Texas Road Trip, Day 0: Flying to Austin

I'm in Texas on vacation, and to research something for the novel I'm working on. When I tell people I've come to Texas to research fracking, they can't believe it. I overheard Cris saying to a friend, "First he went to Minnesota to see what it was like in a blizzard, and then he went to the desert to find survivalists, and now he's going to Texas to get himself in trouble with oil roughnecks."

It's true that all those trips were research for this book. But I took out the part about the survivalists. And the fracking stuff is really for a story-within-a-story. However, I'm also thinking of setting my next book in this milieu, so this is both research for my current project and for the possible next one.

I'm in a hotel near the Austin airport. I went to university in Austin, many years ago, and at the time I had a frantic love for the city. Then I graduated and got a little sick of it, and moved to San Francisco. I've only been back twice before this. Once, in 1981, was only two years after I'd left, and it was still very much the same place. The next time was in 2001, and it was very much not the same place. In the intervening 20 years, the tech industry had come to town, and Republicans were in the ascendancy. There were huge new developments all over, and a freeway had replaced the sweet two-lane state highway I used to take from Houston to Austin, a road that meant so much to me I wrote a song about it. In 2001 I actually drove 100 miles to the town of Columbus and attempted to drive the fondly-remembered highway, but the freeway had erased it almost entirely. Now -- that is, in 2001 -- it was just another drive through countryside.

Now it's almost 12 years after that. I have no hopes of a nostalgic reunion with any of my favorite places, going on 37 years since I left town 9 months after graduating. So much money and development has come to town that it would be like going to Las Vegas and attempting to find old Rat Pack hangouts. Of course, the university itself is still there, and many of its buildings are even the same. (Of course, when I attended in the mid-70s, it was already full of newer buildings which probably shocked anyone who had attended even 10 years earlier.) But even in 2001 almost none of the funky houses and buildings I'd lived in still existed; they'd been torn down and replaced with condos and large apartment buildings. So I'm not going to spend much time trying to connect with my youth.

Instead, I'm going to drive south, toward the Eagle Ford Shale zone, and try to find some fracking. The illustration below shows the zone, marked by red pins, spreading across south Texas.

Collapsitarian: Mad Max-like collapse 'has to happen'

Here's some collapsitarian getting a hard-on about his favorite subject:

You are going to see, in metro areas, the absolute worst in humanity, as the people that are most dependent upon a collectivist system, whether they're these Occupy Well Street [sic] people, or people who are loaded up with debt, they are totally unprepared for an economic reality where their paradigm does not function.

As a result they’re going to go through the absolute most disgusting inhumanity that I think any American has ever seen as they go through this anger phase -- and it's going to result in riots, and starvation and bloodshed.

It has to happen. You don't have people's life savings and people becoming desperate and not have that happen.

It has to happen. Sure -- even though it's never happened before on the grand scale he predicts. Scattered food riots, yes -- in which maybe a shop, or at most a row of shops, gets burned. Widespread panic and pants-shitting, no. But they sure love to fantasize about it.

If you want to get a glimpse of one of these people in the wild, check out the guy's website. The article is about the Collapse and how to prepare for it -- buy lots of silver, oh and also send him money! -- but also great is the collection of advertisements on the right side of the page. Just looking at them is like being dragged by a pickup truck through a segregated whites-only trailer park in the most depressed town in Florida.

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

Marines think Twentynine Palms base is worst possible assignment

Conveniently located in the middle of nowhere -- halfway to hell, if you ask most Marines -- Twentynine Palms is possibly the worst place on earth to get stationed.

From "Hesitation Kills," by Maj. Jane Blair,
quoted in a San Diego Union Tribune article

For your perusal, here's a map of the base's location, and here's a picture I took last summer on the base's boundary fence.

Yep, pretty desolate -- but I have the feeling it looks pretty good after you've actually been to Iraq where, after summer temperatures of 120+ degrees, the mere 100+ temps of Twentynine Palms probably feel refreshing.

(Last year I spent a month in the region while researching a novel.)

About the progress of my novel

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to starting writing the following April. But other parts of the novel are based on ideas I had as early as March 1996, when I wrote a five page scenario about a man who is trapped by a snowstorm at O'Hare and has to make his way back through the Midwest, through successive blizzards, and when he arrives back in California his life is off-kilter. I paired an idea I had in late 2008, which was a sort of psychological sex thriller set in a rainy Berkeley hills mansion, with that idea, and started writing in April, 2009.

It took until the end of 2009 to write most of the first section, and then in February 2010 I took a car trip to the midwest to research the whole notion of driving in blizzards. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 road trip.") Then it took me until the end of the summer to actually finish the first part of the book -- but I still hadn't written the first chronological section, in which the guy gets snowbound. All I had written was the part set in the San Francisco Bay Area, after he returns from the trip.

Then in September and October 2010 I went to the Mojave Desert to research the second part of the book, because after the guy's life goes off-kilter he moves to the desert and gets involved with the wrong crowd. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 desert trip.") And since returning from that sojourn in October 2010 I've been working on the desert part. I'm about, oh, two-thirds of the way through it, on the downhill slope where everything has been put in place and all I have to do is work through the plot -- as least as far as a first draft is concerned.

Meanwhile, I learned something interesting about narrative. Cris and I have been watching the series "Breaking Bad" on DVD, and we just finished the third season -- or thought we did. The season is broken up onto 4 DVDs, containing episodes 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 respectively. And somehow our Netflix queue got messed up and instead of disc 3 we got disc 4 and watched all of it without realizing we had missed anything.

Yes, we didn't realize we had missed anything. We missed seeing the third quarter of the season, three entire episodes totaling the length of a feature film, and didn't miss anything in the story. (The following sentence is for anyone familiar with the show.) Hank is still in the hospital after getting shot in episode 7; Walt has fired his first meth lab assistant and is now working with his original partner Jessie; Walt's wife Skyler is still floundering in her affair with her boss. Apparently nothing happens in those episodes we missed.

Right now I'm in the same part of my book -- the third quarter -- laboriously working through the plot. I'm a plodding fiction writer, I have to write through all the actions to understand character motivation and figure out why people make the choices at the end of the book I usually already know, by the middle of the book, that they will make. But the lesson of the unnoticed "Breaking Bad" episodes for me is: nobody cares. Cut all that shit out and nobody will notice.

So I'm looking forward to doing that in my second draft. After I finish this one, sometime by the end of the year.
 

A little later: I wrote the above entry before finding this entirely accurate and sadly hilarious article in The Onion depicting a novelist's self-loathing as he realizes all the effort he has put into his novel is in vain: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out. I found the entry thanks to an acquaintance who tweeted about it: "This Onion article is like looking at the most unflattering photo of myself ever taken."

Envisioning a better book

In the last few working sessions on my novel, I've been writing a crucial chapter -- I say it's crucial because it is really the turning point of the second part: By the end of this chapter, the main character has started down a road he will never return from.

As I work on this chapter I've been following a pattern of drafting content in one session, completely rewriting it in the next. Last weekend, for example, I completely rewrote on Saturday what I had struggled through on Monday the 25th, when I took a vacation day to write and could come up with nothing more than 150 words. The result was much better than I wrote on the Monday, that's for sure. So this chapter has taken me longer, but it's the better for it.

I still have glimpses of a better book, one in which the language is polished and things are truly good. I'm starting to realize that my first novel "Make Nice," for example, was, well, good in some ways, but not very good in the ways that count. By which I mean really interesting prose, a lack of dross, some inspiration and originality. (It does have some of that, and of course those are the best parts. The climactic scene featuring Marilyn Monroe, for example: really good.) If I were to tackle a rewrite of "Make Nice" now (which I will never do), it would be a lot better. But I think I can learn more from writing new books, not rewriting old ones.

Antwerp to 2666 -- beginning to end for Bolaño

Man, what an achievement 2666 was. I re-read the last twenty pages of The Part About Fate this weekend -- maybe the part which is most like the Bolaño book I'm actually reading now, Antwerp.

Antwerp is very short, probably no more than 4000 words, so I'm savoring it. I read a chapter (each of which are 200-500 words long) one day and re-read it a day or two later and then move on. There is no plot, or only a very obscure one. The book sort of reads like a novel of which only the first sentence of every paragraph has been printed; in fact, I thought idly that you could actually use it as a template and write a paragraph for each sentence, using the existing sentence somewhere in the paragraph. Or you could write an alternate novel using the chapter titles only. Or you could write a series of songs using the chapter titles. (There are 55 chapters or so, so it would be a lot of songs. But the chapter titles do sound like song titles.)

Why do I say that The Part About Fate, from Bolaño's final novel, is like Antwerp, which he wrote more than twenty years earlier? Because both are noirish. And this strikes me now because part of the novel I'm working on now is noirish.

Morgan Meis put it all much better in this review from the website "The Smart Set":

Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's executor, called Antwerp the "Big Bang" that created Bolaño's subsequent literary universe. That would mean the fragmentary jottings from Antwerp later expand into the dense 900 pages of 2666, Bolaño's magnum opus of crime and horror revolving around the small town of Santa Teresa. In a few literal ways this is probably true. Crime and violence are the twin stars in Bolaño's works. They are already there in Antwerp, the narrative of which (if there can be said to be one at all) centers on the murder of six kids at a place called the Calabria Commune campground.

I'm more interested, for the moment, in how Antwerp is the birth of a literary mood in Bolaño, one that also stayed with him throughout the production of his longer and more ambitious works. Yes, Antwerp is the creation of themes and characters that will reappear throughout Bolaño's writings. It is also the creation of Bolaño the writer, a statement about the kind of writer he wants to be.

Huh, plus the fact that I have a character in my book named Echevarría. With the accent over the i, if you please.

A note from a desk

What am I doing this fine holiday? Working on my novel. In my work on Saturday I went over the 95,000 word mark, and I noticed today that I'm over 16,000 words into Part 2 -- the part set down in the desert, where I went last fall to research the setting.

Right-wing collapsitarians' racist beliefs

One of the core beliefs of the crypto-fascist collapsitarians, who think the western world is headed for an economic and social apocalypse, is that when "the end" comes, all cities will collapse into hellholes of violence, rioting, looting, pillaging, and so on. This is one of the main reasons they believe in "prepping" for the catastrophe -- which they refer to as The End of The World As We Know It, or TEOTWAWKI -- and "bugging out" to a well-stocked, heavily armed and fortified compound in, say, Montana. 

When this collapse of the cities is predicted, the example almost always cited is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to this way of thinking, that aftermath was almost exclusively characterized by, on the one hand, looting and violence, and on the other, pathetic dependency on government to save the people. Cable TV coverage of the event stressed both these themes, because they made for dramatic images, and that is what right-wingers have in mind when they say the collapse of the cities will look like that.

They are, of course, ignoring all the incidents where people helped others, acted with compassion, shared their resources, and made peace. TV ignored these incidents too, for the most part, because they aren't conflict-y, and are therefore boring.

But the other reason the crypto-fascist collapsitarians talk about the collapse of the cities, and assume they will descend into a cauldron of violence, is that they're racist. Take a look at this post on a prominent collapsitarian blog. About the cities, the author says: 

Misconception number four: Roving criminal hordes will come from the urban environment to your rural home or Bug Out Location (BOL). Nope, these people do not play chess or even checkers; they do not plan ahead much at all. Criminals, with few exceptions are lazy. And many are on drugs. Yes, a few will flee at the very beginning if they have a specific refuge in mind, the uncle with the farm, but most will not leave their familiar comfortable environment. Even if they have an operational vehicle capable of the trip it is likely to be low on fuel, particularly these days. They will burn up what little fuel they have driving around their usual haunts, to the liquor and drug stores, then to the convenience or grocery store like they did before the event, until their tank is empty. Walking or biking to save fuel will never cross their mind. No gas means no travel for this group.

They are stupid, lazy, and many are on drugs! Really!

Refuting those ideas, which are based on such an idiotic image of city dwellers, would be a waste of time. The only thing I can say in response is that that paragraph actually represents a more moderate prediction than the usual one, where crazed and armed city dwellers, having used up and then burned all the resources in their city, then go out to attack the good Christians in their Montana bunkers. (See my previous entry, Grim Dystopians Hoping for Complete Collapse.) So never mind that -- they are simply too lazy to do so!

It would be laughable, if not for the utter gullibility and ignorance of these collapsitarians, many of whom are elderly people who fall victim to tax-dodging schemes rooted in weird, almost schizophrenic ideas (such as so-called "truth language"). There is lots of money to be made from all the paranoia being served out there.

On the right track to confuse everyone

This blogger lists some qualities in books he seeks out:

1. Dozens, if not, hundreds of characters.
   
2. Digressions all over the place that sometimes do and sometimes don't have a connection to the main plot.
   
3. Not being able to understand large swaths of the text.

Hey, I'm on the right track with the book I'm working on. My character list already has at least 75 entries. And there are plenty of digressions. As far as the last criterion, I guess I'll never know whether readers feel that way, unless through some turn of fate the book becomes widely read and I get a lot of feedback. Gee, that would be nice.

Meet a "sovereign citizen"

A Tennessee TV station sent a news crew over to the home of 69-year-old Hollis Fay Summers, who "became a sovereign four years ago after attending a seminar in Alabama." Among other futile efforts, he has filed several billion-dollar lawsuits against officials of the bank which holds his mortgage, because they won't believe that his mortgage has been paid in full with funds from his "secret account."

WTF, you say. Well, in brief -- and the mention of the "seminar" he attended is the giveaway -- there are charlatans going around the country preaching a form of magic. The magic is contained in a mystical and completely bogus interpretation of legal language, and among other things, asserts that every American has a "secret account" of money being held for him by the federal government -- a government in which the profess not to believe, but that logical contradiction is only one among many -- and that you can access these funds if you know the magic. (For an explanation, see "Bill of Exchange" on the Southern Poverty Law Center's page on the so-called sovereigns, or see this page on the ADL's website for a full picture.)

The TV station's page with the story also includes links to a couple of Summers' mumbo-jumbo court filings, including the one where he asserts his sovereign status.

There are not that many of these people -- tens of thousands, at the most -- but they are responsible for gumming up local courts with these bogus filings, each of which must be addressed and declared frivolous. From the ADL's page:

The filing of frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials, law enforcement officers and private citizens, on the other hand, has remained a favorite harassing strategy. These paper "attacks" intimidate their targets and have the beneficial side effect of clogging up a court system that sovereign citizens believe is illegitimate. Frivolous liens became such a problem in the 1990s that a majority of states were forced to pass new laws to make filing them illegal, their removal easier, or both. Today, eager sovereign citizens can use the Internet to download a variety of boilerplate forms and documents to wield against the government. More adventurous types can matriculate at "schools" such as the Erwin Rommel School of Law; additionally, a number of activists, ranging from David Wynn Miller to The Aware Group, hold seminars around the country to teach people -- for a price -- about the latest tactics and weapons.

(Undeterred, Summers has filed another document in which he attempts to redefine the word frivolous to mean "true and correct," the story says.)

And the thing to know is that these people are not crazy. They're just a bunch of losers who have various grievances and have been tricked into believing that this particular form of magic will somehow lead to the redressing of these grievances.

Some nice details in the story, including the arrival of a dumpster during the interview -- a dumpster being delivered by the bank which is about to evict Summers from his long-foreclosed house. And where will this old grampa go then? Some poor relative, no doubt. But what you should focus on is the people who led him to this pass, who profited from his ignorance and credulousness. Here's the SPLC's page on the leaders of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, many of whom are now serving sentences in federal prison.

Previously:

'Sovereign' files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

The King of Hawaii (the verb)

Petty crime

In the research for my current book, I'm on the lookout for crime stories from the desert area I visited in September and October. This story from today's San Bernardino Sun captures the zeitgeist. Here's the whole story. See if you can find the really jaw-dropping detail.

San Bernardino Sun, 17 Nov 2010:
Twentynine Palms burglary suspects caught selling stolen goods online

By Melissa Pinion-Whitt

Posted: 11/17/2010 01:00:31 PM PST

Two people, including a deserter from the U.S. Marine Corps, were arrested Tuesday in Twentynine Palms on suspicion of burglarizing a home and selling the property on the Internet.

Michael Quimby, 25, and Kimberly Angus, 23, were detained at their apartment in the 73700 block of Raymond Drive when undercover deputies found them in possession of the stolen goods.

San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies received a report of a burglary in the 71000 block of Mesa Drive on Saturday. The victim said several items had been stolen the prior week. He saw some of his items listed on the website Craigslist.com and 29palmsyardsales.com.

Deputies went undercover to buy items from the suspects. They met them at their apartment complex and saw two of the stolen items outside the front door of their apartment when they approached, sheriff's officials said.

Deputies found most of the property stolen in the burglary inside the residence. Sheriff's officials said Angus sold a stolen blue bassinet to a woman at a Jack in the Box in Twentynine Palms. Detectives are looking for the person who bought it so the item can be returned to its owner.

Deputies booked Quimby into jail on suspicion of burglary and for his military warrant. They plan to submit a report to the District Attorney's Office for consideration of charges against Angus.

Yes, these desperate tweakers stole a bassinet from someone, and managed to get rid of it by putting it on Craigslist and then meeting the buyer at the Jack in the Box. You can see why I want to set my story there.

Breaking news from the paranoid front

A website called The Survival Retreat -- you know, that well-stocked fuhrerbunker that will allow you to get through the supposedly coming apocalypse -- alerts us that now is the time to stock up on ammunition.

It just occurred to me that perhaps all the zombie movies and zombie TV shows are really about our anxiety about this eventuality, where there's total societal collapse, everyone attempts to flee, and the well-stocked right-wing Christian survivalist is vindicated. (See my entry from yesterday. (Speaking of which, the title of a post from another collapsitarian blog says it all: The US Government Is Preparing For Unlikely Events Like War, Catastrophic Collapse of Society, and Even Asteroids -- Are You?.)

Related: the Seattle Times reports that it's a buyer's market for islands. Which might help protect you from zombies, who (which?) presumably can't swim, but not from the desperate marauders imagined by the apocalyptic collapsitarians whom I mentioned yesterday.

By the way, can you guess which famous 1960s musician wrote a song about this topic? None other than Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose 1971 song "John Henry Bosworth" imagined the same riots, flight from the cities and suburbs, and survival on a remote piece of property -- but minus the guns and with a much more truly Christian vision than the apocalyptic right-wing Christianity the survivalists apply to their fantasies.

For another optimistic alternative, see this April 2009 NYT magazine article about what was called the Transition movement, which I linked to before. It says something about the appeal of the more horrific fantasies that they're 99 percent of what you hear and read about.

Collapsitarian screed: You're SOL

Last month I mentioned a book I was reading, a so-called novel which described a claque of well-prepared paranoids and how they survive the total collapse of society, including riots, cannibalism, and the end of all political and economic systems, which (according to the novel) will be a swift and inevitable consequence of our current political-economic course.

If you really want a sample of the way these people think, without slogging through that ridiculous (though self-righteously humorless) "novel," take a look at this blog post. It's on the website of the author of that book, and though the post itself was not written by the book's author, it partakes of exactly the same mentality -- only even grimmer. Here's just one sentence, following a passage in which the author says that if you do make it out of the riot-torn cities, it won't do you much good to try to hunt for food because your gunshots will attract other refugees.

Deciding not to risk your life to kill what's left of God's little animals, you might innocently/ignorantly believe that you can sustain yourself and your family by foraging for wild, edible plants, but so does every other unprepared refugee who has fled to the country, and they are all scouring the countryside, grazing on everything that is green or was green or might be green someday.

The whole thing's like that, wild-eyed and detailed to a pornographic degree -- because that's what it is, pornography. It's porn for paranoid right-wing foamers.

This apocalyptic event, known to right-wing paranoids as The End Of The World As We Know It or TEOTWAWKI*, is almost as widely predicted among the gun-crazy right wing as the Rapture itself, and perhaps even more widely yearned for -- because amid all the suffering that comes with it, the well-prepared right-wing paranoid will be vindicated. Plus, he'll get to do what he's always wanted to do, and that's kill everyone in sight that's not in his little survival group. It goes without saying that the end point of this fantasy is that the only other people around will be like-minded right-wing fascists just like him. No wonder he's looking forward to it.

* I think having an acronym that's impossible to pronounce pretty much defeats the purpose of having an acronym, especially when the phrase "The end of the world as we know it" is so easy and fun to say and even has its own rock song, which you are probably already humming along with. They also refer to this event as "When the Schumer hits the fan," apparently a cryptic anti-Semitic reference and one that allows them to piously avoid saying "shit." Because when you're planning a survival strategy that requires you to kill or leave to rot every other human being who isn't as well-armed and well-prepared as you, you'd better not cuss. The post-Schumer world, awash in blood, would be a terrible place if people took the Lord's name in vain.

Desert sojourn, day 22

Sky (yesterday evening)

I've started taking pictures of the sky -- just the sky, with no landscape in it. I don't know if this is because I've had some startling revelation about the nature of geographic space in the desert and the irrelevance of the land, or if I'm just bored with the sights of the neighborhood.

But! today I talked to a guy in his mid-20s. He grew up here. And his parents, who have lived here for decades, live in two old L.A. streetcars that somehow got hauled up here. Well, at least the streetcars form the basis of their house. That's one thing in the neighborhood I haven't taken a picture of yet. In the desert, you don't go around taking pictures of people's houses the way you would in San Francisco, and the reason is that you don't know who lives there. It could be an ex-con, a meth-crazed Marine vet, a guy on Megan's List, a biker on the lam from his enemies, or any number of people who live out here precisely because the extra space allows them some privacy. So you don't want to stand in the road (or, if you're really suicidal, on their property) snapping pictures of their place unless you want to be looking down the barrel of a gun.

Nevertheless, the nice family who live in the streetcar-house won't shoot me, so I'll take a picture of their house some day. But I'll phone first.

Anyway, talking to the young guy was an eye opener. Every time I start asking people about their lives here they wind up telling me crazy stories about meth-crazed villains, even though I don't really ask for them. Today's beaut was about... well, see for yourself:

Ex-Marines sentenced to prison for killing in Twentynine Palms

Associated Press, 22 Aug 2004

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. - Two former Marines were each given three-year prison sentences for the machete death of a man they lured to an off-road area in the Mojave Desert.

Alan Patterson and Justin VanMeter, both 24, were sentenced Friday in Superior Court on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Both have been in custody for two years and probably will be released within a year, prosecutors said.

They were convicted July 6 of the August 2002 killing of Daniel Smith. Prosecutors alleged that they lured the 19-year-old to the Sugar Bowl area of Twentynine Palms and took turns hacking him with a machete because they thought he was informing sheriff's deputies about their alleged drug dealing.

The other funny thing was when I told the guy where I was staying so he could come over. "Oh, the old Garrison house," he said. Thinking he was getting mixed up, I said no, the Harrison House is across the street.* "No, I know which house you mean," he said. "It used to belong to an old tweaker named Garrison. I used to babysit there." And when he walked in the door he laughed and said, "Man, this place looks much better than it used to!"

* See my entry for Sep. 20.

Desert sojourn: day 11

Really intense work for my day job today -- just all day long. It didn't matter much in the sense that it was a hot day and it was no good going outdoors anyway. I completed my walk at dawn as usual, about four miles.

At the end of the day I went outside at sunset and ate my supper at a garden table next to the house. Here's the house from the side rear, with the getting-fuller moon rising, and the Harrison House across the street to the left.

However, I did uncover some great material for my book. I was just telling Cris yesterday that I want part of my plot to involve one of the "typical FBI terror stings" in which some hapless loudmouth is the target of a sting in which the FBI arrests him for planting a non-functioning bomb that they themselves gave him. And voila, it happened. The criminal complaint shows quite clearly how the FBI's confidential informant encouraged this poor shmuck and strung him along until they had him dead to rights. It isn't scary, it's just sad. Compare this to the complaint in the 2007 Fort Dix "pizza terrorists" case -- even less threatening than that. At least in New Jersey they seemed serious about doing something before the FBI got involved.

Desert sojourn: day 8

A road runner came to visit

Realizing how the rear of the house remains cool all morning long, I've been working at the kitchen table with the back door open. This morning a road runner came by and nearly poked his head in the house. I said "Szzzt!" which I am used to doing with the cats at home to keep them from coming into the bedroom, but the road runner never met a cat and didn't know what I meant; he didn't budge until I picked up the camera. Then he hopped up on the bench where I sit and have coffee after my morning walk, and I got this picture before he hopped off and trotted away.

In the early evening, I drove to downtown Joshua Tree to the studios of the local radio station. It's part pop music station and part small-town local station, with local news stories. My ideal of desert radio is "The Hot One for the High Desert" as heard on The Firesign Theatre's "Everything You Know is Wrong." This station isn't as fusty and weird, unfortunately, but it does have a few distinctly strangely voiced announcers. Tonight I got a chance to sit for over an hour and interview one of the DJs in between announcements. I asked him about a general picture here, and I've tried to be careful not to make it seem like I'm just looking for dirt, but people keep serving it up. According to the guy I interviewed, drugs and crime are fairly rampant. But I also have a contact in the local sheriff's department and want to get his side of it too, as well as the side of as many other people as I can.

It was a little before 8 pm then, and I didn't feel like going home, so I drove 35 or 40 miles to The Palms in Wonder Valley and had a beer. The bartender, an attractive brunette, had one arm in a sling and did everything with the other arm. She kept telling people that she had broken her elbow a day or two before, though I didn't hear how it happened. This place is way out there. After I finished my beer, I went out to the parking lot and looked up at the stars. Even though there was a bright enough moon to cast a distinct shadow, the stars were shining brightly, because there are no other lights out there.

The other good thing about The Palms, aside from its extreme funkyness, is that there are no Marines. Not that I have anything against them, but I don't want to be in a bar when they're drinking. I'd rather stay far out of the way, and if I have to drive 30 miles, fine.

There's crazy and then there's certifiably insane

One of the more truly insane blogs I follow is The Vatic Project, which regularly posts anti-Semitic economics-related rants and other forms of paranoid fantasies about the state of the world. Just another dot on the spectrum of collapsitarian nuttery, this particular dot pretty far out on the spectrum. Today he -- whoever it is -- posted something and included an introduction, as he often does. A preface of sorts. And this preface is priceless.

They do not want this one up. Taking control of my cursor again so I can't put it up. So do not know when you will get this. I was trying for today, but it may not be til later when I can do this without the messing around. Be patient, ITS GOING UP NO MATTER HOW HARD THEY TRY, I AM FULLY AND UNEQUVICALLY STUBBORN. THIS MEANS YOU NOW HAVE TO READ IT, BECAUSE THEY ONLY DO THIS ON INFO THEY DO NOT WANT OUT THERE.... SO GET THIS OUT THERE ALL OVER THE PLACE. THANKS. Its about waiting til I get a different shift. hehehe.

It appears that its the OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL TREASURY THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. SO PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THAT AND DIG EVEN FURTHER SINCE THEY SEEM TO HATE THAT ONE WHICH IS WHERE I GET THE WORSE MESSING OF THE CURSOR.

Wow, "they" must really not want it up on the internet -- whoever "they" are -- because no sooner did I click on the link than I get a "Page Not Found" message. It Really Makes You Think, Doesn't It??!?

For those really interested, here is a screenshot of the feed from Google Reader from which I pulled his text. I was able to get only a couple of the lines of the actual article, but it's the preface I love.

'Uniquely Southern' panic rooms also serve as storm shelters

Coincidental to my research on nutbag collapsitarians and survivalists (don't miss The Biggest Threat to Your Survival? An American Economic Collapse) is a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about storm shelters-cum-panic rooms which are said to be "the new must-have" in amenities.

These aren't the dank bunkers your father hid in, as we discuss in today's WSJ story. And they aren't cheap. Many of the new shelters are above-ground $4,000-$15,000 prefabricated pads that can be bolted to the garage's concrete pad, or even installed inside the home. They boast names like "StormRoom" and "Iron Eagle II" and often lead double lives of offices, tool sheds and even wine cellars in less turbulent times. DuPont makes one reinforced with bullet-resistant Kevlar. Builder Rhonda House, owner of Uniquely Southern Homes in Ward, Ark. says she regularly includes safe rooms in her new custom homes, calling it a "must-have item."

Did you catch that? Not only is the owner of a house-building company named Rhonda House -- un nom du destin, as my French teacher would say -- but her company is called Uniquely Southern Homes. I think a bullet-proof storm shelter really is a uniquely Southern idea, don't you? Doesn't say if they also come with gun racks.

I also liked this bit:

Above-ground designs are particularly popular among families with elderly members who might not be able to navigate stairs or make it across the yard into a bunker quickly.

Wow, what could possibly go wrong?

"Hello Momma? ... No, Momma, those aren't tornado sirens, that's probably just an ambulance. ... Because I'm looking at the weather on the internet and there's nothing on the radar. ... Well of course the internet knows. ... Momma, please don't lock yourself in the storm shelter again. Hello? Momma? Hello?"

Yes: If your elderly mother locks herself in the tornado-proof, bullet-proof storm shelter and can't remember how to get out, how do you get her out?

Desert sojourn: day 5

First rays of sunlight, looking north over the desert

On my walk this morning, I started late, took an alternate route, and wound up walking along the highway for a short distance as traffic blew by at 65 mph, probably commuters heading for jobs on the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms.

Like yesterday, after my walk and my morning coffee, I spent the entire day inside, from 9:00 a.m. to just after 4:30. It's not the heat I'm hiding from as much as the sun, and aside from the back porch in the early mornings, there's not much shade around this house. After 3:00 pm it's possible to sit in a chair in front of the house in a little bit of shade, if I really need to, and I did sit out there a lot reading on Saturday and Sunday.

After logging off my job for the day, I went over there myself on a second attempt to do laundry. While the stuff was in the machines I waited at the Jack in the Box and the McDonalds, each of which held several Marines who had just gotten off work, or whatever you call it -- off duty, I guess. Man, they are young. I almost said "Marine boys." But of course any of them could take me apart like Toshiro Mifune takes apart that sub-standard shoe in "The Bad Sleep Well." All the Marines were eating copious amounts of McDonalds food. When you're 18, what you eat is what you eat. A middle-aged man who was sitting there actually said something like "That's a lot of food." The Marine answered, "Yes sir, I had no lunch, I'm hungry."

Also seen in town were a couple of degenerate-looking characters, one of them heavily tattooed and scrawny as a starving dog, the other meatier and only slightly less mean-looking. I saw them wander across the street in one direction, and then half an hour later they were in the McDonalds at the same time I was.

I came home and skimmed half of this crazy book I picked up for half price at Borders a few months ago. It's a so-called novel written by a survivalist gun nut about how to survive the breakdown of society after the U.S. economy implodes following a sudden bout of hyperinflation. Ninety percent of the book is devoted to detailed explanations of how to stock up for the great collapse, how to run your survival retreat like a military camp, and so on.

It is not a novel in any sense of the word; rather, a narrative of how a group of people would survive for several years after the collapse of society if they had properly prepared. (To his credit, in an interview the author himself admitted, "I don't pretend it's a literary masterpiece.")

What I find entertaining, aside from the unintentionally funny stuff of which there is a great deal, is the window into the mindset of the survivalist type and the unexamined assumptions he makes. Maybe the biggest assumption is that a total social breakdown inevitably and swiftly would follow the collapse of the economy. He takes it for granted that riots and looting swiftly render every city and town uninhabitable, as if everyone becomes like one of the zombies with the Rage virus in "28 Days Later" as soon as the power grid fails. This happens universally, he says. Well, if it doesn't, then there's no reason for his little stronghold, obviously. Anyway, he never tires of endless discussions of how to create a homemade cannon, and how to make your own camouflage suit, and endless near-pornographic discussions of guns and ammunition.

This is research, of course.