Nice motel. Clean. I can recommend it. Very close to the churches, the other motel and the liquor store.

I'm not kidding. Over there on the right, when I say I post too much at other people's blogs I mean that all of my best shit ends up in someone else's comments section.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey mentioned his desire to move to a small town, and before I knew it I had written the following. It's the most interesting thing I've written all week.

"I am undecided. Sometimes I walk around SF and think what a swell place it is. I could live there easily. I could partake of it and abstain from it as I see fit. I would live like a king. When I lived there I felt like the only time the whole city wasn't in my face it was because my face was being rubbed in dogshit.

At the other extreme, I have friends in Boron, way the fuck out in the desert. It's an hour's drive through featureless sand and sagebrush to get to a grocery store that sells fresh produce. The town exists because of one of the world's only known deposits of Boron. The mine is what the whole town is about. That and Edwards Air Force Base, "The Gateway to Area 51."

My friend's dad retired from the Air Force and worked at Edwards as a civilian employee for 30 years. He loves to obliquely mention some remote location, "over the hill" and then say, "That would be talking about Groom Lake, and I'm not allowed to do that. Yuck Yuck."

Boron has about 500 people, eight churches, two motels and a liquor store. Ore trains roar through the center of town several times a day. You can see the hill where the Air Force tests rocket engines. I mean big ass ICBM -Mercury-Space Shuttle rocket engines. Periodically they fire one up and the whole town shakes. Also, the Air Force has a special exemption that allows them to overfly the town at supersonic speeds and as low as 500 feet. If nothing else is rattling your dentures you can look forward to an experimental jet screaming overhead so low you can see the pilot's face, followed by a sonic boom that knocks all the china off the shelf.

I really like it there. I must have some bad white trash genes in me because there's nothing to explain it except the call of the blood.

If you're ever there, go to the Mexican restaurant. It's also the only bar in town. All of the astronauts drink there. They have all kinds of Air Force memorabilia signed by authentic space heroes. The story is that it's a money laundering operation for some very heavy Mexian Mafia guys. I've met them. They are charming. Some guy broke in there a few years ago. He tried to steal the safe. A few days later he was found in his basement. His mouth was taped shut. His hands were taped behind his back. His legs were broken. His feet were touching the ground, but he was hanging by a noose around his neck. The sheriff walked around the body and ruled his death a suicide. I guess the boy was despondent or something.

Don't let anybody tell you small towns are boring. Boron is totally punk rock."

It was one hundred and two degrees here today. The fires are still burning all over the state. The air is thick with smoke. My eyes are red and swollen. My sinuses hurt. I have not been sleeping well. Don't expect much from me.

This morning, I went swimming with my stepdaughter, April. We were in the pool at the condo where she and my ex live. It was so hot the water was warm, but it was still better than being out of the water. Afterwards I went and did more volunteer training at Free Mind Media Center. I volunteered to clean the bathroom. It is now much cleaner than the bathroom here at mi casita mobile. I found out that my fellow trainee is from Evansville, Indiana. She lived in Bloomington for a few years. She knew my friend Tommy Donahue. If the temperature was less than 102 and if the sky was some color other than orange we would have laughed at the coincidence. Too much work though.

And speaking of coincidences, the mystic algorithms behind iTunes did some fabulous DJ'ing and sequenced these two songs together. It's a seamless mix if you listen to them in the order presented. Grime meets surf pop somewhere over the desert.


I swear I had some real serious writing planned for today. I was gonna write about the virtues of sweaty old white men with heart, and the class struggle and why I still don't heart hippies. It was gonna be major, with major musical contribu's to match. Not that kind of day. XXOO