In the blackness of this night, the lights in the city are a disturbance to the darkness of the terrain. Although he is still, it is nevertheless a blackness of cats and snakes alike, where even he can slither smoothly and elegantly like the liquid shadow of nothingness, in search of a secret and a solution. The secret, which belongs to his mind, and the solution which shall be the consequence to the unravelling of the secret, hideous as it is.

Trying to fix destiny is a fun task, and not as impossible as people make it seem. The trail leads back to the time before existence, circling around the source of life, which is a deep well, into which the normal folk can cast curses like stones on ancestors. But if one looks down a well, one sees one’s own reflection, and casting curses is nothing more than throwing stones at oneself. And so, in the company of himself, he waits: a wandering mind thinking of why what happened happened at all.

And this becomes an epilogue to my poetic espionage of my own self, as I am cloaked in predominantly black, wandering through a home-staked city of Los Angeles in the plunges of West Hollywood, slurped up into the Mondrian Hotel‘s electric rooftop overlooking the city of angels. And almost immediately, pasted against the macabre interiors of the SLS Beverly Hills’ Bazaar, where skulls are made of wax and infused with diamond eyes, and stallions are trapped mid poise in a barb of glass crafted by Philip Stark. The Roberto Cavalli leopard, Giorgio Armani boots and blazer and Nikos Narcissos shirt with a faux bowtie undone would be the works of a prophecy.

The detour into my world of normalcy commences with a plunge into the world of gastronomy and mixology, where a classic mojito strained over cotton candy infuses the world with magic, while a classic margarita, served up, topped with salt air and sal de gusano. Surely, the way to lure classics into the world of modernism. They were admittedly addictively satisfying, and perhaps in my contemporary whimsical floral mood, I could not even revert back to legacies I once loved. The precision of the spherical ice cube and the blood red of the homage to my actual entrenched roots of New York in a New York sour of rye whiskey, lemon and red wine were a juxtaposition of sour and strong. But a nod to my birth as a scientifically placed oddity was the LN2 Caipirinha, Brazilian cachaca, fresh lime and sugar frozen by using liquid nitrogen, almost like an adult slushy potion made for the stoned caterpillar in Alice’s macarbre world – tasty and infused with the florals she probably picked from the rose garden that bullied her.