Gun control and the lunatic fringes

Ruger LCR

Everyone should own as many guns of whatever type he or she wants. These weapons should be carried openly or concealed according to the wishes of each person, 24/7, everywhere. No training or certification or permit or license should ever be required for any weapon under any circumstances. Just print out a little card with the text of the 2nd Amendment–that’s all you should need. Remember also to carry your ANTI-Fourteenth Amendment card with you as well. If you want to carry (while drunk) seven fully automatic rifles with large capacity magazines and sit on a bench in a crowded city park full of 5 year-olds supervised by nuns (the nice nuns, not the mean old battle-axe finger-smashing nuns like Kathleen Freeman in The Blues Brothers), you should be able to do that without fear of being hassled by the cops or the UN or Nancy Pelosi. Kathleen Freeman also played General Burkhalter’s sister in “Hogan’s Heroes,” and General Burkhalter was a Nazi—think about that. The government has no right to set any limits at all on our God-given right to keep and bear arms. Guns were given to the great American people (people who look and think like me) by JESUS to repel the vicious hordes and to Take Back Our Country, and I will not allow the government to take mine away! This nation was founded on guns and the Bible (Jesus carried a Glock, as you know, and many other guns as well), and it is every person’s right - outlined extensively in the Bible - to own and carry as many guns as possible at all times. Except the people who don’t think or look like me. They don’t get to keep ‘em. I’m building a fortified compound, complete with underground bunkers and ammo storage containers, under the scrubby sands of the Nevada desert. It’s 80 miles off-road just to reach my compound, and I have a bunch of stuff stored in a spare SUV ready to go once the SHTF. Remember, Obama wants to take our guns. I heard it on Fox News a whole bunch of times. He plans to ship them all to his real home in Kenya or Indonesia or wherever (I can’t remember for sure–I gotta check with Rush again to find out exactly where. It’s one of those African countries–Kenya or Indonesia or maybe Syria. Or maybe North Korea). Also, remember that the first thing Hitler did when he was elected was to take the guns!!! I know this because I read the signature lines of every guy who posts his opinions in the various gun forums on the Internet.
                                                •   •   •
I am morose, and my heart goes out to all the victims of the capitalist, violent gun culture. Guns are inherently evil. They can shoot on their own even when they’re not loaded, because they have some kind of Bad Force that allows them to act independently. Guns are not healthy for children and people and other living things in nature, and there is no valid use for them. Some of my friends think that target shooting is okay, but I disagree; guns are like drugs, and once a person (especially a male person) starts shooting at paper targets made in Indonesia by child labor, he will invariably start shooting people within a year or less. A gun is a malevolent thing unto itself. Its sole purpose is to kill and maim and wound and tear asunder all that is good. People who own guns are mostly guys who have short penises. I know this because my encounter group discussed it with a woman named Zenith Moon Butterfly Flowerpower and Jason Alexander on the top of Mt. Tam one morning, and then we chanted rhythmically to celebrate the sunrise. Visualize world peace and It Will Happen. Peace-loving people should just hand over their money and their houses and their children if a Bad Man comes around. There’s just too much violence in the world as it is, and we should all sacrifice individual autonomy for the greater good. In every state that allows people to carry concealed handguns, the murder rates are off the chart. How do I know? My reflexologist/aromatherapist told me so. People shoot their neighbors all the time, with Uzis, which I heard are used by the Israeli Army to shoot innocent Palestinians every single day. Guns have some kind of cosmic negative karma, conferred upon them by people like Hitler. Remember, Hitler commanded a vast army and they had guns!!! Kathleen Freeman also played Miss Hannigan in the 2nd National Touring Company of "Annie" in the late 70's/early 80's, and Miss Hannigan was not a good person! I truly believe that if we reason with robbers and killers and gang members and tell them that they will get in Really Big Trouble if they have guns, they will stop, because they don’t want to go to jail.

•   •   •

You say your position is somewhere between these two extremes? Congratulations--you just might be capable of reasoning.

© Pseudocognitive

Note: Just because a continuum exists and I find fault with both extremes of that continuum does NOT necessarily imply any of the following (a) That I have heretofore identified, explicitly or implicitly, the specific spot along that continuum where the most reasonable, logically supportable position is located; (b) That I personally identify more with one extreme than the other; or (c) That I believe it is practical to completely unlink this issue from all other sociopolitically contentious discussions.

Daily Journal: Bad Noir and the Nun's Ovaries

June 12, 1958 - Petaluma, California

Raptors woke me before I was ready. It was cold, so I found a discarded blanket, the value of which cannot be overstated except by those who senselessly appreciate reality. Snead was waiting, tapping his feet impatiently on the pavement and leaning on his low-slung purple brougham. I asked him for a spare magazine, because he always went into a fight over-prepared and I had used the opposite tactic on more than one occasion. He gave me a dog-eared Argosy. Worthless pulp and I told him so. He shot me in the gonadal vicinity but only hit one. Nature’s redundancy is awesome.
The next day I drove Snead’s car to the Jiffy Lube to get some bottles of fine beer. I prefer to drink my brew from a brown bottle, not green or clear, and they have some good lager over there. The owner, Marge, gave her ovaries to a nun who’d renounced her vows, and ever since my cars ran bad but I never wanted for beer. Marge is a decent woman but her skinny no-good husband Mixer Man is a bumbling failure at the serial killing arts. He’s always letting people escape and run through the shop. I’ve already decided to throw him to the carnivorous tadpoles in the Amazon drainage but I can’t bear to tell Marge. She collects vintage pickles.“Why won’t you just follow directions for once, you motherfucking fuckers?” This was Mix (a lover of redundancy himself). He couldn’t get his latest victim sweepstakes contestants to agree on the order of their demise. He finally gave up when the fastest of them kicked him in his smallberries. Most of the same lot would be back next week anyway, and pickles don’t go bad.

© Pseudocognitive

Non-Redacted Zodiac Killer Profile Part II: He’s dead, Jim

Lake Berryessa Zodiac crime scene

Even the most experienced and highly trained criminal profilers acknowledge that profiling is more art than science. This is another way of saying that when you try to apply the generalizations of psychology to specific unknown individuals, it is utterly impossible to control for even a fraction of the variables that affect behavior. Any profiler who doesn’t acknowledge this is just a quack. I base this view primarily on my innate skepticism of most things; I performed no searches of the legitimate literature on the topic. If someone would like to argue the point, I encourage it.


Zodiac is dead. If you cling to the hope that he’s alive and you might be the person who catches him, I suggest that you get comfortable in your mom’s moldy basement, stock up on ganja and DiGiorno, and get a new keyboard to replace that one with the overused CAPS LOCK key. If I have a few spare minutes, I’ll look for you on the various
fora every December 20 and see what you’re up to.
As I possibly described in part one of the profile, Zodiac is rumored to have had ties to a PETA precursor group somewhere in the high wheat country of western Kansas, perhaps very close to the small town of Holcomb. I got my start on the path to this tentative conclusion when I discovered a previously overlooked piece of evidence: Zodiac’s right Wing Walker shoe. I am not currently prepared to explain the circumstances of this discovery, as it may have been found on federal BLM land, but the shoe has been examined and authenticated by somebody in some agency someplace.  Please remember that many to most of the statements herein are complete dreck. Zodiac was possibly terrified of small insects as a child. It has been suggested that it may have been the sight of scurrying creatures small enough to chew on his eardrums that did more than anything else to steer him toward his eventual fate. Each of his thumbs had a highly flexible metacarpal phalangeal joint. He ventured into two-bit seedy dives in the worst part of every town he passed through in order to hone his fighting skills. It was in one such place that he almost met his doom when the bartender shot at him point-blank with an old 10 gauge his grandpa had used to hunt geese out of season on Suisun Bay. The gun misfired.

A possible former Zodiac haunt in an undisclosed location

Secret place in Rio Vista, thought by some to have an undefined role in the etiology of Zodiac's mental pathology

There are tantalizing hints of Zodiac’s passage in the dry summer of 1960 through many places around the arid southwest. In Needles, California, which sits across the mighty Colorado from Arizona, there was later discovered, carved in the riverbank silt at the spot made famous by Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” a symbol eerily similar to the one Zodiac scrawled on his letters to Bay Area newspapers (and on the door of Bryan Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia).

This is rumored in many zones to be a former Zodiac hideout/staging headquarters.

If the Zodiac murders were happening now, who would the killer be? These crimes are to be treated here—in order to free our minds from the the stultifying atmosphere created by the anti-think mass media/politico-corporate complex—as a scourge of the current day, and we examine the characteristics that may lead us to Zodiac. He’s your neighbor, the friendly guy who’s always willing to help you unload large pieces of furniture but who invariably lets you know that he has a better way to do it.  He’s your other neighbor–the guy who refuses to talk to anyone and takes his solitary meals in the backyard under an old mulberry tree, cradling a varmint gun in his lap in case the squirrels or pigeons bother him. He works at a mini market and buys all the Penthouse and Hustler magazines before they go on the rack. His job involves, as I said before, long-distance driving, usually along deserted roads across the high desert. Last year he tried to prospect for a local second-tier 1% motorcycle club. He didn’t make it, of course, but he still uses the slang he picked up, and this bothers some people. He is the proprietor of a bait shop near Steamboat Slough and he refuses to sell jumbo minnows to any customer who does not first promise to render each of them unconscious with ice water before running a gleaming 1/0 hook through its lips. He is a five foot-six vice principal of the old school who calls everyone “slacker.” He gave up trying to grow hair years ago, and now shines his pale, globe-like head with ski wax. He wears Pendleton® shirts hanging out with only the top button fastened because he once read a book about the history of Los Angeles gangs. He’s your podiatrist, and he’s angry whether you know it or not.

Returning to the actual time of Zodiac’s activities, if you will consult any 60′s era gas station map you will discover—with the aid of a ruler and pencil—that the driving distance from North M and Vine in Needles to the summit of Mt. Diablo is 555 miles.  If you add that to the 111 miles from Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco to an unspecified spot alongside US 50 west of Cameron Park, you get 666 miles. These are possibly coincidences, but as hardwired pattern-seekers, you want to accept it, so I suggest that you do.

The gravel turn-out at the Lake Herman Road Zodiac crime scene.

We could, under some circumstances, know incontrovertibly that Zodiac can definitely be placed in the Bay Area by 1961, perhaps. Legends of possibly unexplained phenomena involving gravitational anomalies, mysterious ice blue (or white or gray or silver or pearl-colored) pursuit cars skulking along dark roads, as well as several nearly-confirmed disappearances within a 50 mile radius of Samuel P. Taylor State Park from January 1955 to July 1967 tend to support this contention. This kind of behavior, according to several persons identifying themselves as experts, often escalates to homicide. That these incidents occurred within a nearly 8,000 square mile area over a twelve and-a-half year time frame just about nails it down. Additionally, the socio-chronological progression along a vaguely described continuum of moral permissiveness in that era set the stage for all kinds of undifferentiated behavioral permutations. The time was ripe, and by the end of this period, Zodiac was ready to take his twisted games to the ultimate level.

© Pseudocognitive

UPDATE!

Now hear this:

There is nothing new to report. Endocranial discontinuity continues to play a major role in the lack of reportable developments. Do not stay tuned for further info.

That is all.

A lightly guarded interface

I have no answer for whatever question I should be thoughtfully considering at this time. Until I can think of one, here's another of the several documented entrances to Hell in my area. I snapped this shot while coming out of the pharmacy a few days ago. I can't recall ever seeing a manhole cover quite like it before, a fact that is germane to nothing.

© Pseudocognitive

Burn rubber

No one was supposed to get hurt. Real criminals never say that or even think it. I would not base my evaluation of any dire progression of chaotic events on Ridley Scott's approximation of human behavior under such conditions. And who the hell says tarmac anymore? There's no rubber on the tarmac; that's out at the airfield at what used to be the south edge of town, where the Koren War era fighter from north of the border skittered down three-zero and slammed into the ice cream parlor sometime between the summer of love and the age of disco. 

This is a parking lot and those marks are burned on blacktop or asphalt or pavement. A guy once got shot near this place and I had to look at his distal innards as they tried to slither out the colander that used to be his belly and those things were still squeezing and trying to move the mail. I tried my best to keep them inside. You don't forget a thing like that.

© Pseudocognitive

Update from Five Dead Riders memorial site

I shot this picture last weekend and now I notice that T.S.S. made the plaque. I don't know who T.S.S. is. See the post right below this one for more info on the incident the plaque commemorates.

© Pseudocognitive

Five Dead Riders

“This marks one of the worst tragedies in motorcycle history. The purpose of this memorial is to never forget those of us who have fallen, and to remind us how precious life is and how quickly it can be taken away.  Live to ride, ride to live, God speed and please be careful.”

I first read that plaque on an unseasonably cool Monday in early August, 2009. High sky, no clouds, 77° at noon. Perfect riding weather on NorCal’s west Sierra slope, and the road we’d been following after bailing from US 50 near Pollock Pines was nearly devoid of traffic. A few weeks earlier, I’d jacked-up my rotator cuff falling down a mountain near that same road, trying to save my Nikon after tripping over some rusty barbed wire. That day, my brother and I continued on to Virginia City, where we ate fish tacos, visited the dead in a dusty 19th Century bone yard, and saw a drunk chick ride a little Ninja down Main Street.

On the way back down the hill we spotted a row of five large crosses sheltered by pines on a roadside embankment. We were racing the sun with no time to stop; I had witnessed the effects of deer on the motorcyclists who’ve smacked into ‘em, and I had no intention of letting one claim me. Just as well, as I was also feeling the need for something stronger than Motrin for that damned shoulder after riding several hundred miles using my other arm to lift my hand to the throttle. We sped past the site and made plans to follow up on it sometime later.

Later wound up taking a few months to materialize. Having failed to win the lottery, I was forced to allow work to interfere with other, more important pursuits. On August 3rd we returned. I wasn't prepared for the intensity of my response.

I am a lifelong, tortured agnostic. I don’t believe in any god, but I don’t actively disbelieve either. There’s a switch in my mind, painstakingly installed and subsequently maintained by the usual combination of genetics and environment, which redirects questions about the alleged persistence of non-corporeal consciousness to an out-of-the-way mental crawlspace. Sure, I think about such things, but when the intractability of the problem wears me down, I just stuff it in that fortified thought locker so I can continue to function in a semi-normal manner.

I had some trouble flipping that switch at the memorial. Memories of riding dirt bikes with my dad when I was a kid, thoughts of my own wife and sons and how my death-by-fiery crash would affect them, the history and physical qualities of the site—all of this contributed to a state that felt like the presence of something bigger. I can do a reasonable job of explaining this with my limited knowledge of neurology, but in this case I'll allow the undefined to remain undefined—to a greater degree than it needs to be—because I like it that way. As long as I make that distinction consciously, it’s cool.

Five stout wooden crosses stand as sentinels for this place that memorializes the lives of five motorcyclists who died on Labor Day weekend in 1989. These crosses line the ridge of a ten foot red dirt embankment along the south side of a sparsely traveled road that gains 4,000 feet in elevation over a distance of about 30 miles as you ride east.

To reach the memorial beyond the crosses, you either scale the embankment or walk along a dirt path threading through the trees from a turn-out half a football field west. Either way, when you get there, be prepared for conflicting emotions. This is a peaceful place, and even the occasional passage of vehicles on the roadway below won’t distract you from contemplating the duality of that peace and the violent collision and fire that claimed five lives. The riders were part of a larger group, maybe 30 or 40 bikes strong, en route to Hope Valley on a bright September morning. The young, inexperienced driver of a west-bound truck hauling wood lost control on the downgrade, and when it was done, James Carter, Jeff Pearl, Jeffrey and Debbie Sund, and Doug Wall were all dead.

Echoes of terror are there if you want them. What would you feel, watching a one-ton flatbed coming at you sideways with just enough time to know your fate but not evade it? Which is worse, blunt force trauma or immolation? Would your thoughts—in that brief interval between threat recognition and fate realization—have any coherence, or would all your energy be spent trying to react? You can ponder those questions when you visit this place, but you’ll also notice how calm and removed it seems, despite the proximity of the road below. You can hear ravens and Steller’s jays. Beds of pine needles, sun-dappled shade, a tree with a trunk and dead limb that forms a big dollar sign 50 feet up. In the summer there are plenty of grasshoppers just outside the perimeter of the little clearing, and western fence lizards skitter around on fallen branches. Life amid the remembrance of loss, the juxtaposition more profound and elemental than what you’ll find at a cemetery. Evidence that not only is Zen something you bring with you and discover more readily when distractions are minimized, but also that a ten foot dirt bank is more than enough mountain to scale in search of it.

In a clearing under the pine canopy there is a simple concrete base supporting a pewter plaque that tells the story. Also mounted on this low pedestal is the engine of one of the bikes, and damage from the extreme heat of the fire can be seen in the parts that melted. Touch it. That V-twin power plant once moved a rider through space and time and spiritual awareness just as your bike moves you now. Examine the bits and pieces of tribute left by other riders. An American flag patch. A laminated card of an artist's depiction of Jesus. Cards bearing the logos of several MC’s and riding clubs. A half-smoked cigar and a sticker with the grinning skull logo of Ironworkers Local 118. Some coins. An old digital watch, cracked and burned and stopped forever. Some .38 Special and .45 long Colt brass. A small brown and white teddy bear. A tiny, bent redwood seedling, nurtured by an elderly couple with a can of water, survivor of winter snows and inadvertently placed boot soles. The old collar and tags of a long-dead, beloved dog.

Leave your own tribute, but respect the tone and nature of the spot and the memory of those whom it honors. Let yourself absorb the detail and the generality, the physical objects, their natural surroundings, and the atmosphere they produce. Don't force it, just let it. If there’s enough of whatever it is to register in the undefined zones of my agnostic mind, it will definitely affect you.

© Pseudocognitive

An excellent memorial-themed ride report from NorCal with some compelling photographs can be found on the John Is On The Road Again blog.


Memorial to Five bikers on SmugMug

I obtained some of the information about the crash from the plaque at the site; the rest of the background information about the incident is from an interesting article by RJ “Cowboy” Carter of the BoozeFighters MC.

Note: In the realm of motorcycle riding, there exist distinctions among the various classifications given to and used by the operators of the machines. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the differences between those who truly are “bikers”and those who are not (not to mention trying to dispel whatever misconceptions some readers may have concerning various stereotypes). For that reason, I have chosen to refer to the people who died in this crash by the more general term “rider,” no offense intended to anyone at all.

More ticking in my head

a cross of dirt

the hot summer sun

fingers, frets and gut

¬

cold fish, midnight sky
pulls the stars across his gills
the moon in his eye
¬

heed nothing, no one

venison, ravening dogs

no more ants patrol

¬

good massage gone bad
look up, surprise! leaking shards
moe green’s red glasses
¬

deserted off-ramp in the dark
a cooling engine
tick tick tick
no occupants
but
the radio
plays
¬

sanguineous ops
median cubital jab
vacutainers slaked
¬

black ribbon through green woods
leaping deer, squeezing calipers
asphalt peels my face
¬

in the ditch
pupils fixed and dilated
staring up at nothing
¬

larvae in my head
my stagnant noggin puddle
mental mosquitoes

¬

asphalt under waxing moon
brake lights flash
an arm extends
my doom
¬

blanket on the floor

decline, pain, merciful death

old good-dog is gone

© Pseudocognitive

The Undiscovered Country

The Undiscovered Country is not a Shakespearean death metaphor, and it’s not a future where humans and Klingons get along. The Undiscovered Country is a place inside your head, a tenuously-held position that is periodically shelled by the forces of doubt, worry, and amorphous anxiety. It’s not a comfortable place, but it’s better than retreating or blundering forward in a clumsy stumble toward doom. Fortify, plan, act, and bring that zone of creative tension along as you make a coordinated advance. Avoid the extremes of complacency and fear to the point of inaction. Don’t get caught doing nothing, but don’t do any old thing just for the sake of doing it. Make it count.

© Pseudocognitive

Donut holes and space

This picture is unrelated to the subject matter below.

Defining "nothing" without contextualizing it with something or anything at all might just be impossible.  Today I considered the problem as it relates to fried doughy snacks. They don't sell donut holes. Those greasy little sugary lumps are donut •balls.• A donut HOLE is the empty space in the middle of a donut. It is made by punching out the donut ball with a steely implement. The hole is left behind, wholly defined by the donut around it. The hole does not exist in the absence of the donut. This is either disturbing or comforting.

Next: A tall, horizontally displaced donut as an analogy for the alimentary canal's location outside the body.

© Pseudocognitive

Tortured Berries, or Why Cletus Betrayed Us

Gate to the old cemetery, Virginia City, NV

This is the second installment in a senselessly continuing series of fractured ramblings by an old man who’s outlived his usefulness, which he set down on paper while traveling through the badlands bordering the state of Fugue, which is just outside Virginia City, Nevada.

It was hotter than a whorehouse on nickel night, and had been for near to a month. That's why we decided to try it, on account of the sun baking the dirt so severe that our horses would be able to raise a powdery cloud and obscure our escape. On the day we left, dust did indeed conceal our progress from the observers up in the hills as we made our way through that little valley beyond the old wood gate. Those bastards knew we were down there somewhere, but could not hone their senses good enough to figure our location precisely or to predict what place we were headed to. Until the belly-cheater Cletus decided to go off on his own to higher ground after sage grouse. Dumb idea anyway, circumstances notwithstanding, because although I will allow that Cletus was competent enough with beans and miscellaneous organ meats, he could not cook a feathered creature without rendering it as dry and stringy as what was commonly sold at drugstores to pull last week's jerky out from between your teeth. It took the watchers not one-sixth of an hour to extract the details from Cletus, and from that time forward our end stood in plain form before us. Cletus was left bloody and bereft of his berries, and we lost our only way out.



© Pseudocognitive

Old miseries, myth oxen, and the pungent piss of feral longhorns

On the thirteenth of May we went down the mountain for the last time. Passing quietly through long shadows, our route led us in painful divergence from what we’d once believed we were, offering nothing in place of those beliefs except a more desperate tendency to preserve and defend old miseries. Along our descent, we chewed and snapped at the imaginings of our common fate, like manic dogs unhinged by fleas or pin worms they cannot reach. Farther down, past the place where the creek bends double and tough grasses thrive under the urinary and fecal onslaught of feral Texas longhorns,

the secondary ridge fell off abruptly, so we followed instead the rusted old Union Pacific tracks, all the way around to the south exposure, into a zone where dry grass and scrub predominate more severely the farther down you go. Here, but for the dust and rock and crackly brown plants, there is nothing worthy of careful notation by any but the most desperate chroniclers of human folly in wild places. The truly sobering influence of these lands is best left to others to ponder. None of this would matter anyway, not once we reached habitation, because we would soon be made dead at the hands of self-righteous fools and those who do their bidding. You may have resigned yourself to a similar fate as the likely outcome of the current mess you’ve blundered your way into, but you should remember that I was of a similar mind at the time, yet here I am still.

Continuing down-slope, furtive creatures—perhaps refugees of the last county war—were sighted ahead, shifting in and out of our bleary plane of focus. These were far less substantial than a dusty old boar taking a dirt bath. A man can shoot a boar and eat his muscles and tender parts and use his tusks to beat back the inexorable myth oxen. Not so with these undefined forms flitting about before us. They held fast to no spot for longer than half a moment. We chose to ignore them, and in that manner we passed without further imperilment into town, where the plan was to spend our last night on this earth in stuporous inebriation.

•     •     •

This was the first installment in a senselessly continuing series of fractured ramblings by an old man who’s outlived his usefulness, and it was set down on paper while traveling through the badlands bordering the state of Fugue. The second installment will likely never be set down on these pages. I do not expect nor want you to make any sense of it. Anyone attempting to do so will be consigned to the corners of my mind reserved for blathering media whores like Michelle Rhee and Andrew Breitbart and Tom Tancredo, to name but a few.

About Pseudocognitive:
Meta-nonconformity consultant for a large public agency.  Married father of adult children with autism. Motorcycle rider. Quasi-photographer. Irascible curmudgeon. Get off my fescue. Moved west with the Giants in ’58 but forgot about it until recently. My head grabs a bunch of stuff and doesn’t like to let it go. It has been determined that I should escalate my efforts to rid myself of some of these extraneosities. There is no pattern to be found in the scope or sequence of the topics I post except whatever patterns your own mind creates. Any attempt by the reader to impose his or her patterns on me will be met with apathy. I am a strong and active supporter of the Establishment Clause. Keep your religion out of my publicly funded agencies. I have nothing to do with any ads you may see here; direct your ire elsewhere. I am in favor of eating animals if a person so desires. Save the winter-run Chinook salmon. I post first and proofread later, making numerous edits. I no longer rudely pick my nose in public. No one reads this; you probably shouldn’t either.

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© Pseudocognitive

Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Tourists following non-tourists

Ocean Beach is like Atlantic City without the Boardwalk or casinos. With a better ocean. In a better state.

Big metal boxes

"Lodi Man" (see earlier post for two paragraphs of sketchy details)

I do not know them

Bob was morose--the sea spat him out

Hurry, Spot

British bikes are cool, but one should not place trust in their electrical systems

© Pseudocognitive

How not to record video while riding a motorcycle

Mount a GoPro or something. Don't fumble around with an iPhone in your clutch hand.

© Pseudocognitive

Zodiac Country: Lake Herman Road

Along the infamous Lake Herman Road, about a mile east of the site of the first Zodiac murders. Below and to the left, just out of the frame, you can see the Mothball Fleet.

Yeah, right here.

Coming soon: Zodiac, part 2. Read part one first.

© Pseudocognitive

Intervention: Dragonfly and spider

Random incident report for 28 AUG 2011:

Today I freed a rusty orange dragonfly from a web. Outdoor spider number one looked at me with reproach, but my wife and I have been raising rusty orange dragonflies in our pond longer than I've been observing these fat yard spiders in their five foot diameter webs, and my loyalties are to the odonatans. Spider wasn't gonna eat him anyway; she just looked on in horror as that P-47 Thunderbolt of the insect world thrashed the web all to hell. I got Orange Bob to perch on my index finger while I snipped the silk less than a millimeter from one of his wings, and off he went on another mosquito hunt. No camera available (I only have the two hands), but above you can see a picture of one of his  progenitors, which I snapped with my Instamatic back in '05.

That is all.

© Pseudocognitive

Aha! 12,495 page hits yesterday!

Not really. My record for one day is still 83, with an average of 18 over the three weeks since I began moving this stuff over from the old place. Any of you who do find your way here, feel free to comment on something. Even if its (reasonably) argumentative.

Down in the Delta: Gambling, drinking, and history

On the main street of an old riverfront town in the Delta there is a former gambling hall. This place and the town where it still stands were built and populated long ago by Chinese immigrants to California. The town is Locke, located at the apex of an elbow-bend in the roiling Sacramento River just north of Walnut Grove, and it packs a lot more substance than the post's title implies. You walk through Locke, you don't come out the other end without some history hitching a ride.

© Pseudocognitive

Mono County Line

I do not ever cross this line into Mono County. Thirty years ago, I ran afoul of the sheriff over there, Johann Braun. He always hated me. I don't know why.

© Pseudocognitive

Cataloging the entrances to the underworld

In the storied Calaveras County town of Angels Camp, there is a pit in the rocky ground behind a gas station that is rumored to lead directly to Hell. It is partitioned from the above-world by an anemic fence of chain link and barbed wire, put there as more of an anti-liability measure than as any real attempt to dissuade the hellbent. Mark Twain did not write of this place.


© Pseudocognitive

Zen Place 48: Somewhere overlooking I-5 in California's Great Central Valley

I won’t say where, exactly, because I forgot. It’s just a parking lot on top of a hill on the western edge of the valley. You can drink some water, if you brought some. It’s hot up there in the summer, and if you did not bring water then you should just keep going, unless you are falling asleep in which case get the hell off the highway because the life you save may be mine.

© Pseudocognitive