Adelaide, South Australia. The year is nineteen ninety-something. Your age is a single digit. You know precisely, and at all times, how long until that number increases by one.

Someone important—parents—an older sibling—your guardian—takes you into the city. They’re excited for you. Why though? There’s hardly even any TVs there.

A new shopping centre is opening today. It's state-of-the-art and very expensive—more expensive Lego? Than all the Lego in the world apparently, they say.

Not that you care. It's shopping. Sure, they say it's for you—good to get out of the house. But this is what they want to do.

It's always what they want to do.

Inside, someone presses level 5. The elevator ascends. It's packed. Your baby brother—sister says, "excalator." Everyone smiles—at each other and at your sibling.

Whatever...

There better be a good toy section.

"Look," someone says.

The adults are shocked, gasping—and for once it seems genuine.

You push through a sea of legs. You press your face against the pristine glass of the elevator.

D A Z Z E L A N D

The top two floors of the building house a space, a place like nothing you've ever seen, but like everything you've ever imagined.

A roller coaster made of tangled tubas called Jazz Junction rolls and weaves about the space in the centre of the massive building, nothing between its tracks and the floor so many meters below—incredible—your eyes track the carriages as they pass an enormous ribbon of melted piano keys, a sun with a face, a wizard riding a fish like a bicycle. Behind these enormous, pretty ornaments are arcades—rides—junk food—games of skill.

Heaven...but better...

You think, "I want to get married here one day." It doesn't make sense. But that's okay. Nothing does here.

And it never did. It didn't need to.

You visit a handful of times over the years, each trip etching itself in the pleasure centres of your brain.

One day The News—your least favourite TV show, since it takes priority over the Simpsons—announces that Dazzeland will be closing for good on January thirty-first nineteen ninety-eight, seven years to the day after it opened.

~

A decade passes. All that exists of Dazzeland are memories, feelings—each as blurred as the few small images your Google searches yield—ubiquitous in the minds of anyone within five years of your age. Despite this collective state-wide nostalgia, there is a doubt. A small but nagging one. For some sad reason, it persists.

But what if it never existed in the first place?

~

Adelaide, South Australia. Present day. An email: New music for you on Bandcamp. Let's hope you're quick enough.

D A Z Z E L A N D

But how?

You're so stunned you play the album immediately, forgetting to try and buy the myriad physicals on offer.

You miss out.

But it doesn't matter.

Because that awful void, that niggling, seething doubt that Dazzeland never existed has wilted away to nothing…

Because you’re somewhere else now…

~

Your age is a single digit.

D A Z Z E L A N D

Again, you're finally there!