Ian Wilson

Ambrosia

1. ANOTHER FREAK IN THE FREAK KINGDOM Was me hired to scribe for Bazaar Monthly, a posh Los Angeles-based online publication boasting a readership amalgamated of new age gurus, holistic juice cleansers, naturopathic shaman, real estate moguls, Hollywood elite, avant garde architects, entrepreneurial pioneers, Silicon Valley Titans of technocracy, dot com gozillionaires, weekend warriors plus counterculture enthusiasts. Was me, armed with a bic pen and thin, black notebook they were paying what seemed to me a conspicuous, if not outright gratuitous lump sum of $20,000.00 to fly out over the mighty Pacific Ocean on a unique and covert journalistic endeavor, to infiltrate an esoteric subculture shrouded in mystery and ultimately shed light on the obscure underbelly of the Hawaiian Islands, respective. Was also me who (I’m seeing this now, in retrospect) signed up to be airdropped into a mythopoeic landscape, a sociological petri dish akin to a William Golding novel, to bear witness to the vicissitudes of human relatings and be indelibly altered via cultural osmosis; to peak behind the curtain at the inner workings of this soft machine.