands as well as Musashi, I suddenly felt I stepped in an alternate universe of Training Day where I am riding shotgun with a goddamn, f***kin yakuza himself.

A raucous, rooky cacophony blared for few seconds. When the caw died down, I realized it took me about eight to ten minutes to sludge through the traffic on regular days. And God forbid if one ever dare has the galls to attempt it during rush hour when one feels like boiled alive in Chinese water torture cell!

“Time slowing down at Newtonian frames. Every breath breaking down the discreet calculi where you are ever so aware of the crystalline structure of the gravel as if you are merging to the diffraction of a rhodochrosite… you slowly enter a Kurzweilian singularity where vision blends with the space-time taking you to the ether of Arahat. Your head quadrupling like Brahma as you find yourself in the middle of beatific panopticon vision… imbibing darshan of mandorla from the El Salvador taco joint window to the Nahuatl splatter on the earthwork of walls brutally layered over a defaced attempt of Banksy to a violent eruption of Basquiat-like explosion…to every fauvist curlicue of the Mara Salvatrucha tagging… to the tatted head of the vato emerging from a ’69 Buick like a reptilian slaughter… to the nosebeads of Leticia down the street appearing like a gothic avatar in fishnet.. as if the whole fuckin scene became a GTA wallpaper washed through the glare of sun… that splashes all over the Reality vessel akin to the rays of a EDM concert or Diego Rivera’s atomic burst of energy from Man, Controller of the Universe to more unpublished panels of the street murals rivaling that of triptychs of Delft, Vermeer or say Ghent Altarpiece in micropixel of Van Wyck detail…as the mamasita turns over the torta stuffed with carne asada next to the Sina Loa menu of the glass window of a Mariscos amidst the silence of the din of visual noise of Thai Massage signs and other hieroglyphs of Korean alphabets that looks like a man sitting in front of a computer or perhaps a hangman about to be hanged…to the pungent scent of roasted frijoles and chilaquiles printed out from the notes of the breeze carrying the train of Kolmogorov constant and other algorithmic information theory as high as the intensity and complexity of the rich scent of Subway’s toasted fresh bread wafted from the oven struggling to keep up with the dance of Shiva and Nataraja on rhythm of the backrider whose every syllable of heartbeat you can hear as she clutches for last grasp of air with acolytes haranguing her for medical insurance info when not assuring with an eyewash to fool even the sternest lie detector of the examiner’s sphygmomanometer that she will be ‘okay’ in a cosmic symphony picking out the sole incel kid with paunchy belly and Jansport bag - hunched over like Notre Dame! — momentarily pausing to take a selfie as each photon of camera flash hits your retina like quasar giving the glint of insight that the dumbf*ck’s settings must have been on to every numeral engraved in the Billboard parroting local Power106 radio breaking down the arithmetic equation and Ramanujan partition and parity number followed by 1–800 and other code and sigils from Lamar Advertising to the sliced contact information that luffs like teeth posted on the traffic light column should someone locate the Shih Tzu who ‘responds to Rajah’ balled up in a woolly-onyx yarn as if a challenge to a yarrow, y-shaped branch carr’ing dowser or rhabdomancer down to the details of unique cornea pattern of that same puppy begging for mercy as if about to be shot by a John Wick Russian— even though the vector be in black and white — your zazen vision darts to the fractals of other photographic details inside the water store of the Chinese lady where you can even pick out the bursting belly of the garland- laden Laughing Buddha of the 2-inch statuette in amber on top of other vases and urns that adorns the shelves with terrarium of lucky bamboos and snake plant if not other variegated varieties of Dracaena over the drums and barrels of blue-tinted 5 gallons — the icon otherwise might appear as a minute dot in the blindspot of other passersby in their regular reverie in Tesla, minivan or Cayenne from their dashboard and even missed by the sharp eyes of needle-vision of a hagiographer who embosses Lord’s Prayer on grain of rice to the litany of hashtags taking one down the rabbithole of Tiktok brands at the vibrant countdown of the walk sign from 15 seconds that soon switches to a mudra- the hand gesture forbidding one to trespass on zebra- perpendicular to your sight as you hold your breath taking in the whole coda in cursive architecture of the sconces of hemidemisemiquaver when radio interrupts your succubus nirvana in glitches that someone has been shot while attempting to hold a Liquor after an altercation from Backwoods price along with the fodder of pure cannabis in Apollonian circles of smoke summoning spirits of Aleister Crowley, Karmi the Magician or other svengali dervishes… of the coal-black hustler with a blue, Paisley designed bandana wrapped around his elbow leaning against the wall on one feet like an origami crane ready to take an unwitting victim to a real-life Darkweb portal with a hypnotic smile in a sharp-pitched DMT-like tune of Solfeggio frequency as the biker almost stumbles with the insulated bag to fulfill the Express Delivery like the jerk of a horse-drawn Victorian gig-worker along with the influences of Corinthian flourishes on Orthodox Byzantine dome of the church picking apart every syllable of hangul in Koreatown to the mongoloid wrinkles of the zygomatic arches on the bronze-faced Bengalis who idle by window of cell phone store with Lyca mobile plastered on it just in time to pay for the SIM card replacement… in one-minute you see it all snowflake. You see it all.”

I knew I was up for a long day.