California Party Balloons

This exploration is part of my larger investigation in Los Angeles mythology.

“As a young boy, I grew up dreaming of California. This dream followed me through each stage of my life.”
I used to believe balloons were magic. They floated through the sky, weightless and limitless. They could go anywhere. As I grew older, I soon found more magical qualities within them. I could breathe them in and their magic would change me. I heard it in my changed voice, it was inside me and altering me, but I couldn’t hold the magic in. My voice would return and I would eventually be left standing with an empty balloon.?As I grew even older, I discovered what helium was. The balloons and their magic became a symbol of my own foolish ideas. I rejected them as past and “moved on;” I was bored by balloons. They weren’t what I thought they were and what they were became boring, typical or grotesque.?This is feeling I had when I moved to California. California had this projected identity an anti-myth. I believed somehow that coming and taking part in this anti-myth that life would be better, I could move to this beautiful, edenic image of California and life would be something like paradise.?When I moved to California, I found something else. The image of California was a mythic anti-myth—not really a myth but a falsity because it was projected with a designed intent rather than something made as a reaction to what was encountered, but still containing mythic qualities—that soon colored my surroundings with a different notion. My rationalist mind looked at the anti-myths and challenged them one by one. Poking and prodding and watching them collapse under experience, science and statistic.?The anti-myth now dead, something must take its place.