Angel's Ride

Part 2

What is now so sad about my learning of Angel's suicide shortly after the ride's closure, is to realize that the nightmare for both of us was orchestrated and designed by some of the best and the brightest savants in the land-cogently, effectively, and ever so cold-heartedly. In the end, I was overly-willing to participate in my own way, traveling down into the earth with her-Angel, luring me in, using every ounce of her own brand of promotional mystique.

What actually was taking place out there under the valley floor, thirty miles east of LA, some forty meters under ground, and occupying miles of tunnels, can only be described as a techno-wonderland, a dreamscape which existed somewhere between documented mythology and the surreal. And it would certainly have become the next great international attraction in spite of the hype Angel fed me about it, no sooner than I met her.

Looking back, I should have been wary of the scheme when she told me of her "connections" to score us a pair of the rare 'first wave tickets.' Officially, the ride was billed in a somewhat minimal way as "a massive underground theme park, featuring mythological creatures and spectacular adventures down a river into the land of the dead." The irony of this is that in a saner, more affluent time, such an attraction, with its fantastic allusions to ancient Greece and heart-stopping special effects, would have been sensational, though overly morbid, even without all the macabre promotion that preceded it.

There was no doubt a calculated risk made by the executives of the park's production and ad departments to get people into the expensive venue urgently-to recoup its costs at a time when no one was even buying any frills at the supermarket. The extreme economic fallout was spurring more dire measures needed for The River Styx opening. And this called for an unwavering success. Those "accelerated"-and deadly marketing tactics, which had been leaked to the LA Times, and later CNN, partly through my own testimony and that of others who had come forward, were all cleverly designed and anticipated. They were purposely created to appeal to a now more skewed and neurotic expectation of what entertainment had become in the USA during the age of "Neo-Depression."

Whatever "entertainment as diversion" now means, post-Crash II in 2021, is anybody's guess. For whatever the world finds compelling in these dire times, the goal it seems, at least on "Any-street-USA," is to simply numb reality by means of the most convenient and affordable opiate. This new posture of catatonic hibernation, instead of seeking joy or awe, as mythology had once done for the masses over millennia, is the latest, defeatist twist in our missguided society. It has left us bereft of any pleasure or escape through a past paradigm of magnificence, as The River Styx could have done through its brilliance once offered to us. But it was sometime around the closing of the theme park in 2015, that I witnessed the 'glass of water' in America become emphatically and irreversibly 'half empty.'

Those bizarre "occurrences" rumored to have taken place inside the "ride" while people "floated down the virtual river of life, river of death," pitched on the Net and through pervasive cellular adverts, were becoming the staple topic of blogtrolls haunting the domestic and international scene for new cracks in our psychic infrastructure. These cynics were the new magi, the harsh social critics of a downward-spiraling landscape, being witnessed on every continent. And it was especially true out West in America, where the optimism of innovation and unbridled energy had always managed to reign supreme.

Most of these pundits just ranted over the endless economic gloom and its residual societal effects sprouting everywhere-like dragon's teeth. They pontificated about what we already knew-a significant ramping up in people's isolation and affective disorders. These 'afflictions of hope,' they warned, would be seen at every stratum of the food chain. Prophetically, even the young and vibrant Angel, as I was to later learn, eventually succumbed to that exalted and anesthesia-focused exit strategy--suicide, suddenly so popular among the terminally disenchanted. And it didn't help Angel that in late 2015 the National Euthanasia Law came into affect, giving people the right to a painless and dignified death-sometimes for no other reason than becoming, in their own estimation, a "motivational casualty." Somehow, over only a decade, vast numbers of people, once riding high on a 'self-actualized' life were falling through new cracks in Maslow's Pyramid. and falling to their death.

Nevertheless, at the time I met Angel she was the perfect "promotional agent" in the midst of our darkening hour, an avatar of the public-relations-world-gone-mad. She had somehow adopted the instinct to endure it all-armed with her entrepreneurial stance at any cost, and all the while in the face of oceanic disappointments. Lunging at any game of upward mobility, she, and many of the young business-focused of her generation, eventually would became swallowed up at the expense of their own sincerity and an epiphany of self-betrayal, so bargained for within the system.

2015 had become the poster year for fiscal Darwinism in the USA and it was coaxing the bright, young and motivated to play 'all out,' and 'for keeps' to survive. There was a brutal hunt going on for work in these ravaged lands where any fast-track job was seen as temporary salvation. And truly for many, this quest had become a matter of life or death.

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Text and e-book copyright © 2014 Califia Montalvo

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