Right next to me, as I write this, there’s an older white guy asleep in his car. White shirt, glasses on, eyes closed, mouth open. A class act, just like me, waiting out some awful piece of real life in a McDonald’s parking lot in Hollywood, California.
What I am waiting for is photos. I just got back from an insane trip to the Grand Canyon, and I took a lot of strange pictures of myself along the way.
At the actual canyon, I’d heard a bunch of married couples who sounded like they hated each other but would probably never get divorced. “You’re stepping on it.” “I’m not STEPPING on it.” “Yes, you are. Look, you’re going right back INTO it.”
When it started to rain, an Australian in yoga pants said that she thought she just needed a hot drink.
All that was all right, though. It made me feel like I was smart. Like driving all night to Arizona by yourself was a smart move, and not at all sad and crazy. Another positive thing was that I got to see several rainbow-colored helicopters. They were beautiful and I tried to photograph them, but I was made to stay on one side of a fence.
On the way back I stopped to take my photo with a two-story cutout of Fred Flintstone, but then discovered that someone had built an entire Bedrock City behind it. “This place is really cool,” I said to the only employee in sight, a Native American woman sitting next to a turnstile in a huge, artificial cave. She didn’t really look at me when she answered. “Yeah, it’s… old cartoons.”
In Fred Flintstone’s house, there was the bird record player that says “It’s a living.” In the barber shop there was a good painting on the wall of Ann Margrock. Bright orange hair and a tight, purple, animal-hide dress. There was a brontosaurus with stairs going up its tail that was as big as a real brontosaurus. There was a volcano you could walk inside of and an orange-red stage with a wooly mammoth on it. But nobody cared. There were real wild bunnies living in some of the buildings.
Whoever built this place knew what the hell they were doing. They were inspired. They weren’t lazy. But nobody cared at all. I now listen quite often to a late-night radio show where people make outrageous statements about Bigfoot and aliens. One caller said he saw angels standing on the roof of his trailer. Another person on the show, a guest, said that the moon was fake. The people on this program are always positive that these things are actually happening, but they never know exactly who is to blame. Possibly future humans. But I was in the same boat with Bedrock City. It must have been aliens or the government or The Devil that built this place. The colors were too good. But what were they trying to tell me? SPEAK FUCKING ENGLISH.
The rest of the trip back was uneventful. When I returned to Los Angeles and entered a restaurant wearing a shirt I’d slept in, an old, unmotherly waitress told me I had beautiful eyes.
THE END
Okay, truth be told, I wrote that five years ago. Since then it was announced that Bedrock City was going away forever, but it’s not. You can still go there. This article explains.
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11289
Thanks for reading this far 👋🏻
Ryan