The Best Bookstore in Arizona

So, went and hung out with ol’ Bo, desert hermit, adventurer, philosopher outside of Blythe, CA. In the past, he’s introduced me around to the desert scrappers, cracking shots off in the night with their AKs at smugglers, and roaming the bombing range in buggies with night vision goggles. A few days later, and a few minutes before we pull out of town, I ask him if there are any good used bookstores around. He draws a map to a large “tent” bookstore down I40 in a roadside town called Quartzite, AZ. Quartzite’s one of those places with a couple of liquor stores, about 35 rock and mineral stands, and a winter population heavily representing the sleazy side of RV culture. Bo claims the bookstore, “The Reader’s Oasis,” is the finest collection of desert and western literature in the country, and from a bibliophilic hobo that searched used bookstores and libraries for years, that’s saying something. Mentions the owner is a character, and I might enjoy meeting him.

Anyway, after visiting the place, I’d agree; an open air building, meticulously organized, and visually narrated by hundreds of small signs in colored markers in a cartoonist’s script. Best collection of rare, old, and cheap western history, Native American, and desert ecology I could imagine. It’s owned by an old cat named Paul Winer, aka Sweetpie. Sweetpie is an interesting guy that we ended up hanging out with for a while, listening to stories until well after closing time. Here are a few reasons you might call him interesting:

1. He’s been to the state Supreme Court in Vermont twice, representing himself both times. The first time, he won conscientious objector status. The second time he changed the law, nationally, regarding male burlesque acts.
2. He was a honkey-tonk blues piano performer of some note for many years, until he disappeared into the desert nineteen years ago.
3. And the video below might be NSFW if watching a video of a tanned and wizened old Jewish guy running his bookstore wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a little tiny crocheted sock thing over his junk could be a problem with your boss.

Hannah walked up to guy right off (she’s taller than he is), he’s just all beard and sunglasses , hat and a huge nose, wearing his thing, and she says “Our friend Bo the teacher said we should stop by.” “Oh, man,” he gravels, “that guys is weird.”

www.sweetpie.us

Tangentially related, since Bo recommended it, and then I just picked up a copy from Sweetpie…
Book recommendation for the month, possibly of the season, I’ve been slowly digesting this little volume for the last two days:
“The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”, 1951, Eric Hoffer.

Hoffer lost his sight at age seven, regained it at 15, and dedicated himself to reading all he could lest he lose his sight again. Spent his time in the lean years as a hobo, a migrant worker, a longshoreman, or as he said, he lived “between the library and the brothel.” Brilliant ( if uncomfortable for a quasi-reformed radical like myself) book from a self-educated guy that refused to be labeled an intellectual. Apparently in his other writings, an admirer of the underclass, the working man, and the outccast, this book is still something of a damning treatise on some of the undercurrents and psychologies of mass movements, be they Nazi, Christian, right, or left.

Re-Entry

On our way out of Mexico, we spent four days or so climbing the highest mountain in Baja, Picacho Del Diablo, where a long time ago some college students got lost for a month, and another time a guy named Jack died on the way up and his mates buried him in a side canyon, and then wrote about it in the summit register, and rather recently, a Mexican military platoon was lost for several days. The park is discongruous in Baja; six foot diameter ponderosas, snow, granite, and other singularities you’d expect to find in the High Sierras, not two hours inland from Ensenada. How not to prepare for this 10k ft. summit: spend two days getting dehydrated and senseless, writhing on the ground in the pine needles, occasionally sharting yourself with bacterial spawn from a bad carne torta.

On our way out of Mexico, we also played chicken with an on coming semi truck on Mex 1. The truck won, although I get points for second place and for the smoothness of my exit into a pasture at sixty five mph.

The border crossing was otherwise uneventful, and we just spent a week with friends just off Pacific Beach in San Diego, undergoing mild culture shock: Not a lot of clothes being worn these days at Pacific Beach. Played guitar on the boardwalk. Played guitar on the beach. Played guitar for a classroom of behaviorally disturbed kids in a south Diego ghetto public school.

Killing time in a bar on the boardwalk, feeling utterly out of place, I crack open an issue of the LA Times, and there in the Calendar section is a picture of good buddy Alan Disaster, sitting on the hood of a car with a shotgun. Good ol’ Alan. Good ol’ America.

Nearly four months on the road: Second Mexico Update

Left our buddy in the secret canyon, near scorpion bay, after a wailing night of booze and drugs on the beach. My head is a bit sore from hitting it several times on the roof of the cab, bouncing screaming north on the bit of the Baja jeep track that heads north from El Arco a couple hundred miles into remote Bahia Las Animas, spilled tequila everywhere. Filthy, filthy, odorous, grinning. And only about a week to spear a few more fish, which we’ll need, cause the cash-ola’s about done.

We returned to our friends in San Juanico and the secret canyon after another month of rambling, spearfishing, getting face time with gunrunners and smugglers, shutting down bars in Loreto, jumping waterfalls, avoiding giant fucking moray eels in the reefs and deadly scorpion fish.

We’ve got a rag-tag pinata we’ve been driving with since La Paz a few weeks ago, and plan on destroying it on the summit of the highest mountain in Baja, Picacho Del Diablo, on the 22nd, if there’s not too much snow up there, and we make it up to the top before we run out of food.

Tiempo para trabajar. Landing in northern arizona in two weeks.

A little over a month on the road: First Mexico Update

Writing from a cafe on the harbor of La Paz, capitol of Baja California Sur, after emerging into the sun of the courtyard gritty eyed and tequila-breathed from a cool stuccoed room of a dilapidated and converted convent, our abode at the moment.

We have been shorn of goods by ineptitude and theft, rambled the brutal Baja 1000 trail by truck and motorcycle, repelled with machetes a night landing of drug runners on the beach, had our goods rifled through by banditos, and been lifted of twenty bucks by a fat dirty cop. We have become surfers, worked on tiny, puttering fishing boats, dwarfed by waves twenty two miles at sea in the Pacific, dodged stingrays and rock fish and speared monstrous halibut with our own hands, and have lived for the last few weeks in a shaded canyon of fossilized sharks teeth and primitive artifacts that opens onto a perfect, world class point break. In the mornings, I run for miles down the beach and do push ups. Later there is oil painting and writing, guitars, fire, music, and an old surfer brings out fresh bottles of beer and reefer and tells stories of the old days. The days blend.

Three weeks camped outside the paradisical fishing village of San Juanico, a hundred miles from pavement, electricity, radio, phone, or computers, I have stood and felt myself at the top of the long slippery slope that terminates in becoming a sunburnt expat with a VW bug with a surf rack and a palapa roofed house on a cliff.

Life is magnificent. I´ve got fifteen or twenty longhand pages that I mean to type up on the trials of our southern rambling and the nature of memory as I see it. Deciding what month, or even whether, to return. Now it´s on to the East Cape. Or maybe stow the truck here and ramble by backpack through Mazatlan. Or maybe have a fisherman drop us of on Espiritu Santos island for a week. We´ll decide after a few beers.

Send you an update again in a month or so.

Mysteries, Mystic Little Rock, in the days leading to departure:

1.
In the end of one of the long buildings of tan corrugated metal and rolling doors, there is a little window, and an office. The several rows of steel storage unit buildings lie safe behind barbed wire, across from the old liquor store on Col. Glenn, where it used to be woods, by the newer, but not newest, Wal-Mart. Most of our stuff’s been in there for about three years now of traveling. The office is small and narrow.

Today the door at the back left of the office behind the desk was open, and there was the smell of fried chicken. Through the crack in the door: a long low sofa, a grandmother, pictures on the wall, a guy standing tall in jeans and a baseball cap, an encapsulated scene of domesticity, a framed picture (a glare from the t.v. obscures the scene). It is not cramped, it is spacious, and homey. And without windows. And the door shuts. And I pay my bill for unit J23, for the next three months in advance, and realize that behind a certain wing of steel doors has all this time been a hidden dwelling, all carved out and carpeted, and they’ve been there all these three years, watching the sun rise and set on Kanis Rd.

2.
Near Second and Cross, by the Sally, is a single long building of rusted corrugated metal, rebar on the windows. There is scrap plywood and a rain soaked child’s backpack lying in the parking lot. There is a lift and shiny tools and my truck on a lift in that little building. We’re drinking beer.
“The tie-rods?”
“The tie -rods look good.”
“Cause we’re driving a long ways.”
“Suspension looks good, too.”
“The hoses? What do you think, too soft? I’m not trying to act Asperger’s or something, but I’m stressed.”
“Oh. I have Asperger’s. Yeah, let’s go ahead and change those out.”
“You do?”
Six years of knowing a guy, and a thousand small things coalesce into little ice crystals in four seconds.

3.
Driving down Markham in the truck, by the coat factory, there’s a red fire chief’s car, parked in the middle of five lanes. Lights on. I slow down. A long haired woman gets out of the driver’s seat in a white shirt and black BDU pants. In front of her fire squad car: a white goat, with one broken horn, laying twisted in the street, a pool of blood forming under it’s mouth. I lean my head out the window and give a little hand-out-to-the-side-palm-up shrug, like, “Hey, this is crazy isn’t it?”

The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway(TM) Method, by Allen Carr

My father is a fantastic reader. He had to reinforce the flooring of the humble two story house there in Ferndale, Arkansas, with basement columns to accommodate the ever-growing bookshelves and thousands of tomes on history, philosophy, civilization. He's also a former Pastor of almost two decades, a scholar of St. Augustine, an intellectual theologian, and a man that learned to read Hebrew in order to read the Bible without other people's translation in the way. (And, in his defense, a defense formulated by his agnostic anarchist son, he doesn't go to church anymore, but he still believes in God. And he spends all day in Arkansas Public Schools dealing with massively Fuct Kids.)

When we travel together we stop in flea-markets (for complicated reasons, he's a collector of military memorabilia) and we stop in bookstores, any kind.

But, from a young age, he would point out books, those books in pastel covers, and bold face titles, the Dread Self Help Sections. He disdains books such as these. He says that these texts, be they Christian, or Feminist, or New Age, or Whatever, they cannot be called “books.” They are “Word Products.” Anybody can create and sell a “Word Product.”

But also my father's been drunk but once, smoked never, (skip tha early years) he has only put gentle pressure on me to quit smoking cigarrettes.

Ahem.

Sorry about that aside.

So as a Thirty-Something cigarrette addict, I decide it's time to spend some money. I'm not sure whether to allocate it towards Nicotine Gum, Nicotine Patches, or Prescription Drugs, so I turn to My Generation's Oracle: The Wikipedia.

And there's the success rates, as evalutated by independent sci studies, between the chemicals and patches, and pills, and strategies, theres something called “The Allen Carr Method.” That method being so much more successful, supposedly, that I suspect that the Wiki article has been vandalized. But it hasn't. So I order the damn book.

It is everything I've been taught to discard, in terms of word products: Pastel Covers. Outrageous Claims. Poorly written. LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS...Incomplete sentences. No, Honestly, the shit looks like Dr. Phil Book Club.

But after a read, it works like Black Magic. Fourteen years of smoking, and the last three or four years, at least wanting to quit, but not able, and it was that easy.

Not trying to write an advertisement here, but I think maybe this guy, Allen Carr, figgered out how to do that hypnotic thing with a printed page. (And come on that hypnotic thing is powerful.. at least he seems to be using his powers for Good...)

So if you find your way to this book, I know, every indication says 'Word Product'... but it's just a disguise. It's something fucking weird. Try it.

And I'm totally curious, email me if it's a bunch of bullshit. Dig I get tricked?

Wait.

If I got tricked into not smoking anymore, then...

Fuck, this is too complex.

Never mind.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Eisner

“To really experience the desert you have to march right into its white bowl of sky and shape-contorting heat with your mind on your canteen as if it were your last gallon of gas and you were being chased by a carload of escaped murderers. You have to imagine what it would be like to drink blood from a lizard or, in the grip of dementia, claw bare-handed through sand and rock for the vestigial moisture beneath a dry wash.”

Wish I could say that Reisner keeps this kind of prose up consistently through his devastating history of the “Reclamation” of the American West... But if he catches you with the introduction, and you can maintain, then the raw history will change the way you think about “West of the Mississippi”...

In a dry summary (get it, dry??) I think I could summarize his thesis like this: What we see as the reclamation, population, and irrigation of the American West is at best a temporary beachhead, a passing phenomenon. An achievement of engineering, yes, but ultimately, very temporary.

The book is a hyper-researched, scholarly work, but if you can hang with his descent into depths of minutia, you'll be treated to tales like, How Some Rich Smart Guys Ripped Off, Smuggled, and Permanently Embezzled the Water Rights of an Entire Huge Region to Pipe, By Aquaduct, Water to a Little Development They Owned Called ... Los Angeles.

Donald Rumsfeld said that the wars of the 21st century would not be over Oil, but Water. Well, the domestic wars of the late 19th and 20th century were over water.

But the bulk of the book concerns two disturbing trends:

Numero Uno: The Building of Dams to Capture Run-off Water for Some Irrigation, but Mostly for Cows.

Numero Two: When that failed, the pumping of the gigantic Oglalla Aquifer to irrigate the crops.

Okay, let's review Numero Uno. And this is where the book gets interesting, but then, very hard to pay attention. Reisner spent ten years researching and working on this book. I mean, like it was his full-time job. So what happened was that two little sub-sets of the U.S. Gov't got into a little competition: The Bureau of Land Reclamation, and the Army Corp of Engineers. It started as an engineering challenge, of how to turn the most desolate land into land that could sustain cattle or crops.

(And, I'll let you read about how irrigation turned the place once called “The Fertile Crescent” and the “Birthplace of Agriculture” into the hardpack desert that we now refer to as... Iraq.”

But then somehow that agricultural objective got lost.

And what happened next is so trivial, yet so massive.

The respective leaders of (A) the Bureau of Land Reclamation, and (B) the Honchos of the Corp of Engineers both start competing for “Projects.”

And the Result?

It's sad, but the topography of fucked up dams, diverted waters, flooded cities, dead ecosystems, massive, massive, GIGANTIC HUGE FUCKING DAMS, with cost benefit analyses that have only costs, and no benefits... It all boils down to personal rivalries, and more enduringly, rivalries between the Civilian and Military Arms of the Government.

And although his thesis is clear, this is why the book is difficult to endure... He spent ten years on it, interviewing the surviving directors and generals, so much of the book is a descent into the personal rivalries and month to month minutia of these powerful guys with personality disorders, it's just hard to keep up the interest... and he interviews many of the men, rambling old men, getting drunk on their porches, and he indulges them with pages and pages of transcripts. But maype that's what it takes to document this sort of planet-fucking. I don't know.

Enough. Either the preceeding paragraphs are boring enough that you've already closed this window on your browser, or you're ready to listen to thesis Number 2 of the book: The Depletion of the Oglalla Reservoir.

So, when the Dams didn't cut it, luckily(?) there were significant changes in the technology of drilling wells. There's this huge reservoir of Pleistocene Era water underneath the Mid-West states called the Oglalla Reservoir, and when we learned how to tap it, things started changing. And we're draining it quick. It's okay, it will refill. It takes about 20 thousand years, though. And that's what we're watering lawns and golf courses in Arizona with.

You're still reading? I was on the phone yesterday with a scientist buddy of mine, working on his Ph.D at U.C. Berkeley, working on water and agricultural issues, from a science perspective, and I mentioned this Crackpot Book I just read, and yeah, that book is something the Profs and the Kids have read and are talking and arguing and working on, which was sort of a validation for me. I bought it in a little tiny book display from a ranger in Big Water, Utah, and he had four foot pony tail, and I agreed that the book was interesting, but I was more just trying to get good information about the 130 mile jeep road we were about to take through the desert wilderness, and I thought if I bought the book he would be more inclined to be honest with me.

He was.

He told us where not to get stuck, and where we could pull off and see black acrid smoke pouring from fissures in the mountain.

But that's neither here nor there.

And neither am I.

Grumpy Book Review: Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Maybe it's a problem of inflated expectations, but I thought this book was lame.

(And no, I haven't seen the film. And I don't plan to.)

Somehow, it's a popular novel published in the middle of a war with the country in which it is supposedly set, populated by cardboard caricatures and tired cliches, yet still it carries zero weight in terms of cultural enlightentment. Sorry, but that's how it reads.

Here's what I learned about Afghanistan: The slaves are noble and obedient, giving all for their even more noble masters. Children like Kites. There is a bad German boy that ass-rape other kids. When Afghans come to America they either become self-pitying novelists, or flea market junkies.

I know this novel caught a buzz because of all of our (and, really, mine, too) interest in where our tax dollars are going, and who's getting bombed, and yeah it's great that he wrote a novel with the supposition (is it really that radical?) that Afghanistan is populated by actual humans with feelings. And the author comes up with a “B-minus” story, but the imagery and prose aren't anything that special. It's supposed to be a tale of redemption, but the climax scene is something from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, where the (self-pitying, broken, privileged novelist) finally gets the teeth-breaking, skull-cracking beatdown he's been craving all these years. And lame-o plot symmetry that doesn't pass for realism, but yet still isn't Overly Symmetric enough to qualify as being a True Morality Tale. I'm sorry, but if I want cartoon characters representing abstract moral characters in a surreal world, I'll take “A Prayer For Owen Meany” or something, where it is apparent that the characters are dream archetypes, not this pretend realism. And the painful confessions (and not like that 'good' literary painful, but more like enduring an embarrassing overheard conversation at a restaurant) of a thinly veiled author... Let's put it this way, I found the tearful child ass-raping fantasy (as the slave child takes one for “The Team”) less painful to read than the “self-pitying novelist finds redemption” lame-o ending. Boo.

(Okay look, yeah, I've never been to Afghanistan, so who am I to judge? I don't know, but I can hold this book up agains about a dozen travelogues and histories and socio-investigations I've read in the last year about the area, and either they're all lying, misguided or insane, or else Khaled has just has a vivid, but ultimately kind of boring, imagination.)

(Look, normally I'm against the concept of a negative book review... it's like, why bother telling someone not to read something? The guy worked hard, got a book published, if you want to write reviews, then tell people what they should read... but I'm so genuinely confused as to why people have been so “blown away” by this book, I'm almost asking for feedback. Almost.)

Goddamndest Best Birthday Ever. (November 13, 2007)

Essential Information

for the Enjoyment

of Your

Very First

Prickly Pear Cactus Margarita:

STEP ONE:

You will notice that the prickly pear cactus are bearing their annual purple, bloody fruit by the Shit on the trail -- long, long before you see any actual prickly pear cactus.

The scat will lay on the trail and granite boulders like grainy blackberry preserves with white seeds. You will find evidence in the high desert at just this time of year in places like the northern Arizona backcountry. What appears to be high-fiber jam drying on those arid stones is something, actually, that just recently emerged from the massive ass of a Black Bear.

You may feel defeated after almost dying, again, on the granite walls of an airy desert spire of frozen magma, your ropes and metal trinkets rebuffed. But as you wind your way down the mountain, allow your partner time to collect the reddish bulbs from the edges of the green lobes of prickly pear cactus; also known as 'beaver tail' cactus because of the shape of its flat, thorned pads. The fruit themselves appear as little lavender and bruised hot air baloons looking to lift off, and they bleed a few drops of crimson blood from their tiny cupolas when you tear them from their mother.

You may even feel slightly redeemed by devising a collection container from your water jug with the help of a knife (water long gone, but miles to go) to allow your partner to harvest these spiny, booby-trapped delectables more easily.

Upon approaching the valley low lands again, put aside the feeling of defeat by the quartzite spires; the humiliating, dangerous retreat down their vertical walls. Gaze instead upon the vision of a Black Bear before you in a meadow. Warning: it's bad if your dog chases this large, if seemingly cuddly animal. Don't be surprised if you find another Black Bear, a few meters away, standing motionless, in the shadows of a copse of trees when your dog returns. Warning: it's bad if your dog ignores your previous reprimands and chases that Bear, too.

Reflect, at this point in the preparation of your drink, on which really was more dangerous, the mountain and granite and gravity, or those cuddly buddies who share your taste for the sugary goodness of Prickly Pear Fruit (Margaritas).

STEP TWO:

Having collected your bounty and just come-uppance, return to your kitchen base camp. Back under the cold electric lights of a small apartment, you and your partner have several choices in the extraction of the desert nectar for your Prickly Pear Cactus Margaritas.

First strategy

You may initially try salad tongs to hold the little, golf-ball sized bulbs, and attempt to cut away their tiny hair-like bundles of needles with a dull knife. But inevitably, the bulbs will slip, the knives goes awry, and you get those little tiny hyper-evolved hairs burying themselves in your fingers.

Second strategy

You may try donning rubber gloves, and rubbing the fine little hypodermic needles away with a coarse-textured scrubber. The rag, or vegetable scrubber, or whatever similar tool you choose will no doubt be effective in banishing the fine neck hairs of the devil, but gloves are no match: you have even more little bristles, barely visible, very penetrating, and

very feel-able, in your fingers.

Third strategy

You may notice that the little bundles of survival-protection are spaced on the bulbs of Prickly Pear Fruit such that you can grasp them - Carefully! - without contacting the needles, no gloves or tongs to sully your precision as you excise the Darwin-Locks, the Survivor-Mechanisms, the Last-Resorts. Nope, doesn't matter, more of the little needles-hairs in your fingers.

Reflect now upon your lack of employment, the imminent calendar marking of the passing of another year, the rising climate and dying ecosystem, the turning of the hands on the clock, your shortcomings in general. Here, in the desert abode, reflect on your bad attitude, your ingratitude for the bounty harvest of nectar at this very moment staining your countertops in shimmering purple-red like a crime scene, and the ways in which you have disappointed your partner in capitalist crimes beside you. Taste this. Recall, now, in your mind, the red oak trees of the Ozarks, being felled by boring beetles, the supple vines of indestructible grape vine and poison sumac and twisted iron arms of Appalachian Rhododendrum. From these mental constructs: form a chest, a box, hewing planks from the downed and weakened trees of your memory, tying hinges of fibrous green tendrils, and place your concerns in this box, and close this box shut, hearing the squeak, locking it shut with a small clasp padlock, a padlock containing tiny white gleaming gears carved from the carapaces of Buffalo River mollusc shells.

Set this box aside.

Take the fruit of the Prickly Pear Cactus, having removed its Stings, and dice the fruit with a knife into mush. Place this pulp in a generous amount of cheese cloth, and squeeze the regal irridescent juice into any container at hand. Repeat several times until all the pulp looks emptied as the dried blackberry jam you found on the boulders.

Pour the nectar you have extracted into cubicle containers and freeze. These will later be both handy and necessary for placement in your cooler to keep your beer a respectable and drinkable temperature.

Have fun experimenting with tweezers versus pliers in extracting the tiny hair-like needles from your mitts. Wonder to yourself about the resiliency of bear tongues. Allow to freeze solid (several days).

STEP THREE:

Place frozen cube-containers of Prickly Pear Cactus Nectar in a cooler, surround with beer and whatever decent food you can afford, and drive to a sunny warm place. In our research, we recommend that Sunny Place to be the Carizo Badlands, deep within the Anza Borrego Desert in Southern California, approaching from it's southern entrance.

In addition to your Frozen Prickly Pear Fruit Nectar, you will need the following:

-Tequila

-Triple Sec

-A Bit of Orange Juice

-A 4x4 Truck (and assorted repair equipment)

-Sufficient Water to Survive Unnecessary Death

-Maps

-Food

-And, unless you are an experienced Mixologist, you will need to enlist the help of qualified personnel. Ideally, you will also bring with you (besides your Lifetime Cactus Drinking Partner) a bartender of sufficient merit, and a Professional Therapist.

For our experimentation with the Prickly Pear Cactus Margarita, we chose, respectively: a Silver 1880 Tequila, a very cheap Generic Triple Sec, Minute Maid Orange Juice, a Toyota, 12 Gallons of Tap Water, a Southern California Loremie Gazeteer, Assorted Mexican Food, the Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman, and a Boston-born fair-skinned teacher lady that wrangles South San Diego Junior High Kids with Extreme Behavior Problems.

To prepare the drink:

You will need to find a canyon in the Badlands - and there are several Badlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badlands). Following the drink instuctions in this recipe, you will find yourself with survival gear, personnel, and Prickly Pear Cactus Fruit Nectar far from home, in the Anza Borrego. Choose the Slot Canyon about twenty-six miles in. But any deep canyon in a Badlands will do. The Canyon will provide you with shade and a cool breeze during the day, as well as appropriately exciting, if claustrophobic, exploration up canyon in the night. Notice from the Wikipedia Brain that deep canyons in the Badlands are, at root, extremely unstable. Camping on a major faultline, in a canyon made of compressed dirt, a canyon 20 feet wide and a few hundred feet deep: relish the gamble. The chances are slim, yes, but a gamble still, because a little earth shaky-shaky, and you are a part of the geological scenery and a compressed sedimentary layer. This will be the only time that you beat the house odds in a large casino in California.

Mixing the drink:

I don't know how to make the drink. That's why I recommend bringing a Mixologist. Duh. Preferably a Mixologist with the in-born, go-to, ever-present, driving positive life-energy that's only derived from having the descended, but positively mutated, genes from the Maniac that burned a swath of Southern Confederates from Georgia to the Coast. Just like there's the E. Coli that kills you, there's the adapted E. Coli that lives like friendly miners in your colon, digesting your food. That's the E. Coli Man that will make you a fantastic drink, and play acoustic bass to your acoustic guitar.

Drinking the Drink:

Prickly Pear Nectar is somewhere in between Watermelon, and Cool Fresh Cucumber in taste. Mixed with Tequila, it forms an elixir that is a delightful desert explosion, like the fiery red blooms from the ends of an ocotillo's spiked arms. You may find yourself, in the firelight, climbing the walls of the canyon, higher and higher. But this is not rock, this is dried mud. Higher and higher, the layers become more soft and friable, there is no way back down way you came: too unstable. You are two hundred feet above your camp. There is nothing but vertical bad lands above you. You are about to embark upon a trip up that last twenty feet, the campfire flickers on the walls across the canyon. You may have just become That Guy That Fucked Up. You are willing to risk all to get out of this terrible situation, and the easiest way out is just up. Breathing quickens. Why aren't you still hanging out around the campfire? The box you made in STEP TWO, with its vine hinges and rough-hewn oak, wormed through with beetle holes, falls from a hole in the back of your head, and crashes down a gulley, shattering itself and its contents down on Pleistocene stones until the chattering bits and dirt disappear into the black beneath you.

This is when you will be glad you brought the Therapist, who will calmly, but in a loud enough voice, tell you that there is another way besides up, another way besides down the way you came (which is impassible now), that you will just have to look for it. It is a matter of faith, she is a disembodied voice, somewhere else, who cannot see your predicament, but senses the poor choices you are about to make; you will find this other way, you will squeeze-chimney your way down, you will - gratefully- take another strong drink and see the canyon in new light.

STEP FOUR:

After three days in the canyon, you will run out of Prickly Pear Fruit Nectar, and be left with a backup bottle of Cheap Tequila and couple of lukewarm cans of Miller Highlife, which are still novel because - being hunting season - they are printed on flourescent orange cans. Drink these as the desert shimmers around you. Miles and miles away, you might be able to find some Hot Springs, capped and plumbed and tamed into concrete pools which float dying old people, and the hot mineral water will rejuvenate you about as much as it's able, which is not much. Witness the red old man emerge from the pool and collapse like a bundle of sticks, smacking his cranium on the concrete.

Instead, now washed of your Badland dust, follow your Therapist, your Descendent-of-a-General, and your Partner-For-Life, and head for the oeean. You've seen the the inscrutable Petroglyphs, and touched the thousands-year-old scraped holes in the rock, where they had no choice but to grind sustenance from this harsh place. Here's the lesson they didn't know: Head for the Ocean.

STEP FIVE:

You must consume a lot of B12 to compensate for your descent into desert binge Prickly Pear Margarita drinking. Eat swordfish and crab, drink wine. Allow your Therapist and General to pamper you. There is no cure for your Prickly Pear Fruit Margarita Binge, none but to cruise the boardwalk at sunset, on a borrowed long-board, a flexing long four foot skate board. Weave in and out of the crowd, let your shirt hang open. You are unemployed. You are without place.

Some of those pesky needles still in your hands will bother you, but don't scratch at them, because it will make you look like a crack head. Cruise the boardwalk. Ignore the insecurities. You have no home, you have no income, you are a bum, and this is the one place where the world still loves an overgrown child with a skateboard and indecipherable ambitions. The sun sets on the Pacific in horizontal pastel screeds, the particulant remnants of wildfires since put out, the surfers plod out of the coldening and darkening waters in their seal suits; you belong as much as any of these sons and daughters of Dust Bowl Refugees, but you don't. Drift without time or place. The sun will disappear into the depths of the ocean.

But! Return to the desert, to the High Desert with your True Love, burning the last of the dinosaur bones all the way.

Garnish with Highway lights.

Summer is Dead. Long Live Summer.

[Actually from October 10th, 2007... There are technical issues involved, alright?]

Hannah had already left a week or two earlier, and the temperature had taken a dive. The borrowed furniture had been reclaimed, leaving the living room strange, now just musical instruments and amps and nowhere to sit. One of the roommates had relapsed and no one had seen him in weeks. I woke after a week-long binge, and the mountains wore a hoary mantel of snow on its shoulders and I knew summer was dead, and the arrival of fall was as irreversible as the grey hairs I’ve been noticing on my temples.

The next morning I packed the truck and left before anyone woke up. I tried to drive all the way to Flagstaff, but ran out of energy in the middle of the night on some backroad near the Grand Canyon, and lay in the dirt, teeth coffee clenched, while coyotes screamed nearby.

“Shut the fuck up already!” I’d yell to them.

“Yeee-yi-yeeee-yeeee-yi” they’d screech back.

Locked. Loaded.

Montana: A Remembrance and Reckoning

[Summer 2007]

We just spent the summer living with some adventurers and musicians in a big farmhouse (stuffed with instruments and recording gear) on a couple of acres outside Glacier Park in Montana.. It was epic, huge and indescribable, the summer was. Mountains and Whitewater, Guns and Booze, and Rocking Out. I more or less took a four month sabbatical from communicating with anyone farther away then shouting distance. Here are a few random notes off the top of my head. Below that is a piece about a trip I took last spring down to New Orleans to finance the trip to Montana.

On Transportation by Earth and Water:

A school bus with cases of beer, sunburns and rafts. Rafts in raft-eating rapids, sixty miles from anywhere. A rich kid’s motorboat. Wild Horse Island, the Middle of Flathead Lake, the abandoned post office on a desert islanded. Bicycles. Stolen tags, an eighty-two Dodge Power Ram flatbed, black, named the Widowmaker, tearing down dirt roads, climbing from cab to flatbed for beer, shooting signs, on a midnight run to poach cobble stone from the river (600 dollars a pallet). Intoxicated river tubing, intoxicated hitchiking. Sore feet on high peaks, hands clutching cold rock, boots in crunching snow. One extremely equipped late model VW van over the Bitterroots, into Portland, digging clams on Whidbey Island in the ocean, VIP room treatment at a Seattle rock show. Everyday to work, three in the cab of a tiny S10 to hammer stones with mallets and carbide chisels. Every day, drunk by the end of the fifty mile drive home. A bit of flying nearly everyday: Jumping the gap at the cliffs of McGregor Lake, down the road from the house.

On Shopping:

The Kila mall; one cast steel fire pit and chimnia, one two seater camp chair, one pair of Keens in Hannah’s size. (The Mall is actually the city dump.)

On Employment:

Self-employed, a dry-stack stone mason in the sun, dust and mallets and carbide chisels, and huge fucking stones maneuvered Egyptian style for the Pharoah rich. But we make them pay and pay and pay. It is nothing to them. We get to work when we feel like it, when the coffee’s been drunk. We leave when we get tired.

On Recycling:

Cans and plastic go to the bins at the Kila Mall. The glass goes up the dirt road in the mountains behind the house, arranged on an old logging road, and is there disassembled by AK-47s.

On Meals:

Strange mushrooms, which we picked ourselves, which look like brains, taste like steak.. Turns out they go for $270 a dried pound, so we consumed a couple grand worth. Venison. Elk. Rainbow trout Grouse Huckleberry mojitos. Until summer began to dissolve, we prided ourselves on “Family Dinner.” Six deep, plus assorted guests, every night. Sport coats on, candles lit, and Hannah always says grace. Which sounds kind of creepy and commune-like, but it wasn’t.

On Living Quarters:

The ranch was christened Camp America, a virging grove of uncut Liberty in a vast occupied territory. We have seven acres, a barn, a shop (with a ping pong table), a horse in the meadow, an archery range, a place to hit golf balls into the wetlands below the house, ringed by mountains, and a view of the snowy crags of Glacier. There is a lake within a few minutes bike ride for fishing. A minute or two drive across the valley, and there is rock climbing in the sun. In our living room, there is a picture window framing the mouth of the valley with the snowy crags off in the distance, and you can play keyboards, organs, pianos, drums, basses (acoustic and electric), mandolins, banjos, xylophones, and many, many guitars; microphones and recording gear snake everywhere. Every night we have Family Dinner, and we eat venison, and morrel mushrooms, and rainbow trout, and other fruits of the land, and we light candles and say grace, and eat quickly, and pass a pipe. The sky is beautiful as they say here, and there are swarms of tumbling cliff swallows above the meadow and a resident bald eagle that spars with ospreys above the house. But quickly, the sky and the falcons and the mountains are no longer special and majestic and beautiful sights. The sky is just The Sky, and the peaks are just The Mountains, and the Hawk is just where he is meant to be, and that is simply what The Sky and The World is supposed to look like, and anything else would not be The Sky and The World, and that is Good.

A Carpenter's Postcards From New Orleans Which Arrived Out of Order

[Spring 2007, I found myself in the Big Easy. Here are my notes.]

1. Arkansas Or Bust:

After I passed the fifth stranded car, I began to get nervous. I had blown out of New Orleans at rush hour, and hit 55 north with an empty gas tank, like an idiot, just eager to get out of that stinkhole, and now the needle was 35 miles past E, on a raised concrete causeway, swamps as far as the eye can see. No exits. No signs. No access to the lane in the opposite direction. Three weeks out and I just want to get home. It’s seven hours to Little Rock, and there’s a thick stack of hundred dollar bills taped under the dash. Another stranded car, this time, a luckless sweaty cajun sits on the guard rail.

I pulled off at an exit (labeled MANCHAC) at last, but there are no gas stations, and the next exit is dozens of miles away. Ready to beg, siphon, or steal, I follow a dirt road that seems to lead towards rooftops I saw from the highway. A spray painted piece of plywood nailed to a tree reading “GaS” points the way to a screened shed with a sign out front: “Coon Meat. Alligator Meat. Crabs. Closed.” But there’s another spray painted sign for gas just beyond that, with an arrow pointing deeper into the swamp. Under the trees sit long stranded shrimp boats, aground in the forest. “Don’t MovE me! Just a MINutE set Back” painted on one. And then another rotting, spray-painted promise of petrol nailed to a tree that I need to believe.

Into a clearing, a sudden cool, fresh breeze, and I’m on the coast of Lake Ponchatrain, I guess. There’s a decrepit and obviously uninhabited shed with a Monte Carlo parked out front. On the shed in man-tall letters it reads “GAS” with an arrow pointing up into the sky.

Fuck.

I get out to examine the shack (there’s not enough fuel to make it back to the road anyway), and in doing so see that the old shed is just barely obscuring a cabana-like structure on fifteen foot pylons, a motor boat moored out front. Up the stairs and inside, it’s clean and cool and neat, with a half dozen sunburnt, drunk, friendly, shiny, cajuns sitting around a table. A younger version of myself might have had the courage to while away the twilight, but I can barely understand them, and the hose for refueling boats will reach the gravel driveway and the truck after all.

So long, Manchac.

So long, Loosey-Anna.

2. Carpentry Nights

The house is at least a hundred years old, and is now divided into four “shotgun” apartments. That is, in a tired metaphor I don’t need to explain, they are linear. Each room can only be accessed in sequence; front room, hallway, next room, next room; last room, where I sit. The saw dust is swept up for the night, tools hang from the walls and sit in buckets and cases, graph paper diagrams are taped to the walls; a cool breeze blows intermittenly through the window. I sit at a table on sawhorses, trying to make the measurements add up. But the beer is fogging everything.

We’ve finished vaulting the ceiling, and it reaches high into the darkness, and is beautifuly lit with a worklight and shadows. A three hundred pound solid cherry ship’s ladder sits there now, steps up to the loft above, with treads of ambrosia maple and ash, brand new, and the birch and oak cabinets are in various states of construction. New shelves line one wall, but the sliding doors aren’t working right yet, but the laundry room’s been framed out. Didn’t get too much done today.

The owner lives in the apartment adjacent, to the south. Her mother deals with her own quickly advancing Alzheimer’s in the apartment beneath that. Her mother is forever feeding the dogs and forever looking for her keys, which she is never to find (witness the wrecked Toyota on the street). This town is a town of hard edged survivors. This street is almost put back together, it’s own street signs in purple with flowers and funny lettering, and the end of the block, by the bayou: lawn chairs and awnings welcome walkers to sit, with homemade signs exhorting respect and cleanliness.

Jeanette, the owner, plans this, this apartment to be her money maker for her and her mother; the building: financed through fast talking, SBA loans, FEMA handouts, and charisma. We (buddy and I) stayed on the floor of her apartment the first few days, but I’ve opted to berth here in the dust and tools, because I need my space. I have decided to stay and finish the goddamned job, or as much as I can, because I really like her. She’s in her forties or later, and begins stories with things like “We saved the mushrooms we bought in Saigon, and ate them when we got on the camels and rode into the Gobi Desert.” She is scattered and blonde, sharp and caring, and makes us take lunch breaks to eat alligator sausage. She has (I gather) lived high on the hog before, but without a doubt, she is a self made woman. She has two older women as house guests; one an ex-drug smuggler from Chicago that lives in Costa Rica. The other sells jewelry at Ren Fairs.

Her words earlier to my buddy (who actually hired me to come down here) echo in my head: “I’ll throw your tools out the fucking window. Get out of my house. Get out or cops. Out or cops. Get the fuck out. Now.” She cried when I said I’d stay.

I took him half-way home to North Carolina, dropping him off in Montgomery, Alabama. Drove back alone to be left in this weird thing. I rarely have the urge to please someone, but here it is. And I need her approval.

I’ve never built cabinets before. But I will.

It’s getting late.

3.Tragedy on the Streets.

Blood is sputtering from his mouth, and he’s kind of nervously pacing back and forth in the street, mumbling, the bicycle still laying there in the dark. There are cars about. There are cops about. We are just within the boundaries of the fabled Ninth Ward.

I saw my buddy go down a block ahead of me, the wet melon slap sound reaching my ears a few miliseconds delay after the wreck, just like the crack of a baseball bat reaches the ears after the ball’s already flying. He took off from that bar in the Quarter, and I’m only just now catching up.

“How about we just sit down here on the curb for a second?” I say in my best friendly EMT voice. He complies. I pull the bike onto the median.

“Can you bite your teeth down?” He shakes his head No. His face is pockmarked with gouges that are now beginning to ooze blood.
“Will you let me look?”

He lifts his upper lip and I’m careful to hold what I hope is an expression of detached bemusement (or maybe bemused detachment), his eyes are trained on mine, and I don’t want to give away the awfulness of the answer: “No big deal, you chipped a few teeth.” I lay him down on his side in the grass, wondering what the doctor’s bill will be for a mangled mouth of dangling broken and missing teeth, check his pupils, pat his chest with one hand. I pull out my phone and wonder, who to call? I could call 411 for a number for a cab, but I wouldn’t even know where to ask to go.

In a little bit, he’ll swing liquor drunk punches at me and try and jump in front of a car, but it will turn out okay after a long night in the ER (where he will sign “Mark MacGuire” to all forms), and later apologize, with a lisp, in a ride in my truck to meet his wife halfway home – that halfway point being Montgomery, Alabama. But right now he’s beginning to cry.

“Just sit tight, just give me a minute, we’ll be out of here real soon. No big deal, just a couple of chipped teeth. Sit tight. Lay down. I’m working on it.”

4.Suitcase on the Jobsite

When Rick showed up and opened his suitcase, I knew things would be okay.

Jeannette was out with buddy on a lumber run, and I was doing shit work, unloading the trailer, and hauling out the mess of previous crackhead contractors. “I’ll call this guy Rick,” she said. “He’ll come help you.” No, please, I pleaded, I’ve got it. I don’t need any help from New Orleans Rick.

Rick apparently did the tile in the bathrooms, and he shows up a bit later on a ‘73 Honda CB750, with a sparkling, glittering, orange helmet. He appears to be my age (he’s actually turns out to be years older). Rick is tight lipped but helpful. Most of his tools are already at the jobsite, organized with meticulous precision. I notice he’s got a black leather briefcase strapped to the passenger seat of his bike. He brings it inside, and asks if there’s anything I’d like to listen to. He opens the briefcase, unfolds a small light armature built into it, two speakers on hinges unfold like a butterfly, a mini disk recorder mounted in the center of the vertical panel, the bottom section full of hundreds of alphabetically organized mini disks, which he selects with tweezers - which have their own special stowaway space.

“Where the hell you get that?”

“Uh. Made it.”

A few days later, as friends, we’ll go to his rehearsal space, the sixth floor of what used to be a gargantuan hotel, now converted to steel door bunkers, storage space, odd snatches of music bouncing down the halls. Inside his cell, a futon, a sprawling drumset, and at one wall, an organ-like spread of keyboards, and four more huge suitcases, packed precisely with archaic samplers, beat machines, effects processors, illuminated, various cords snaking from jacks mounted into the sides of the luggage. The floor must have a dozen pedals. Off to the side is some sort of console, like a 1950s NASA control room artifact, dozens of little colored pegs like the old Battleship game, and a joystick.

In a few weeks, I’ll call him from a noisy bar in Arkansas, and we’ll realize he knows my sister-in-law from his days in New York City. And that he was at my wife’s eighteenth birthday party in the Lower East Side.

But in his studio, Rick “doesn’t record.” He pulls instruments off the walls, and begins stomping pedals, building loops, into a tumbling wall of sound, and jerks his head towards the drumset. Me? Yes.

This is Jericho.

5. Lost Dog.

I’m driving Jeannette’s truck, a huge F150 4×4 through the grass, between the trees of a city park,in the dark, wiith the lights out, sweating ammo. How do I explain that I don’t the owner’s last name if I get caught doing this? How do I explain the revolver under the drivers seat, shit, I forgot about that.

How the hell did this happen? Just a couple of minutes ago, buddy and I were sitting enjoying the sunset at Lake Ponchatrain’s edge, within sight of the levee’s breach, meditating on the water, Jeannette had wandered off when one of the dogs hadn’t shown back up.

“Shit,” I said to buddy. “I hope this doesn’t turn into some epic.” She left buddy posted at the lake in case the dog showed up, hustled me into the truck, and off we went, tearing through the winding, confusing streets of city park, when she decides to start going cross country. She jumped out of the truck and ran to the top of the levy, calling me to drive the truck up there. Nothing doing. I shut off the lights and yell that I’m going back, and make my way through the park grass and trees until I find a road. But a one-way leads to another one-way, and I realize I’m getting more and more lost. I call her on her cell. It rings beside me on the seat. I don’t know how to get home, I don’t know where I am, I pull over and call buddy. “Hey, buddy, where are you?” I ask.

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Me neither. Jeannette’s fucking crazy. I’m going to start walking.”

I pick a direction, more or less at random, and begin to laugh to myself.

Important Announcement

All of you who have reached this page because you're trying to find out why your eyes are twitching because of nastigma (and there are several hundred per month), or because someone you know or love has twitching eyes because of nastigma, I have important news to help you find the cure for nastigma. I first mentioned the symptoms in my story about scorpions causing nastigma. Here's the problem you are having: You Are Spelling It Wrong. I made the same mistake.

You need to be searching for NYSTAGMUS, the ocular condition of involuntary lateral movement. Try this article.

Well, there went half of my web traffic.

You're welcome.

Kurt Vonnegut.

THE RADIO SAYS IT'S A HEAT WAVE IN SEATTLE

1.

i've been on highway 101 before, long, long ago.

travelled out west to the california, to the fabled easy gold of oregon, several times, but always on the twin steel ribbon of the Union Pacific freight rails, except for once.

i have to pause to count the years. that would be thirteen and a half. but even still, it wasn't this part of the 101. not even this state. just seventeen. the year i got my border collie.

here we are, though, where the asaphalt thread pulled tight cuts deep into the flesh of western washington, and lays along the coast. somewhere it is statiscally probable that the pennies on the tax on the gas are paying more than the cubic pounds of carbons dioxide, are paying for bullets in a gun, but you can't hear the shots from here, on this side of the ocean.

through the waves of the binocs, white foam sprays around the tufted stone outcropping. the sun is sinking down into the pacific, and the sand flows in toe deep waves in the wind. it's a cold wind, freezing cold. the beer from the backpack tastes warm compared. the radio says they're giving out emergency fans to old people in seattle. it's not supposed to get that hot. out on the peninsula, this road lays in the green welt of giant trees draped down the coast. go too far from the water, though, and all you find are fields of grey weathered stumps. like tombstones.

my teeth are chattering. hannah and the dog decide to make for the rocks a half-mile away before the tide rolls in. of course i follow.

head leaned into the wind, the wind suddenly stops when we enter the maze of rocks at the promontory. the waves are only beginning to splash into the lower tide pools. barnacles on the rocks, sea anemones with translucent purple tentacles wave.

here, stick your finger, gently, among the tendrils (i learned this at the museum, in the children's section), watch and feel the as the invertebrate's tendrils gently wrap around your finger. they almost feel sticky. that's because thousands of tiny spirettes, barbed and poisonous, are being released from the membrane of the tendril. if your finger were a small soft creature, it would be painless, and lifeless. but your skin is too thick to be penetrated, the spear shaped cells and their venom can't break through. you are invincible.

....

it didn't seem to bode well for the trip, standing there in the stairwell, trying to get out, the truck was loaded. hannah dropping things and the dog wrapping leash circles around our legs. 'why can't she be more organized?' i thought to myself with my two bags packed, and coffee mug in one hand, pouring, steadily pouring, fresh coffee into my clothes duffel.

...

thoughts stretch and i have to wonder, sitting here on the rocks, what's happening in new york city? is andy the doorman there? are the neighbors under our apartment smoking and bitching? what's up, really, i have to wonder, with branson?

if you ever happen to wonder, sitting up one late sunset, what's happening here, at this rock, at 45 degrees and 32 minutes north by 123 degrees and 38 minutes west, or early in the dawn, or whenever:

the white foam is spraying around the tufted stone outcropping.





under construction:
2. The Rainforest. American Dipper.
3. The East Face of Mount Ellinor. Sun, heat, snow, cliffs. A chance encounter at the peak with immigrant Mountain Goats, aggressive style.

Update.

For some reason, a fragment of the post below was left hanging around, which I had actually saved as a draft. The completed "Part I" is now there. That's how long it's been since I checked my own site, I guess.

If you want to hang with me, I've got four more pieces to it coming, including strange craigslist phone numbers that reach phone recordings of long recitations of giant prime numbers, hidden html content in the ten billion spam messages a day, strange blog-comment spam and attempts to decipher it, and the technology of hiding information in tiny bits of pictures and sound files, which has some certain people in power pretty freaked out.

[UPDATE 12/07: Don't believe that fucking liar. This is all there is, and there are no installments coming. It's all a bunch of shit.]

The Crying of Email 49, Part 1 of 5

A. THE ORIGINAL SHORT(WAVE) RACKET

1.

Why the voices they choose? little girls? childrens voices? or in our case, what sounds like a female truck driver?

It will be hard for me to be a reliable narrator here, because I'm still the kind of person that hears acoustic guitar playing, and bolts from my chair, opens the window, hearing nothing, I check each wall with my ear. Where was that coming from?

...

I can remember it clearly, though I was certainly intoxicated at the time. In my room at that over-packed house on Rice Street, with the shortwave radio. Long antennae and coarse and fine tuning adjustment knobs. Listen: here's the Vatican Radio from Rome. Here's someone from Wales. Here's Tijuana.

The realization that the quiet room, it's high ceilings, scuffed hardwood floor, white walls, all brimming and bouncing with invisible waves.

Here's a station that sounds like the slurry when your modem connects. At four and a half second intervals a bored and somewhat annoyed sounding woman reads off a nine digit number. Clicking like a phone hung up and another slurry. Nine digits.

It's an AM dial. At night, those waves can bounce off the ionosphere, and so you might be listening to someone far over the horizon. Or it might be from close by.

The woman has an accent like she's from Morrilton, Arkansas. Or Mena, for that matter.

2.

I puzzled the meaning for a long time. And on other occasions, remembered even less clearly, I caught bits of other stations, numbers being read out loud. Almost always women's voices through the static. Reading numbers.

It was only later I learned just how common these "number stations" actually were. People have reported listening to them since World War I, making them (probably) one of the first radio broadcasts ever.

What is the fascination with we have with hidden messages in the waves? Count the books you've seen about numerology, the meaning of the numbers in the text of your name, or Gorbachev's name. It's as old as the Kaballah. It must be something deep in our cortices. Why is it that schizophrenics so consistently blame radio transmissions for the messages that are hidden for them alone?

For at least twenty years the same likely late night characters have apparently pondered and wondered over these same numbers stations.

There's whole websites these days listing the latest broadcast frequencies, times, and content of certain stations. These cryptophiles have names for certain long, long standing stations.

There are schedules for The Yosemite Sam Mystery Station, Daily V2 Cuban Atencion Spy Numbers Station Schedule, Mystery CW Beacons in the South West USA, MOSSAD E10 Schedules.


2.

A recording company named Irdial Discs will even sell you a four CD set called The Conet Project of recordings of number stations spanning over 30 years.

Of course it's widely assumed that these are stations being run by governments to convey messages to agents in the field. You probably guessed as much.

Certain enterprising cryptophiles have triangulated some broadcasts from within the FBI headquarters in Langley. And hell, if you check the wikipedia entry on numbers stations, you'll find that in a 1999 article in The Daily Telegraph (London), a guy from the Department of Trade and Industry in the UK said aloud what everybody pretty much already knew:

"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption," said the dignitary.

"Listening to numbers stations in the UK is illegal under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949," the article also helpfully notes.

"Interestingly, the volume of coded message traffic doesn't seem to have dropped appreciably with the end of the Cold War," writes my favorite imaginary researcher Cecil Adams in an article.

It's also widely assumed that a lot of the transmissions are from drug smugglers. Good a guess as any, I suppose.

3.

The tragicomic thing about the whole obsession with numbers' station, and everybody knows it, is that those stations that actually contain information in the numbers broadcast (it's also assumed that a great many stations are nothing but "noise" to keep rival cryptoanalysts distracted) is almost certainly encoded with what's called a "one time pad."

You know what that is if you've ever read Cryptonomicon, but I'll try and summarize. The receiver of the message is given a key to the message, called (you guessed it) a one-time-pad to decipher the message. I'm not going to get into the technical aspects, but the upshot is is that as long as the same code isn't used twice, and the 'one time pad' isn't captured or found, the messages are completely indecipherable.

That point bears repeating. Code cannot be broken. Not even by the NSA's city of computers that's going through your cellphone records right now.

But that doesn't seem to phase the anybody that's obsessed with listening to them. Dutifully, they sit up nights, identifying frequencies, logging numbers, posting them on the internet.

Apparently, there was actually one of these "one-time" keys that happened to be captured. Just once. In a federal espionage case, "U.S. prosecutors claimed the accused were writing down number codes received from Atención, using Sony hand-held shortwave receivers, and typing the numbers into laptop computers to decode spying instructions. The FBI testified that they had entered a spy's apartment in 1995, and copied the computer decryption program for the Atención numbers code."

Out of the ether, the brave protectors of American freedom kept Cuba from taking over Florida by intercepting messages like "prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis" and my favorite, "Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman."

Actually, this was about all they figured out. Literally. There was one other 70 character message about so-and-so not flying on a plane. That's the entirety of what's ever been decoded and made public out of numbers broadcasts. 236 characters.


Coming Soon:
Part II - It's Up to You Not to Heed the Dial Up - Strange numbers recordings on phone numbers from
Craigslist postings, and attempts by optimistic hackers to crack them.
Part III - Ten Billion A Day - Encrypted messages hidden in the html code of Spam
Part IV - Lookout, Blogs - The mysteries of the 5-Digit No-comment Blog Spam
Part V - They're in the Picture, In the Sounds - Security experts and Governments totally freak out about
the possibilities of hidden content in tiny parts of digital pictures and sound waves.

i guess you could say we live in seattle now.

got told to chill out at the bar 'because i'm in seattle,' so i took my arkansas bad attitude down to the wharf with the dog and stumbled around to the sound of waves slapping pylons in the middle of the night.

..................

to my surprise, the computer actually turned on after i carried it up from the truck into this apartment, despite some serious mud and rock crawling in search of free camping in wyoming and montana. at one point i finally gave up on trying to be gentle on the truck and its contents, in sink's canyon outside of landers, wyoming. we were getting up that damn hill, dammit. i figured that anything that could get broken in the back of the truck was done already broke.

..................

a bit saddle sore, of course, even though it weren't but about a week or two on the road. but it was a long enough trip to make this feel far from home. woke under snow and slush most nights; tetons, yellowstone, or maybe in the hills above bozeman montana. driving up the oregon and washington coasts, i don't think rain and fog and ferns have ever felt so, well, weird. it rained exactly once, for about an hour, lightly, in the entire duration of our stay in tucson.

..................

neighborhood here is the typical clash: starched shirts and hip glasses preside over fancy meals on the sidewalk tables, and the underpasses are full of shuffling broken people muttering to themselves. there seems to be a couple of homeless/addict resource places around the neighborhood, i'm to check them out. or i might not. i might just sit up on the roof of the apartment building, on the deck chairs next to the barbecue grill, and watch the city-sized boats stacked with intermodal containers slide into the sound and unload their lego-like cargo. back in the day, i used to ride the freight trains around, sometime even up in these parts. those stacked up containers mean a hot shot, going far, going fast. i always liked the ones with the H A N J I N logo the best, it has this balance. seeing the containers reminds me of the never-ending train yards of north platte nebraska, or the union pacific proviso yard in chicago. but i've never really watched the units come off the boat. it's like eating eggs for a long time, and then watching one get popped out of a chicken butt, and being amazed. except the chicken is the size of a city and just swam in from hong kong.

..................

long drives of course breed hours of meditation, or hypnosis, or something. kansas. what happened to kansas, anyway? we stayed in denver with friends, and talked about dispensational millenialists, and are the conservatives really hurrying things up because they think they can kickstart the rapture (who needs trees, the world's going up in bloody frogs any day now) or is that just the excuse? i drank too much wine and hannah said i spend too much time filling my head with intellectual bullshit.

we went down to the sixteenth street mall in denver, in the shadow of the rockies, i wanted to see if the musicians and street people were out there, and think about when i rolled in here by freight and ate out of dumpsters. nobody but tourists and coffee shops, shit got wiped clean real nice. next morning, hung over and breathing fancy clam breath, i realized i was officially on the other side, three little marks on the door frame of the truck and two on the tailgate tell the story of two guys that tried to make off with the truck but failed. or maybe they were after the AM radio. i think they were after the whole truck; that would've been a real kick in the nuts. my little brother says he used to use four hands and three screwdrivers to pull the door back to access the latch and pop it. hannah went to the botanical gardens and i went to autozone and got a club, a cheap alarm, some no trespassing signs, and some barbed wire. stay off my property. i'm not sharing.

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it's cool and breezy in an odd apartment in seattle by the water and the sun pokes in and out of the clouds. high pressure, low pressure, they meet where you get storms is the interface. i'm guessing it's over 130 degrees back in sand vallery, the scorpion's crotch, on the cali-mexico border. at the oddest times, moments come back to me. in the back of a chopped up, roofless old scout, hauling ass out across the flats, hannah's there, and the sun's crystal and bright. boy quick is driving, ma quick wrinkled in the passenger seat, doing sixty across the flats alongside the little burro mountains. occasionally he'll lock into into a four wheel drift, hannah and i will meet wide eyes in the back seat and come skidding to the brink of a deep wash.

we're out on a drive to see the cave of a jaguar and hunt some gems in the powdery volcanic hills. a rifle with a mag-lite bolted to the end of the barrel hangs behind the driver's seat.

"even if you don't see the road, he does." ma quick turns her desert wrinkled face and reassures us.

occasionally i can tell we're following faint tire traces in the red desert. when we reach the edge of a wash, he rolls the frankenstein truck over improbable ditches, craters, and rubble, and claws out the other side without some much as a scrape, a jar, the truck only gently rocking back and forth like a canoe rustled by a light wave. the boy is a genius at this. the boy built this truck. the boy only went to town once last year. boy quick is my age, or perhaps a shade older, and is wearing desert camos and a meshback that says 'gold prospectors of america.' from the bombing range, boy quick has shown me wrecked remote control air drones, mortar rounds, and winches made from the cranks of tank turrets. we're in search of "thunder eggs," geodes, and emeralds.

boy quick turns his head over his shoulder, but his faded blue eyes stay on the so-called road.
"the dinosaurs, they ran the world sixty five million years ago. i often wonder to myself, i often wonder, what will be here in another sixy five million years."

"well, i don't know about that, i just trust the lord," ma ends the conversation with finality. the red hills glow in the afternoon sun.

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it takes perspective like that to remember geologic time. there's kansas, elected schoolboard bureaucrats saying the dinosaurs didn't exist, and the p.t.a. feverishly sending televangelists to congress who sell the family farm and destroy the schools, there's kansas in their dodge hemi's, eating ramen noodles, disgusted with the television, wondering where it all went wrong. petrified forests turned to prairie, turned to crop fields, turned to dust, bought by archer daniels midland, sprayed with petrol fertilizer, and harvested by machines. and in a fit over the damn liberal agenda ruining the country.

it's just the tiniest sliver, the closest parsing of a geologic heartbeat ago, don't you remember how kansas started? the "free soil" movement colonizing kansas before it was a state and the reason they moved there: to fight running gun fights with slave-state missouri years before the civil war kicked off, to stop the westward expansion of human ownership. later, in the deep shit of the depression, the churches were on fire with socialism, the IWW, william jennings bryant running for president, preaching the redistribution of wealth, and damning those that would try and fit a camel through the eye of a needle.

and here are the grangers, the farmers, the anti-monopolists, storming the comfortable millionaire homes of the gated communities of topeka, rattling the gates, chanting, "we've come to cut your taxes!"

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it happens that quickly, even in geologic time. things just flip. back in seattle, i'm standing in the rush of human traffic at the pike street market, a postcard in one hand has mt. saint helens, before and after. pristine mountain; smoking crater. in the other hand a postcard of the mt. saint helens crater, with a dotted line describing it's former peak. which one to send? i'm picking postcards out for the rats in the desert, promised to send them something from the rain of seattle.

hannah's at the next stall over, picking out vegetables and buying fish. the fish hawkers hoist headless carcasses of halibut and bass bigger than my dog. friendly white young men with sideburns bark out over the crowd that they deliver to hotels, and they overnight ship to anywhere in the country, tourists, buy your ancient sea fish here, at the local market, find it on your doorstep in kansas when you get home.

i pay my one dollar for five postcards (including lightning hitting the space needle against a purple sky), and swim my way through the zip-off pants and four hundred dollar strollers to tell hannah, i have to leave.

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we spent a precious few nights in portland with a friend. playing guitar, littering the backyard with beer bottles. mt. saint helens in view on the walk downtown.

hannah doesn't complain when the conversation turns to pompeii, to geologic oh-shit time, if you were on the can, would you wipe or run? dignity and poise at the moment of doom, or running for the boats with your pants down? are there ash encased figures memorialized in this moment of indecision?

or the same thing in a more serious way: sitting at bar in the rain that followed the sunshine, my friend thinks aloud, "i mean, how long can you keep writing songs about how your day went?"

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i'm forcing my way out of the seattle market in my best new york walk, leaving hannah to shop for herself, and leaving a wake of angry jostled people and their strollers in my path. fine, i'll buy my produce down here, i like that stall, but never, ever, ever, again on a saturday.

there's a band playing, what looks to be a forty year old women with a fantastic body gyrates on the plastic stage. sequins and bandana top, 'give it to me baby,' bum be bum, adds an unbearable soundtrack to the escape. 'give it to me baby,' the song won't die as i foot some distance between me and the market, aiming for the underpass, aiming for home. behind the bus shelter a guy with moppy hair and surfer jams stutters to himself as he frantically picks objects off from the trampled weeds and throws them back down: a cigarrette butt, then a used tampon applicator, then a crushed beer can.

walk on home with a backpack of fish and some carrots.

these clashing oppositions, contradictions, projected or real, income disparity, motives and results,
warm air meets cold air. tectonic plates suddenly shift. this is how storms start.

if i could write fiction i would, but all i can do is report the shifting fronts. i heard somebody say once that you don't have to be a weather man to know which way the wind blows.