The smell hits you as soon as you step out of the air-conditioned airport. You feel the residue, the fallout of broken dreams hitting your palate. The charred remains of incinerated hopes mix with the omnipresent smog and invade every pore of your being.

The shuttle bus takes you to your hotel over miles and miles of pulverized aspirations paved over by concrete highways. From the bus window you can see the Hollywood Boulevard, where gold stars are set into asphalt, merging imperceptibly with the Promenade of Dead Dreams where the stars are wrought of dirty and soggy cardboard and are stuck onto the pavement with scotch tape or wads of old gum. Each cardboard star marks the exact spot where a particular dream breathed its last.

Different dreams die in different ways. Some shatter into jagged shards and one gets badly cut trying to piece them together again…