While flipping through one of my notebooks looking for a poem to transcribe, I found something else I’d written — the start of an essay about authenticity and truth-telling. Like so much of my stuff it was short and rambly, full of analogies and big words. It was four paragraphs long. I groaned re-reading it.

The essay you’re reading now is an attempt at scrapbooking, at harvesting some old writing, at trying to find a use for some of my older scribbles. At the end of the day, maybe I’m just trying to be my own LLM.1

But, reading back over those lines reminded me that I’ve been grappling with the same stuff for years. Sometimes I wonder if it’s fate or epigenetics. Or both. Maybe I am stuck churning over the same ideas because of some secret third reason. Who can tell.

What I can tell is where I was, what I was thinking and feeling, at the time I wrote it. I was most likely on my sunny Arizona patio, and I was probably overthinking for the umpteenth time that day.

“The only way to be yourself in anything approaching uniqueness is to disappear; to blend in,” I wrote. “To camouflage yourself so well that you are barely detectable. You exist as merely background noise. Static amidst more static.”

That reads like someone trying to hide. Static amidst more static. I guess it never occurred to me to change the channel.

The next paragraph had me explaining that maybe the world only exists – has only ever existed — as textbooks and the zeitgeist; something either poorly explained or merely felt and intuited. The world will always be this way “until everything artificial comes crashing down.” I was probably thinking along lines similar to how the victor always writes history.

What I wrote next took several re-reads to parse. At first, I thought it had some merit, even if it was idiotic. Now I think it might be brilliant — but not in the way I had initially intended it. I wrote:

But to speak the truth, you must obfuscate and hide; like the snake amidst fallen leaves. However, one cannot simply disappear. But if one does, you must take no one with you. You are a lunatic and can be trusted by the powers that be because you are a hermitic lunatic – someone aloof, alone, and completely cut-off. Jesus was untouched in the desert; he was only killed in the city.

I advocated for “hermitic lunacy” — that the more alone and weird you are, the more yourself you can be. And, more to the point, that the “powers that be” can trust you because you are hyper: hyperalone, hyperweird, and hyperindividuated. You have no master, therefore you are no one’s slave.

It isn’t quite radical honesty, but it bears the mark of the religious zealot. You can almost see me in camel’s hair, eating locusts and honey, crying alone in the wilderness — vox clamantis in deserto.

There is a truth to the idea of authenticity borne out by being such a “hermitic lunatic”, but it is a partial truth. We need to be alone, but we cannot be alone forever. The solitary figure is either a beast or a god — but even Jesus didn’t spend his entire life in the desert, just the figurative “40 days.”

But wait, there’s more.

The last two lines I wrote kill me to read now; I took these words more than a little to heart. I was playing with poison and accidentally swallowed some: “You must let yourself vanish, disappear. Your true self… let your mask shine forth, masking that true face that lies within.”

This little light of mine, how I’m not going to let it shine! How cruel I was to myself. How afraid to see and be seen. How terrified I was to be perceived.

My feelings now, if it wasn’t obvious, are shifting toward the opposite. The more you that you become — the weirder and more authentic — the less isolated and alone you’ll be. At any rate, at least you and others will know where you stand. These latest articles — Rant: Unbridled and Things Poorly Finished — are an experiment to such an end. The number of conversations both articles have started within my circle has been thought-provoking and gratifying; the chats have prompted yet other topics to address and other rants to write.

I know the obstacles will come, they always do. Practicing any kind of honesty, even in half-measures, will ruffle feathers. Maybe I’ll lose people (and things and opportunities), but I like to think I’ll lose or miss out on only those that are not really meant for me. That, in pretending to be someone else, I would have suffered to keep.

I’ll be less a hermit alone in some desert cave, and more like a cenobite living in a community of shared weirdness. The more weird I am (the more true I am to myself) the more I think I’ll find my place in the world.

No matter how isolated and alone you feel, to paraphrase Carl Jung, “if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.” I know this as fact. Many of the people reading this now are only in my life because I was weird around them. And they, in turn, were weird around me.

If you can’t let your freak flag fly, at least send up a flare — you’ll be surprised at who shows up. I know I was.

1

A h/t to Erik Davis and the below article for how a writer (in this case, Slavoj Žižek) can sometimes become their own LLM. Davis also calls it “self-plagiarism, or perhaps auto-collage.” All three suffice.

Burning Shore

Out of the Oven

The other day a friend sent me “The Elite Capture of Substack,” a post by Cydney Hayes that got a lot of play over the last year. The piece tracked the enshittification of the platform, principally through the introduction of Notes and the feedy shift in focus towards “stacking” and “restacking” and other social media circus acts. Hayes, deploying her g…

Read more

2 years ago · 124 likes · 45 comments · Erik Davis

The great irony of this realization is that the harder I work at something the worse it turns out, the more complicated it becomes. When I lay-off or “phone it in”, it tends to be better. Much better. Perfect, it turns out, is the enemy of good enough.

So much of my “phoning-it-in” is subjective. It feels like a C+, but functions as an A. I still don’t know how this works. Maybe it’s magic.

I experience this truth, and it feels like a truth, in nearly all aspects of my life: work, play, sleep. It’s true when it comes to family, or friends. What I eat, or read. What I write.

I’ve probably had the perfect/good enough problem for most of my life. I could probably trace the origins back to how I interpreted Christianity as a kid, that there was no room for error and that any sin was worthy of a full and complete damnation. The things I would beat myself up over as a child and early teen; the things I would cry about and beg forgiveness for. What a way for a child to feel.

While the things I horse-whip myself over have changed, the beatings continue. No more so than in what I write or what I think I should write, what I think other people want me to write. I have made writing about everything except the act of writing.

There are antidotes to this self-flagellation like “just fucking send it” or “screw it, let’s do it.” Both of those are book titles, by the way, and you can guess what they’re talking about.

The problem is that antidotes only work if the system is stable enough to metabolize them. An antidote, or any cure, can kill just as easily as save. There is no ready-made solution, no one-size-fits-all, no “just add water” version anyone can bake with.

The cure must be tailor-made, custom-fit for every single soul that needs it. To paraphrase Tolstoy: each unhappy soul is unhappy in its own way.

My cure has been to write; to just write and hit send and hope for the best. Sure I edit or add a fresh thought, maybe delete a sentence or add an em dash. But, so much of what is good about my writing (and about myself) is found in the flow, in the stream of consciousness. It’s found with a modicum of effort and maybe the quickest shake through the filter. Oftentimes a little wine helps.

In the end I suppose I value a thing finished poorly more than a thing never finished at all.

I can see where a lizard or rat has dug into the soil around a potted cactus and think about digging and how much effort it takes to dig something out, or up. Or to “dig in” to something. I’m surrounded by a kind of effortless physical functionality and I wonder why my higher-brain functions leave me stuck. I write it out wondering if I can write it out.

I will try and turn the mind into a physical thing.

I have and have not always been like this — but a highly curated life, the one I haphazardly aim for, feels fake. It does not move me, so I do not move for it. Glamour shots or a perfect quote. Bite-sized things, single-use. Scroll on and scroll past. The right efficiency app. Journaling. A thousand noises, but no signal.

I ask what people want from me because I do not know what I want from myself. I hate your artifice because I feel artificial; your stupidity disgusts me because I feel like an idiot. I still feel a civility baked into my bones — bless your heart — that shares marrow with a mace-swinging madness. But I remain motionless, semi-refined; while everything uncivil does just fine on its own.

I think we rant, have always ranted, because it feels the closest to being unbridled. We spit out the bit, and gnash our teeth. There’s a reason wild horses get shot.

Nothing feels as good as justified, righteous anger — and brother are we living in the golden age of it. When everyone is crazy, we all are…and yet, then, no one is! Riddle me that, Batman.

Who you are when you’re alone is who you are. But who are you amongst others? Are you you? Someone else? Does it even matter? In a world of exteriority, interiority means nothing. Absolute honesty will leave you with nothing but clear eyes to see a raw, unvarnished world — it may also leave you on a watchlist.

Open your heart to Jesus, they say — have you also considered opening your heart to the world?

A Complicated, Messy History

The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

Joe Ellis writes like a man exhausted. For fifty-years, Ellis has waxed poetic about American history in an effort to gently course correct some of the narratives around our nation’s founding. He’s written mostly on the American Revolution, with standalone biographies on George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. He was even given a Pulitzer Prize for his trouble.

The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, his latest, feels less like his next great volume on American history and more like a patchwork of years and years of notes stitched together into a long, disjointed essay. Which is a shame because the subject matter is important.

Ellis’ “great contradiction” is how a country founded on “all men are created equal” can then institutionalize slavery. He also asks, in two chapters that feel tacked on, how this same nation, with such high principles, can turn around and allow (even encourage) the expulsion of Native Americans from their traditional homelands. In short: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but for whom?

Ellis doesn’t really answer the question, but does give us a few puzzle pieces to place on our own. He shows the nation’s founders as complicated men, historical titans whose morality frequently dueled (and lost) to the economic necessities of their day. For every Washington or Jefferson, there was an Adams and Franklin. Then, much like today, we want the same things: life, liberty, and happiness. We just disagree on how to achieve them.

Lincoln: America’s King Arthur

Behold the man of western wood
Stony faced besides
Who’s captaincy now had him stood
Among the reddening tides

Whose conscience and a legal bent
Demanded fair redress,
But shattered state to him was lent
A tattered, bloody mess.

That stars and stripes so loosely stitched
Should pull apart with ease
That lo, men’s minds should be bewitched
Bring freedom’s queen to knees.

And this was done with great applause
And gentle hands did clap,
Though befuddled freedom frozen, paused
Across pale ivory slapped.

That violence made virtue of wound
A red badge wrapped up tight
That of the flesh, a pounds a pound,
Though steel and iron bite.

And from a land great riches pulled
A pale king eyes the sun;
The cup of inequity frothed full
And stirred by loaded gun.

A medieval doctors cure it was
Grapeshot is like a leach;
Blood for blood, cause for cause
A red tide froths the beach.

Lightening strike and thunder boom
Betray the wrath of God
And heated rain, foretelling doom
Dead muskets stuck in sod.

And now to turn the ship about
To beach and harbor burned?
To strike the colors — with fear and doubt!
Let freedom then be spurned?

Or raise the banners, let them fly!
The game is now at hand.
Let cannons blow like trumpets high
Bring liberty to land.

With Kentucky paws and western grit
Like log-hewn cabin made
Arthurian peace, let heroes sit
In sunny shade and glade.

Though victor great, no spoils seen
The captain now at rest.
A tired face, with scoured sheen
With arms across his chest.

Flags hang low, and spears lay cracked
A kingly final bow,
A stately tomb, in history’s place
Finely earned, and how.

And if the port should burn anew
And freedom’s forces slack,
No matter if they many or few,
We’ve Lincoln at our back.

We hear the trumpets sound — our fates!
Now pick up battle cry,
Forces fell are at the gates,
It’s liberty or die!

Why We Crave Baseball

What does it mean to love your home?
Is it writing for it?
Do you preach pretty words,
Like paltry psalms while
People pray over their morning coffee?
Hoping for more than sugar
To sweeten their day?
Is it killing for it?
Throwing a knuckleball for it?

Maybe it’s because the world spins
Like a pitch
High and inside
So fast, too fast —
And screaming for your head.
Maybe that is why we duck,
Swing wildly
Or stand dumbstruck
Like frozen pizza;
Counting the seams flashing by.
A highlight reel too quickly gone.
One made for our eyes only
As the world watched us
Blink.

I think that is why we crave baseball so badly.
By gripping the leather
We control the world.
That is,
Until we let it go.
There’s only one reason to hold on,
But 108 to let it fly.
It’s only then that we realize:
Home is a universal
And everyone wants to play.

Opening Day, A National Holiday?

That Opening Day should be a national holiday is a common, if cheeky, remark passed around baseball fan bases like a communal whisky flask — everyone takes a sip. It’s a day that makes your average baseball nut a little irrational, but makes the diehards lose all touch with reality. It’s a day of frenzy and joy.

If you’re me, then it’s the kind of day that makes you want to take the day off, fill-up your gas tank for four-bucks-a-gallon, and drive the 400-odd miles to watch the San Diego Padres play the Detroit Tigers at Petco Park. That little burg on the beach, and its too perfect Mediterranean climate, is less than a day away. Hell, it’s only 6 hours if you speed along The Eight.

Interstate-8: That long, narrow highway that’s mostly desert and empty wilderness until you get to Yuma — the old Spring Training home of the Padres. I-8 is the type of road where the only pull-off is the one you make. Follow it from just south of Casa Grande, AZ and you’ll find the other end in El Cajon, California. You can tell you’re in the American Southwest by the way its roads take you from one Spanish-named town to another. But, be sure to slow down once you get to Patton Valley. The border with Mexico is right over — there.

The more I write about it, the better a drive along that old mafia-built road sounds. Too bad for me I could only watch Nicky Pivetta, our Opening Day starter, hurl meatballs from the comfort of my cracked, ivory-colored couch. I wasn’t there and Pivetta stunk.

What occurred next was one of those funny little things where you start to wonder if he was lousy because you weren’t there. Did the team suck eggs because I couldn’t be bothered to make the drive? Could my single voice, or my presence alone, be enough? Would the team have felt it if the day’s attendance had been not 43,611 but, instead 43,612?

The mystic in me says yes, even if the rationalistic side says: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” But that’s baseball, baby. Such is the mental plight of the average diehard fan — your team doesn’t lack discipline or suffer from poor coaching, they live or die by whether you are there. Without your presence they are nothing.

And without my presence they struck out ten times and barely managed to score two runs. It’s only been one game and already the poor, suffering baseball fan thinks: “The best part about being a Padres fan is that, eventually, you’ll be dead.” Tell that to the 43,611 chumps who showed up.

One game down, one-hundred-and-sixty-one to go.

During poetry readings, sometimes you’ll hear the words “Speak, poet!” It’s a way to encourage the poet to speak — obviously. In my experience it’s also a good way to get the poet to hurry-up and read the damn poem. It’s also a set of words I use quite frequently outside of their poetic context.

For me, it’s a way to encourage others (and usually myself) to get talkin’ already. And the talkin’ is literal, because some things you have to say out loud — to yourself, to no one in particular. You have to put it out there. But, whatever words you choose you must speak them and you must speak them out loud.

I spent about ten-days in Wasilla this past January, visiting my in-laws. During one conversation with my father-in-law I said: “Sometimes I feel like giving up writing, that everything worth writing has already been written.” It’s something I had thought about a lot, but keeping it inside hadn’t helped.

The only thing faster than the speed of light was my father-in-law’s vociferous disagreement.

Share

Which is to say that some things — maybe most things, if we’re being honest with ourselves — need the light of day, need room to move around and breathe. If I hadn’t been honest with my father-in-law, and if he hadn’t been so frank in return, maybe I would have stopped writing. At any rate, this particular story wouldn’t have happened and I wouldn’t be telling you about it now.

For me, it’s writing. For someone else, it might be baking or making music. And who would ever say “this world has enough muffins” or “I think that’s enough music for eternity.” You can never have enough muffins, and the universe is literally music.

I think speaking out loud is a form of prayer. Prayer is the act of speaking to, depending on your beliefs, a higher power or even the universe itself; and actual prayer is often the only way that some people can ask for help. And when help is asked for, how often is it asked for casually? How many times have you needed help, only to put off the asking until things were dire? How often is help seen as a last resort? How many situations could have been avoided with an earlier: “Please, help me.”

• To those asking for help: Be brave. There is always help. You will always find the light of a friend in the middle of the dark.

• To those who are asked for help: Stay vigilant. Sometimes the ask is obvious, sometimes it’s hidden even from the one asking. But, there are always signs for those with the eyes (and heart) to see them.

Sometimes we just need a little help, sometimes a lot. There is no art to asking, really, and sometimes you just need to ask no matter how it looks or sounds. We humans are intuitive creatures, but sometimes we can be a little dense. We don’t read minds (yet).

At the end of the day, some things must be said and said out loud — both for those listening, and for the speaker themself. Put it out there. Let people help you and remember: Speak, poet!

The Summer of Philip

I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more. I’m not reading more of the inanities to be found on the Internet, but real, physical books. I’ve spent most of the late summer knee-deep in the novels of Philip K. Dick. There was a stretch where that was all I read.

Dick, for those who don’t know, is known for his science-fiction and wrote the stories behind what later became the films Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as the TV show The Man In The High Castle. Which is to say, a lot of modern science-fiction has roots in the imagination of Dick.

But for me, where his stuff goes from great to transcendent, is everything he wrote after the spring of 1974. Between February and March, Dick had what could be best described as a break from reality. Or maybe, a reconfiguration and recontextualization of everything. Whatever it was changed him.

In February 1974, Dick was on doctor-prescribed sodium pentothal for an impacted wisdom tooth. A delivery girl came to his door and, as he opened the door, he was “hit” with what he described as a “pink beam of light” reflecting off the fish-shaped pendant on the girl’s necklace. The fish-shaped pendant, displaying an Ichthys, is colloquially called the “Jesus Fish.”

Dick believed tha the pink beam was an entity. “It had memories dating back over 2,000 years… there wasn’t anything that it didn’t seem to know.” The entity, according to Dick, had even been a member of an early Christian sect.

Where things got even stranger, is that the entity told Dick that his 4-year-old son Chris was sick. After a battery of tests (and several “he’s in good health!) doctors diagnosed his son with a right inguinal hernia; this occurs when abdominal tissue pushes through an opening in the lower abdominal wall and into the groin. It is life-threatening.

For Dick, and countless readers of his Exegesis — the 1000+ page handwritten book that he spent the next 8 years writing and that was later published posthumously — the diagnosis of his son was proof of something beyond the author, that something (supernatural or otherwise) had occurred to him. It’s an important part of the writer’s lore and still leaves contemporary readers divided. It also left a huge impact on Dick’s career.

Subscribe now

Dick would spend the rest of his life writing stories that incorporated the events of 1974; all in an effort to understand what it was that had actually happened to him. The first of his fictional works to address it was the semi-autobiographical VALIS — it was also the first-ever of his books I read. (No, I do not suggest starting your journey into the world of Philip K. Dick with VALIS). Other works like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer would later pick-up the threads laid-down in VALIS.

These later works are fiction, but weave in ideas of gnosticism, Christianity, philosophy, aliens, literature, history, and the idea that the universe is a vast active living intelligence system — which he called VALIS (thus the book title). These later works are full of searching, damaged characters trying to help other searching and damaged characters make or find meaning in their lives. Sometimes the meaning is just surviving, and sometimes the characters don’t survive.

…because sometimes there is nothing we can do but bear witness. To carry on as best we can. To be the light amidst the darkness of other people’s souls.

Your Mileage (of Life) May Vary

One of the ironies of life is that one day job I have has me creating newsletters — a thing I can do just fine on the clock, but throw Desert Dispatch in front of me and every thought I have ever had gets sucked up into a haboob and dropped miles away. Alas, sometimes it is easier to convey the thoughts of others than one’s own.

Another gig I have has me working with guys either half my age or twice my age. Out of probably 20 of us, I am the only adult who is smack in the middle of everyone age-wise. Months ago I was explaining (I pontificate, but I try to be short-winded) to one co-worker how I thought most people actually like being told what to do; humans, in essence, crave two things: meaning and direction.

Unfortunately, it feels like a lot of modern life denies us both of these things. So much of life can feel meaningless and directionless. But, here is a great irony of history: despite modern life being, in many ways, soul-destroying, you can kinda-sorta do what you want — in most times, situations, and places. You can quit your job, move across the country, open a small bookshop out of a van, learn Latin on YouTube, drink burgundy on a boat, raise chickens, fight an HOA, make zines, create the ultimate sandwich, or just walk up a mountain.

That is all to say that while life can suck, we also usually have the agency to make it un-suck. We don’t always have physical agency, but the Mind can always set itself free. How strong the Mind is varies from person to person, so your mileage may vary. But, ask anyone who has survived anything how important the Mind is — the ability to think and reason, feel and experience. Sometimes our head is the only thing we have and, well, that ain’t nothing.

Grief, Like A Sad Ship

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief. Thinking and feeling. A friend of ours passed unexpectedly last month, but the emotional calendar has jumped between two poles: “it was yesterday” and “it was forever ago.” Another friend says I’m probably still in shock, and maybe he’s right.

I have never considered myself excessively morbid, but there has always been a squadron of sad ships that seem to trail behind me. I asked my wife the other day — as I sat there with fists and gritted teeth, trying to get the words out — why? Why am I like this?

Why do these sad ships, each crewed by a missing soul, follow behind me? Now, for the record, nothing supernatural has ever occurred. This is almost like an unresolved tension — the tension between the knowledge that those who are gone are actually gone and the fact that, in my head, they are so vividly alive and real.

The number of years that go by seem to matter little and I don’t know if I will ever know why I feel like I do. I do know that I am not alone in this. Grief is something experienced alone, each in our own heads, but it is something that we all experience at one point or another.

So then, grief is like rowing a little boat surrounded by other people doing the same thing. We’re all just rowing around each other, paddles out, eyes wet. Sometimes our boats get close enough that we can grieve together, other times we leave the paddles in the oarlocks and cry alone.

I know this present grief will lessen in severity, in intensity. However, I also think it will never go away. It’ll be tucked away along some mental shoreline that I’ll walk along regularly, and every time I look at the harbor I’ll see all those little boats again. Sometimes I’ll smile, sometimes I won’t be able to.

At the end of the day, I am glad for it. Because if I can grieve it means I can still feel, it means I am still alive to grieve. That I, in some small way, keep these loved ones alive by remembering them. I remind myself that if anyone gets through life with their hearts intact that they didn’t do it right. So, until I am the one that is grieved, I will keep rowing my boat. I will row and look for the others like me and spare a thought, and a backwards glance, for those who drift silently behind me.1

While I continue to beaver away at a larger piece — or series of pieces, or a monograph, or a short story — on my much increased distrust and loathing of AI and how, yes, it actually is the Antichrist, the inspiration for something a little less divisive and exhausting has come along. You guessed it: baseball!

Because baseball is not divisive in the least. And everyone within baseball agrees that every other team is Good and Pure and Righteous. Except: not. On some level we all hate each other, even just a little.

As we rocket towards the postseason — crying death or glory! — I thought it pertinent to discuss my opinion (which is very correct) on how every team that is not the San Diego Padres is tautologically evil. Let me explain.

A tautology means saying the same thing twice, using different words. So, for example: an armed gunman, the summit at the top of the mountain, an unlawful murder, the evil Los Angeles Dodgers. See what I mean?

Every fan and, by extension, every player and manager connected with my team is tautologically good. They are the Platonic Ideal of Good. Even if they are not, they are and by the simple fact that they are on my side. Every fan should have this opinion of their team. Furthermore, we do this in politics all the time, so why not baseball?

For example, during a recent game between the Padres and the Giants, a very excited fan was picked up on the on-field mics. The mics used for the TV and streaming broadcast. Which meant every viewer, fan and announcer alike, was hearing the same fan — from San Diego to Wales. And when I say she was excited, I mean she was screaming after and about everything. It was distracting.

And then we found out she was a Padres fan! Oh, well, that completely changes the dimensions of it. She isn’t shrill and annoying, she is a siren bringing death and destruction to the evil San Francisco Giants. She is a goddess and should clearly be behind home plate (or near the bad guys’ dugout) for every game. She is a secret weapon. She should be given free tickets and her own bobblehead night at Petco Park. Would someone please get Erik Gruepner on the phone?

As with fans, so with the players themselves.

When Bebo — Fernando Tatis Jr. — is having another weird slump, you fail to understand why. He is a scientist, and he is calibrating his toolkit for the playoffs, you fool. He tinkers and lets Xander Bogaerts hit for him instead. It was the same as earlier in the season when Bebo was a hit machine and X couldn't hit the broadside of a barndoor. They are craftsmen honing their craft, thank you very much. Obviously you see this.

Remember when Jackson Merrill rose like a rocket in April and then crashed out (only temporarily) due to injury? That was merely part of the large, unfolding plan known only to a select few — the roughly, approximately 42,567 fans that sell out every home game. They knew, Jackson knew, that this was all according to plan. What’s better than a rise to power? The eventual return to power. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.

Pitchers more your thing? Everyone who ranted and raved against Dylan Cease was not ranting at him, no, they were merely ranting at the daemon that had corrupted his arm, thrown him off his stride. We can and did all see his obvious perfection. Dylan Cease is the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball — he writes poetry about his slider, he alters his facial hair to suit his own innate and unconquerable spirit. He loves bees and cats for goodness sake!

Yu Darvish, Michael King, Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, Robert Suarez, David Morgan, Jeremiah Estrada, Yuki Matsui — my god, the whole lot of them — they are each and everyone of them an Adonis, the perfect man. They are all the greatest singular pitcher in the history of baseball; no one has ever done it better.

And when the trade deadline loomed, and players began to move and ricochet like balls in a pinball machine? That was the sign that the time of prophecy had come. Those who had been villains by chance and advent of being on the wrong team were now on the right team! Freddy Fermin was a Royal, but now he is a Padre. Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Laureano? They play for the good guys now, and left Camden Yards far behind. They were lost, but now they are found!

A trade sent your favorite prospect to some team in the American League? It’s awful, diabolical even. Yet it is all according to plan. It’s how AJ Preller — the King of Escondido and greatest talent scout to have ever existed — drew it up. Everything is proceeding as he has foreseen. AJ is the Lisan al Gaib and he will lead us to paradise!

The paradise and the promised parade. The time spoken of by Peter Seidler himself; the words spoken a millennia ago on February 28, 2023: "One year soon the baseball gods will smile on the San Diego Padres and we will have a parade.” Everything leads toward that, and everything ends there.

Subscribe now

On the off chance you don’t realize I am being cheeky, let me just say: I am being cheeky. My tongue is planted firmly in my cheek.

Baseball is fun, and I like it. I wish no ill to any of the evil teams — sorry! — other teams in baseball. But amidst the jokes is the truth that every fan does, to some wild extent, feel this way about their players and about their team. I obviously do; I just typed out 1,000 words and threw a bunch of Padres memes into a substack piece because I could!

The world is a mess and anything that brings us solace or a good feeling should be cherished and sought after and defended. As a wise man once told me: Baseball is life, the rest is just details.

I am continually struck — like a 9-iron to the back of the head — by the recurring thought that, for a large number of men, the golf course provides a unique haven for guys to just be guys. Or, at any rate, to be more their natural selves and less their “worksonas.” This, of course, begs the question that guys are not guys elsewhere. I’m sure to many it seems like (and with some justification) that men are being men everywhere and all over the place and all the time.

To a great extent, that’s true — I’m not arguing that point. But, speaking as a man, it’s curious how performative men are (or can be) in most spaces outside the home. Hell, sometimes in the home, too. This performative quality is more or less intense depending on the guy and the situation, and some men are so performative (everywhere, all the time) that they don’t even realize it anymore. Wear a mask for too long and it becomes the only face you have.

The golf course, however, provides a surprising third-space between work and home that allows men to relax — as much as playing a game that requires skill and concentration allows anyone to relax. This occurs because of the singular nature of “the golf course.”

Subscribe now

What makes a golf course such a prime “guy-time” location can be boiled down to three key points:

1. It creates a “brotherhood” experience.

   1. Golf is usually played in groups, but these groups are usually no more than four players. (This is, of course, excepting leagues or tournaments.) This smaller group allows for familiarity without breeding contempt. Assuming you’re playing with three other guys, that almost guarantees three other personality types to play off of; one can interact, joke, and converse with three completely unique and original souls. Each guy is going to interact with each other guy differently. There’s a reason so many things — whether the four humors, a dollar, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — are arranged into quarters.

2. It involves an activity.

   1. I mean activity here in the sense of golf being active. It is, lest we forget, a sport — and a sport that anyone can play, as was showcased this month at the US Adaptive Open. Even if you drive (or sit) in a cart between every shot, you’re still physcially doing something when you get out to strike the ball. A golfer is stretching, swinging, stooping, standing, or walking. A golfer is physically doing something and doing something that works completely different parts of the body — working muscles from the feet to the back to the shoulders.

3. It’s outdoors.

   1. Despite being third on this list, the fact that golf is outdoors is of equal importance to it being a physically active undertaking. In a world that finds everyone (and not just men) indoors for an unnatural length of time, an activity that is outside is like water for a thirsty soul. Golf is a daytime sport, which means sunlight — and Vitamin D. You’re exposed to nature and the elements, which means the wind that cools can be the wind that braces you; you’re hearing birdsong and the movement of water; you’re smelling the soil and turf as you make yet another divot. The golf course can function, depending on the location, as an open-air nature park and if you’re lucky (like I am in in Arizona) you might see deer, javalina, or coyotes. It’s wonderful to be outdoors and a golf course provides an easy way to experience it.

While there are other benefits to golf — as, for example, it’s knack for demanding one to focus, think creatively, and be adaptable — the previous points highlight it’s unique function for the guys of the world. But, to flip the coin, I’m sure the exact points hold true for the women of the world, as well; or any other subset one can imagine (like people who work together, share similar interests, went to the same college, etc) and completely irrespective of gender.

While wives of golfers, assuming they don’t play, tend to be called “golf widows” there might be a reason for it. Sometimes a dude just needs to hang with his guy friends, share a few laughs, drive around in the sun, and work on his short game.

In spite of a year-round dirt road, the area is very much wilderness; and you are never alone in the wilderness. You can set off from either side of the road and find an old mining claim as easily as a mountain lion or black bear. It's a lot like Alaska in that regard — except for the mountain lion.

This mild screed, like so much else, is a blend of both the outer world and the inner; from what I’m thinking and from what I’m observing around me. While that is the case for anyone (at least I hope so) it is even more the case now that I’ve returned from a recent visit to Alaska. Like the colors in the rainbow, we don’t often know what the color blue actually looks like until we see it in contrast with something else — blue is always the bluest when set against orange.2

Alaska, if given a color of its own, would be dark green. Or, since it is a land of extremes, the brightest white. Arizona, for its part, is sandstone or perhaps the blinding yellow of the sun. The ideas of both Alaska and Arizona are more etched into peoples minds than real places themselves, which means the color someone associates with a place can be telling of what they actually think about a place.

For me, the dark green of The Last Frontier is one painted across its numerous mountain ranges and hills, its low-lying river valleys, along its fjordic coasts, and as far to the north as the state’s climate can carry it. Even in the farther reaches of the state — cut through by the Dalton Highway all the way to the Arctic Ocean — the dark green of forests is merely replaced by a lighter shade of green and much closer to the ground: literally hundreds of lichen varieties act as nature’s own squishy carpet and, for caribou, as the Earth’s finest buffet. And let us not forget the tussocks, the small mounds that cover huge areas of Arctic tundra, that are as curious to us as they are prone to sprain your ankle.

Alaska, as one would be right to say, is a world almost unto itself. And this world’s color, its default hue, can be experienced only a short drive north from Fairbanks — right off the road system, and, technically, at its end. On Murphy Dome, a tall hill situated above Fairbanks, one can walk a little ways and stare out northward and, because of the dome’s height, down into other rolling river valleys and hills. One can gain a perfect 180 degree view of the north country and see nothing human-made; no roads, no electric poles, no houses. There are no railroads, no airfields, no livestock, no farmlands — nothing. It is to see Alaska as it was before 1741 and its European discovery by Vitus Bering. Atop the dome, it should be added, one also sees very little wildlife.

All of this emphasis on flora has said nothing of the fauna.

Alaska, for all of its wildness, is more barren than lush. It is verdant, in its turn, but is more empty than full. While it is fun to emphasize the state’s exoticness with tales of vast, traveling herds of caribou; huge, antlered moose feeding on summer gardens; and flocks of migrating birds flying north; these moments (and they do happen) are more the exception than the rule.3 You can see wolves and bears, even more exotic to most urbanites, but these are rarely within city limits.

Now your best bet requires a bit of luck and deep drive into a national park — Denali being a good place to spot both. Yet, even then a visitor is never guaranteed a spotting of either. As ironic as it sounds, I saw more bears along one short stretch of the Alaska-Canada Highway in British Columbia than I ever saw in Alaska. Alaska is a vast, forested land but one that feels largely empty.

This feeling of emptiness, of a barren wilderness, is borne out by the facts. In 2002, the Nature Conservancy released a study detailing the biodiversity of every state in the Union. Alaska ranked #50 (out of #51 — the study gave the District of Columbia its own place on the list) for biological diversity and featured, a still breathtaking, 1,835 unique species of plants and animals.4

In comparison to Alaska, Arizona stands firmly on the podium in the biodiversity olympics. Coming in at #3, Arizona can boast — and I do mean boast — 4,759 unique species. That number is more than two-and-a-half times that of Alaska. This diversity is mostly plant-life, with more than 3,500 species; however, it also includes 138 species of mammal, 435 for the birds, and 102 for reptiles. Alaska, for as long as I could remember, always seemed to include a huge number of birds; in spring and summer there felt to always be a vast host squawking, cawing, tweeting, and honking. However, Alaska ranked only #46, whereas Arizona (again) ranked #3.5

Subscribe now

The sandstone hue of the Grand Canyon State is one spotted from above and from below, from the shores of the Colorado River in the west to the 200,000 square-mile Chihuahuan Desert in the east. Arizona is an odd state, both in terms of biomes and topography.

While Alaska has always felt void of wildlife, Arizona has always felt the opposite. While walking nearby parks we’ve seen herds of javelina and watched pairs of coyotes hunt; we’ve seen bobcats, both solitary and in a pair; herds of deer, complete with stags, does, and fawns; I’ve even found the small, light prints of a coatimundi — to say nothing of actual coatimundis. We’ve found bee hives, countless butterflies, hummingbirds, and raptors. My wife has seen a mountain lion.

Within our own community — situated between apartments, a subdivision, and two major roads; to say nothing of the nearby Safeway or Interstate — I’ve seen and heard coyotes, rescued a lizard out of our townhouse, killed several black widows, and watched a praying mantis on the hunt. Oh, and of course, we’ve shooed snakes away from our door.

However, none of this is to paint Alaska as some Martian landscape; and Arizona is no zoo. If any place has areas that are most like Mars it would be Arizona. Both states are unique places, home to beauty both stark and verdant. Alaska has huge glaciers and massive peaks; Arizona must content itself with tall hills and old ranges — and it has no glaciers. Both are full of rivers, although Alaska’s are more numerous and more flowing. Birds flap and insects buzz in both, the latter much to the distress of the citizens of either. The forests in Alaska are more widespread, but they are just as tall in Arizona. A wide, dry desert is not too different in spirit from a wide, cold tundra. Each state has plenty of fishing and hunting opportunities for the subsistence lifestyle and for the sportsman. While the clouds, in my view, are prettier in Arizona, the same sun shines brightly on both — if a bit warmer and hotter in the Southwest.

But all of this is to highlight how wrong we can be about a place neither visited nor lived in. The telling is in the lived experience and, in both, there are experiences to be found and had. Both Alaska and Arizona are lands of extremes — one place will experience -62° and the other +110° — and both can kill you if you let them.

Epilogue via Tangent

Now for a short, manic screed about wild nature and domesticated humanity! A fiesty epilogue to a data-driven post.

*taps podium*

Ahem.

The greatest divorce in world history is between humanity and everything else! And I mean “everything else” quite literally! Humanity, to an almost paralyzing degree, has cut itself off (or tried to cut itself off) from the natural world — to such an extent that if we humans could find a way to live without breathing we would!

But nature is us, and we are it! There is no true separation of the two. Despite the promises of transhumanism, humans will always be in and of nature. Even if humans escaped physical death, swapping a fleshy body for a machine consciousness, they would still be nature — and therein lies a massive irony. For what is a machine but rocks and metal shot through with electricity!

We push nature away, until it smacks us upside the head. Or bites us. Or stings us. It is easy to remember to clean the kitchen when ants are a problem, or that leaving a door cracked can let in a lizard, a kangaroo rat, or snake.

Many urban places — major cities like New York City or Delhi — are much more aware of their city’s native, wild population than even some rural parts of the American West. In New York it is common to see rats, pigeons, and roaches both on the street, near the subway, or in your apartment. Delhi does battle with an estimated population of 25,000 monkeys; this is meant literally as Delhi’s monkeys are more menace than magic and even killed the city’s deputy mayor in 2007. Such animal violence is to say nothing about the city’s problems with cobras, foxes, or jackals.

Alaska? Arizona? It makes no difference beyond that of personal taste and temperament. I know people who would sooner die than leave Alaska; others who would move if pressed; and yet others who see it as an exotic place, fun for a visit and nothing more. Arizona, at least among my own friend group, sounds like a fine and pleasant (and sweltering and diabolical) misery.

Many will hunker down during a sub-zero and dark winter, others will battle snakes and scorpions in the desert. Some will take aim at the moose, others the javelina — both go well with veggies. This is the normal fate of humans, to be living in close quarters — and in close combat — with the rest of the natural world whether we like it or not.6

Families always squabble; and we are a part of nature, not apart from it.

One of my earliest memories is walking through the desert outside Tuba City, AZ looking for aluminum cans to recycle. Dad is with me and we’re singing what is probably the first song I can remember learning: “Old Dan Tucker.” It’s an old American minstrel tune (old by American standards at any rate) and dates to 1843 — Texas was still an independent republic and the Mexican-American War was still three years away.

One of the many, many performers to cover “Old Dan Tucker” was Bob Wills. Wills was from Texas and was the frontman for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He was dubbed the “King of Western Swing.”

Western swing is a genre that is, at its core, a type of jazz — complete with its working class roots, heavy use in the dancehall scene, and habit of improvisation. The only difference is that western swing is jazz played on traditional country instruments. It’s a little bit of a lot and it's twangy. A genre that is as much jazz, as it is blues, big band, polka, country, and even Mexican. Jean Boyd, a historian and musicologist, calls it the “Jazz of the Southwest.” At the end of the day it is a homegrown musical gumbo and a unique product of its origins in the American Southwest.

Ray Benson, the long-serving frontman of contemporary western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, said that “western swing would have just been a footnote in American music if it weren’t for Bob Wills, because Bob Wills was the Elvis Presley of his day.” It’s interesting Benson would make the comparison to Elvis, since both the “King of Western Swing” and the “King of Rock-and-Roll” were influenced by much of the same music; even if their sounds and ultimate fame were miles apart.

The first time I’d ever heard about Bob Wills was while reading Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle in December 2023 (about four months after moving back to Arizona), and even then the name didn’t really stick around in the old brainpan. In fact, I probably forgot the name the same day. But from the mid-1930s to the early-1950s, Wills was unforgettable. He was on tour, on the radio, and in the movies. By 1945, shows by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys outdrew and outperformed acts like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. Wills was the real deal.

While re-reading Desert Oracle this week, I again finished his essay “The Murder King of Western Swing.” It’s an essay about western swing fiddler (and wife murderer) Spade Cooley, but the character that most caught my attention was the non-murdery Bob Wills. The connection between the two men is not just that they were breakout fiddlers of the western swing genre, but that they were both called the “King of Western Swing.” The difference was that Bob was given the name whereas Spade was a rex self-proclaimed.

Subscribe now

I finished the essay on May 13, which meant nothing to me at the time. But, it’s funny how life works; how synchronicities appear and occur. “Synchronicities” are, in essence, meaningful coincidences between internal and external events. It was a term coined by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a man who had his own brief affair with the American Southwest and even traveled over the same ground Wills would a few years later. In a way, too, Jung fits into this larger narrative of synchronicities — and not entirely in ways I can fully explain, yet.

In January 1925, Jung took a Pullman out west, stopping in Arizona and New Mexico. Like any reasonable tourist, his first stop was the Grand Canyon. He and his pal Fowler McCormick — the son of the International Harvester Company chairman and grandson of John D. Rockefeller — then borrowed a Chevy and drove east towards New Mexico. The road they took was an unpaved, though driveable, Route 66. Part of it, interestingly enough, cuts through the bottom right corner of the Navajo Indian Reservation, of which my old home — and aluminum can hunting grounds —Tuba City is a part.

But when Jung took Route 66, it was a road that had not yet become iconic. Its paving, too, was two years away which meant that, in 1925, it was probably much like any wide, dirt road you could find down in Arizona today. That rustic quality gives Jung and Fowler’s trip a certain dusty, romantic halo that I approve of. As Fowler himself wrote: “Jung and I set off alone to take a journey in the land of the ‘endless horizon,’ that part of the Southwest lying between New Mexico and Eastern Texas.” While it is ironic that Jung went east to see more of the West, he was also heading in the direction of what would soon become the birthplace of western swing.

Why May 13 matters in a personal and synchronistic sense — and this is part of what made me write this essay — is because it’s an important date within the Bob Wills lore. Wills died exactly fifty-years to the day (May 13, 1975) that I finished reading Ken Layne’s article. The kicker is that, until I looked Bob Wills up online, I had no idea that was even the case. Fifty years to the day.

I spent most of May 14 listening to the Bob Wills oeuvre on Spotify. There's something appropriate about driving to one's favorite burrito truck while listening to the upbeat steel guitar twang of western swing. I went through the entirety of The Essential Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys twice and The Essential Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys once. As you can tell by the ampersand, those are two separate albums.

One thing I like to do after making a discovery is to see what other people have to say about it. I usually frequent one of the too-many social medias and this time it was Twitter. After realizing a lot of people are still talking about him — there are even days and festivals in his honor — I found a tweet one user posted that read: “Starbucks shoulda used the Bob Wills version of Stay All Night Stay A Little Longer [sic].” That was the whole tweet — it was dated March 30, 2025.

Wait, Starbucks was using a Bob Wills song in a commercial?

So last night Jamie and I were watching baseball — as we often do on nights after work between April and October. It was probably around the middle of the 8th inning when, lo and behold, a Starbucks commercial came on. It was the Willie Nelson version of the Bob Wills tune “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer.”

Suddenly, it felt like I was seeing Bob Wills everywhere. Was this a true synchronicity? Did reading an essay about him on the day he died (which I didn’t know at the time), then hearing about his song being used in a Starbucks commercial and then hearing that exact same commercial less than an hour later…mean something?

I guess it depends on your perspective and how you see life. Sure, this could all just be coincidence. But maybe it isn’t. Now, is Bob Wills trying to reach out to me from beyond the grave? Unlikely. But sometimes messages can come from the strangest and most unforeseen places, and at the most unlikely of times. Just as Saul of Tarsus.

But the real kicker is something I found out while writing this essay. That song “Old Dan Tucker” I mentioned at the beginning — the one I sang with my dad while hunting up aluminum cans — is the exact same melody Bob Wills used in “Stay All Night, Stay A Little Longer.”

Now that is weird.

Bugles announce spring in Interior Alaska. There are no brass instruments glinting in the late April sun, no uniformed musicians standing in the slumping snow drifts. Instead, the hopeful tune comes from above and is played by one of nature’s finest horners, the Sandhill Crane.

Some people might protest that it’s the honking of Canada Geese that marks the end of winter. It’s a fair argument, since the geese are usually audible a week or so before the cranes.1 But after the decade I spent living on the edge of Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Fairbanks, where thousands upon thousands of both species congregate in spring and fall, I still vote for the Sandhills.

Maybe it’s because spring - ‘break-up’ to Interior Alaskans, a reference to the cracking of the thick ice atop the lakes and rivers - is a fickle season. The weather will be a marvelous 50F for a day or two, then fall back below freezing and drop two or three inches of wet snow. The first half of April is notorious for this kind of bait-and-switch. I suppose I always took the Canada Goose’s cry, which usually begins to ring out around the middle of the month, as nasally laughter at our human despair.

If the Canada Goose is the mean girl teasing us for daring to dream of warmer days, the Sandhill Crane is the wise parental figure whose arrival softens the teasing. Ignore those silly geese, for they’ll soon move on to laugh at others. I’m here now, the snow is going, and soon the trees will bud. All is well.

It’s a believable message. Canada Geese look like they could brave a sub-arctic winter, with their bulky bodies and short, thick legs. Sandhill Cranes don’t. Although they’re typically the heavier of the two species, their tapered figures, long legs, and broad wings (up to a foot wider in span than a Canada Goose’s) don’t scream ‘deep-freeze resilient.’ A comparison of wintering grounds backs this visual conclusion up. While Canada Geese overwinter as far north as Illinois and Colorado, the bulk of the Sandhill Crane population keeps south of the Texas Panhandle.2

Sandhills’ figures trigger thoughts of ballerinas for a good reason. Not only are Sandhill Cranes long-distance travelers, accomplished buglers, and loyal lovers, but they’re dancers, too. Their elaborate communication routines were a late-May delight when I lived alongside Creamer’s Field. The leaps and pirouettes worthy of the Bolshoi enticed me out of bed and into the chilly dawn almost every single day.

The main paths through Creamer’s Field form a tilted L, with the old dairy farm buildings at one end and my neighborhood at the other. At five o’clock, the night’s mist would still be clinging to the soil of the open fields, hiding all but the tallest tufts of grass. Occasionally a low call would penetrate the sound-dampening blanket from ground level, but the call that truly broke the silence always came over the tops of the surrounding boreal forest. Aldo Leopold’s description of the moment when the earliest-rising birds come looking for their worms sums the sight up perfectly:

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

And so it was, for that first cry spawned a thousand more. I would walk to the old farm and back, and in the quarter hour this took the cranes awakened. On my return trip, I would often have to stop to let groups of them cross my path. More frequently, I stopped of my own accord to watch them dance.

On days when the Sandhills were especially exuberant, my walk might take two or three time longer than it did during crane-free seasons. I returned home cold but smiling, aware that though I’d been the only spectator at that morning’s recital (for I rarely encountered other humans in the field at that hour), variants of the same show had been seen by hundreds of generations before me.

This is not an exaggeration. Sandhill Cranes were living in what is now Florida at least 2.5 million years ago.3 Florida is still part of their range, so there’s good reason to think that they may also have migrated to and bred in the ice-free haven of Interior Alaska during the Pleistocene Glacial Maximum.4 If so, then the Sandhill Cranes and their gravity-defying dancing may have been one of the first signs to Beringian peoples that they were entering a new world.

Familiarity with the Sandhills didn’t (and doesn’t) make them boring. The Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site near Sedona, Arizona is evidence of this. It isn’t the work of a moment to carve a symbol deep enough into stone that it lasts for more than 600 years. Here, however, the Southern Sinagua people of the Beaver Creek Community drew many cranes alongside other animals.

Sandhill Cranes still flock to Arizona in large numbers. In 2024, over 42,000 wintered in the southeastern corner of the state.5 These aren’t the same cranes that I greeted the day with in Fairbanks, since Arizona’s cranes spend summers in the Rocky Mountains and along the Colorado River6, but that doesn’t make them any less magical. Though they’re technically different subspecies, Arizona’s cranes look the same, sound the same, and dance the same as Alaska’s do. The only obvious difference to the layperson is that the bugling of Arizona’s cranes foretells the coolness of winter instead of the warmth of spring.

It’s an equally relieving change of weather, but there’s extra cause for excitement when the cranes return to the south. That extra excitement is due not to the cranes themselves, but to a very different Arizona creature; snakes.

Although you can encounter snakes in southern Arizona at any time of year, they typically become less active in October or November7, right around the time that the first Sandhills arrive. From a scientific perspective, these two events are unrelated except for being responses to seasonal changes in temperature. From a mythological standpoint, though, one could make a tongue-in-cheek case for the cranes chasing the snakes away.

Science now knows the Sandhill Crane as Antigone canadensis. Antigone of Troy, for whom the genus was allegedly named, is reputed to have claimed that she was more beautiful than the goddess Hera. Hera’s reply was to turn Antigone’s hair into snakes. Other gods later overrode this extreme punishment with the far less horrifying fate of being turned into a stork. This, the myth suggests, is why storks eat snakes.

Cranes aren’t storks, of course, even if their scientific name suggests it in what seems at first glance to be a misnomer8. But like storks, they do eat snakes.

It would be quite a leap to seriously argue that the telltale calls of the returning Sandhills are what drive Arizona’s snakes underground in late fall. But like many desert dwellers, I tread easier on the trail when the snakes are sluggish, regardless of the reason for their retreat. Maybe I shouldn’t take the sound of Sandhills as a sign of relative safety, especially since there are still Canada Geese laughing overhead around the same time. Still, I crane upward in fall as I once did in spring, and strain my ears for bugles.

(Endnote: in writing this piece, I found myself questioning my capitalization choices with ‘Sandhill Crane’ and ‘Canada Goose.’ In the end I chose to go with title case, partly because it was my natural inclination and partly because of this blog post by Ron Dudley at Feathered Photography.)

As the wind blows, the storm clouds gather, and a deluge of rain is promised by the weatherman down here in southern Arizona, I am reminded of a writing project in progress. It is loosely titled “Doomsday: Understanding the American Civil War as Apocalypse.” In it I try to argue that, with as many rehashings of the Civil War as we have, none do the transformative nature of the conflict real justice. That the war is best seen, and should be seen, as it was experienced by those who survived it — that it was a cataclysm, an outright apocalypse.

I’ve included a snippet below from the introduction where I lay bare my opening gambit.

Cut/Paste

An Extract From: “Doomsday: Understanding the American Civil War as Apocalypse.”

All things end.

The study of things dying is called thanatology; the studying of everything dying is called eschatology. When we talk of the end of the world, we’re talking about the latter.

In the Deep South, there is a societally-sanctioned form of eschatology — one that is not so much studied as lived. This idea, that the world has (in some way) ended, permeates many Americans' understanding of history.

This understanding is as ubiquitous as it is nebulous; its source lay in the apocalypse known as the American Civil War. A war that, in a period of less than five-years, saw the destruction of a nascent southern nationhood, the forging of a (seemingly) stronger national union, a violent bloodbath that saw more soldiers die than every other American war combined, and finally — and most importantly — the banishment forever of chattel slavery.

This apocalypse, from sea-to-shining-sea, saw its own version of the Four Horsemen: Death, War, Famine, Conquest. These riders, figuratively speaking, saw to it that the end came.

For everyone in 1860 who, somehow, managed to survive to 1865 and the war’s end saw the world as they knew it completely destroyed. The apocalypse may have, at the beginning, moved slowly and with fits-and-starts, but as it moved it gathered speed and shook the continent with a bloody, violent urgency. For many Americans the world as they lived, imagined, and remembered it ended in the ultimate cataclysm of the Civil War.

This world that was simultaneously lived, imagined, and remembered — particularly in regards to the Old South — is the one that slips languidly, mint julep in hand, into popular culture under the guise of literature and film: Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, and Gods and Generals. When refined Southern belles and grand, sun-dappled plantations are evoked (and invoked) it is of a verdant land without war, an Eden before the Fall.

The North in these near-mythic tellings is barely there. This remembered South is a half-remembered America, a world where everything and everyone has its proper place and, most importantly, knows and embraces their roles in home and society: whether free or enslaved. It is a land that does not know war. Antebellum, the very word used to describe this idyllic world comes from the Latin words ante and bellum - quite literally “before war.”

The words anteonfinem or antecataclysmus are the more fitting and just sobriquets that could be applied to the era before 1860, at least in so far as the Old South has long been imagined. For the generation that survived the conflict, the great cataclysm of war was a Lapsarian sundering with the past. It was the fall of man, redux. It was the Book of Revelations directed at one continent and one people — the final apocalyptic war which ended the world as they knew it.

I wrote the following poem in October 2018 on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The southern portion of the island, where I wrote this, is a tourist Mecca — it’s a strip of land that, like Waikiki on Honolulu, has been completely turned over to tourism. Yet, the presence of a vast, undulating swell of pasty tourists did not stop the locals from their daily trek out into the seas.

The Locals in Their Fishing Boats

In the earliest hours
Before the world wakes
The locals putter out
In their small fishing boats.
Old and new
Wage a kind of silent war;
The locals make haste in the dawn
Before the tourists rule the day.
They must take in their bream, wreckfish, and tuna
Before the return of the pleasure crafts
And tourists catamarans
And jet skis
And ocean liners
Return to swallow up the Costa Adeje.
The locals must make their catch
Before the visiting parasailers can catch wind.
Old and new
Wage a kind of silent war
And the new is winning.
But it hasn't won.
Not yet.

Why Is No One Talking About Agriculture?

I remember a conversation I once had with a fellow jewelry salesperson — this was back in late 2012, a year (and world) that seems farther away than only 13 years ago. Whenever it was slow, when people just refused to buy jewelry, she would always say: “Well, people can’t eat diamonds.”

People can’t eat diamonds; people eat food.

For a nation whose founders envisioned an agrarian republic — no more so than Thomas Jefferson — it’s odd that, with all the happenings within and without the new administration, there’s been little talk towards or about agriculture. Even last week's confirmation of the new agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, didn’t seem to make much in the way of waves. In fact, she had one of the less pugilistic confirmations and was confirmed 72-28; even securing the unanimous approval of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry subcommittee (which includes 12 democrats and 11 republicans).1

All of that is to say what? That you probably didn’t know any of that until now. And that’s sort of the point.

We worry, and rightly so, over the price of eggs. Yet, we know and hear very little about the agricultural sector as a whole — or even in part. Nothing from the administration; nothing from the newsstatnd. In a kind of lowkey irony, I suspect I know as much about the latest goings-on in American agriculture as farmers themselves know about what to expect from the current administration.

And that is my point.

There’s been little talk of agriculture, and how it will or won’t fare, both by the administration and traditional — and coastal — media organizations. The results for “Trump on agriculture” are mostly from farmers or farmers' advocates. Some top results are even dated from Trump’s first administration. There’s been no real deep-dive, not even from within the administration, as to what the grower’s of the nation can expect throughout the next four years. Even this article on MSNBC, one such coastal media group, is by the president of the National Farmers Union. Most stories have cropped-up from regional, inland writers in places like Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas — states where agriculture plays a much larger role in the economy.2

While Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian republic is no more than field corn by 2025, America still has to eat. It still has to grow food. And what it doesn’t eat, it sells.

As part of the new administration's federal funding freeze an initial victim was America’s agricultural sector. The freeze, although it has since been amended, initially included a hold on farm subsidies — subsidies which, as of 2022, amounted to more than $15 billion dollars. Even the USAID shutdown, which has been greeted warmly by some in the country, has had a direct agricultural impact on the US; the global aid organization routinely purchased (to donate) more than $2 billion dollars of US agricultural products annually.

Subscribe now

And this says nothing about the potential impact of retaliatory tariffs. The three biggest targets for our own tariffs (targets who are prepared to counter with their own) are Mexico, Canada, and China; the three nations whom the US relies on most in regards to agriculture exports.3 The only way to make American agricultural goods competitive in such a situation would be to offer, guess what, more subsidies to off-set the cost of the tariffs. For a demographic that solidly backed the current president in 2024, the administration's rather ad hoc approach to agriculture must come as a shock — especially since this is the president’s second time behind the Resolute desk.4

If it isn’t obvious by now, it’s clear food is an afterthought to the administration (and, in all fairness, to most Americans) outside of what goes on at the grocery store price-wise. Agricultural appointments mean nothing. Farm subsidies are frozen until, whoops, they aren’t. We close an agency that appears, at first blush, to be unconnected to the agricultural world until — whoops, again — it deletes a likely $2 billion dollar annual invoice made out to America’s farmers. We bandy about the idea of tariffs when so much of what we grow is exported and, if not even more subsidized to make-up for it, would demand a sector-wide shift to growing different products (be they farmed or raised) entirely.

It’s fun to say we “shoot first, ask questions later”, but it gets dicier when the bullets do real harm and undermine the livelihoods of real people living in the real world. While America may no longer be an agrarian republic, it must still feed itself and, in turn, feed a huge chunk of the world. And no matter how valuable a diamond may be, you still can’t eat it.

It wouldn’t be a 2025 newsletter without some new poetry, now would it? This poem was composed on our patio on February 8, 2025. It was partially inspired by this 17th century ballad.

The Strength of the Sword

Spark in smoothbore pan — (with frightening bayonet fixed)
Sends shot sizzling through air.
Fell Ares breeze flings arms
Fire and flesh fill the four corners;
Seven seas see squalls and
Success must be seized and secured.
Farm tools refashioned for use in a different field;
Flanders was just the first fist.
Searing visions slay unwilling Cassandras
Scarlet silks spill from Sebastopol to Santa Fe.
Fear not the foes you fight — (seek solace in the strength of the sword).

Cut/Paste

An Extract From Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction

I’ve been reading Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006), a monumental history on the creation and destruction of Nazi Germany’s economy. The work focuses primarily on the years 1933-1945, but spends enough time in the Weimar Republic to give everything that occurs after Hitler’s rise to power the necessary context. It’s a brilliant book and reads well despite it’s heavy dual subject matter: economics and Nazis.

Below is an extract from the book that I found impressive, shocking, unexpected (?) — and all for reasons I cannot immediately express. I hope those of you who make it down this deep into the newsletter will offer some insight and feedback; more importantly, your reflections, if any are to be had. The first paragraph is Tooze writing and the second is a pull-quote from a German tank manual:

Contemporaries were struck by the enthusiasm that greeted the reintroduction of conscription in the spring of 1935. And remarkable evidence collected by labour historians demonstrates the passionate identification that many German workers in the 1930s clearly felt with the weapons they were producing. This was no doubt in part due to the high status attached to the skilled work involved in armaments production. But it also had something to do with the weapons themselves. These were not ordinary commodities. They were assertions of national strength, the common property of the German nation, to be handled by the pick of German manhood. A tank manual issued during the war brought this connection forcefully to the attention of its youthful crew:

“For every shell you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes, your mother has worked for a week in the factory... The Tiger costs all told 800,000 Reichsmarks and 300,000 hours of labour. Thirty thousand people had to give an entire week's wages, 6,000 people worked for a week so that you can have a Tiger. Men of the Tiger, they all work for you. Think what you have in your hands!"5

No one is immune to propaganda, but the words “think what you have in your hands” struck me as deeply meaningful. We spend a lot of time wondering how to live our lives, what to do with the hours given to us. But, when we work or create, we’re usually holding something: a paint brush, a whisk, a keyboard, a smartphone, a scalpel, a gun. There is almost always something betwixt one’s meaty paws… and just think, for a moment, what you have in your hands!

Coming Face-to-Face With Ancient Petroglyphs

In December, Jamie and I hiked the Hieroglyphic Trail. It's a 3-mile out-and-back trail that leads into a canyon tucked just inside the Superstition Wilderness near Phoenix. While the views were beautiful and the hike reasonable, what was stunning was at the end of the trail: the centuries old petroglyphs.

While the path to them is called the Hieroglyphic Trail, the etchings are actually petroglyphs. To get technical, hieroglyphs refer to the ancient Egyptian writing system and petroglyphs are simply rock carvings. Pictographs are neither, and are instead painted onto the rock as opposed to etched directly onto it.

The carvings have been made into a basaltic outcropping surrounding a seasonal pond — and have been known to exist since at least the 1400s. The images feature local animal and plant-life, as well as a variety of geometric designs. The Hohokam, the not-to-distant ancestors of Arizona’s current Akimel and Tohono Oʼodham peoples, are believed to have begun making these images in the canyon more than 1,300 years ago (AD 700). Not every etching is that old, of course, but even carvings that are “only” six-hundred years old predate anything European built in the New World.

It is incredible that these etchings are still here. Not only because of elemental pressures (the rock is open to wind, sun, and rain), but because of the human element. The trail to them is short and near a major metropolitan center. Despite that, there appears to be substantially less defacement than one might think and the carvings maintain a level of obvious integrity.

The existence of this ancient rock art shows that human creativity, and the urge to make and leave something behind, is nothing new. Whether the carvings functioned as a visual guidebook for what could be found in the area, or as art for the sake of art, is not known. What is known is that they remain, and that’s good enough for me. 1

Subverting Power in the Roman Republic

Power is a thing to possess, but it is also something that can be ignored. One of my favorite scenes from Merlin, the 1998 mini-series, involves just such a trick. Towards the end of the story, the characters realize that the only way to defeat evil Queen Mab is to forget her, to turn their backs on her.

In essence: Power is meaningless when there is no one to control.

Something similar may have been occurring during the era of the Roman Republic. One of the few clues we have for it is the “Senatorial Decree Concerning the Bacchanalia” — a diktat engraved in bronze in 186 BC. It concerned the Roman god Bacchus, usually seen as the equivalent to the Greek Dionysus. The decree outlawed bacchanals, the traditional rites performed in praise of Bacchus.

These rites varied from city to city, were held in the countryside, but could be different depending on if the practitioners were male or female. These rites often took the form of wild, ecstatic dances and revelers sought to commune with Bacchus through altered states, whether by ingesting a psychedelic or wine. There was also food and dirty jokes. These bacchanals were, in essence, a celebration of the wild and feral; they acted as a rejection of both social norms and established concepts of civilization. They challenged the Roman establishment by going, quite literally, outside of it.

Subscribe now

While not every rite was banned, most practices were forbidden unless approved by the Roman Senate itself — good luck trying to explain to the authorities why you and your friends need to drink heavily and commune with the gods outside city limits. In addition to the curtailing of rites, there could be no priests, no positions of authority within groups of worshippers, and no common fund of money.

As the litigious Romans knew, nothing leeches momentum like bureaucracy. Leaving the cult’s status in a technically permitted, but complicated status, drained it of its transformative power. It’s also hard to challenge the status quo when you have no leadership, no organization, and no money.

The exception to the decree was that shrines holding “sacred objects” (however defined) were excluded from destruction. Romans, a polytheistic and superstitious people, would have balked at destroying any deity’s sacred shrines less they suffer divine punishment. Better to play it safe. Besides, a sacred object with no one to worship it becomes just an object, stripped of the transformative power of the sacred.

However thoughtful the Romans may have been towards the gods themselves, if you were in a Bacchic cult this was about as near to having your religion banned as was possible without outright doing so. If anything, this probably made it worse — with a complete ban, one can know where they stand, but a legal limbo is like walking across quicksand.

As we can see with later Christianity — another disruptive and subversive religion to the state — Rome loved religions until it didn’t. If your religion honors and upholds societal norms, then all's well. If your beliefs take you outside of state control, and if you turn your back to it a la Merlin, then the state’s power is threatened. And a power that only exists if there is someone to wield it over is no power at all.2

The Crown

One does not study
When one lives,
And a closed fist
Leaves no open hand to shake.
What is life,
But a series of moments.
Little lives
Where the only options are
A closed fist or
A handshake?
Sometimes the epiphany comes late,
So be kind to my fingers —
They’ve spent years drawing blood from my palm.
And a thing with claws
Does not always know kindness.
But sometimes one can draw blood
From a turnip.
And sometimes a sword can be pulled
From a stone.
We are all King Arthur’s
If we want to be.
The crown is in us all.3

Mucho Stress Baseball

Since the end of last season, I’ve kept fairly quiet about baseball — I know it’s annoyed several people. I’ve kept quiet because most of what I’d say would be either doom or gloom. The stove is hot for most teams, but for the only team that matters to me it’s as if the gas has been turned off, the electric ripped out of the walls, and it's getting awfully drafty in here. And I’m wearing long johns and a fur hat just to go to the bathroom.

If I’m being honest, it’s hard to see beyond the present troubles. The San Diego Padres failed to sign Roki Sasaki, despite offering him more international signing money than any other team; while it was a long-shot, the Padres also failed to re-sign Blake Snell; three of our most clutch players (Jurickson Profar, Kyle Higashioka, and Ha-Seong Kim) have all signed with other teams. There is talk of trading Dylan Cease and even Michael King. Oh, and the team’s co-owners are suing one another.

All of this has occurred after the team crashed out of the playoffs and failed to win any “...of the Year” awards — our rookie phenom (Jackson Merrill), manager (Mike Shildt), and executive (AJ Preller) all got second-place in their respective categories. All three of them had solid cases for winning each, so it’s disappointing that not one of them won anything. Always the bridesmaid…

For my own part, I wanted the team to “run it back.” Last year, especially in the final stretch, the team had gelled. Everyone seemed to click. The team played as a batch of best friends and personified the “next man up” philosophy. But now a lot of those guys are out, there’s holes in the roster, the wallet is full of moths, and my wife’s Profar jersey sits empty.

In closing, former Padre Eric Hosmer tells a story about Ha-Seong Kim that fits the vibe going into 2025. When stressed, Kim would smoke cigarettes. When really stressed, he would chainsmoke them.

While I’m not necessarily advocating “ripping darts” anywhere in 2025, it seems to me that this year is probably going to be one of mucho stress. So, in the spirit of Ha-Seong Kim — smoke if you got ‘em.

Housekeeping

If you’ve received desert dispatch emails offering membership discounts (or anything except newsletters like this one) please know that it is not me, but an automated function of Substack. It’s also one I will disable once I find out how. Every newsletter in its entirety is free and always will be. While being a paid subscriber is appreciated (really!), I will always keep desert dispatch free.

2024: In Review

First off: A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! It’s rote to get these kinds of messages via email nowadays, but I mean it all the same. Thank you for subscribing and reading.

Since launching desert dispatch on December 20, 2023 I’ve “dispatched” 23 unique newsletters — this one is technically number 24. As a fun bit of data, those 23 newsletters combined comes to just over 27,000 words.

Those 27,000 words have been used to tell about strange happenings in the desert, homelessness, Nikki Haley’s views about slavery, my lifelong love of Blues music, and my adventures following the San Diego Padres around southern California in October (with Debbie P.). I also shared the occasional poem.

Cultural metabolization

I don’t like the word consumed in a cultural context — I prefer metabolized. Consuming something implies destruction: I took it, I consumed it, it is gone. You read a book, laugh at a meme, watch a movie, admire a painting; the experience has changed you, even if only minutely, but the thing itself still exists. You didn’t consume it, because it’s still there.

Metabolizing something, like culture, is different and a more appropriate descriptor. When you metabolize something, you integrate it. Whenever we "absorb” or “imbibe” a cultural thing, what we’re doing is mixing it with everything we’ve absorbed or imbibed before it.

Subscribe now

When we watch a movie, we’re placing that movie into the context of every other movie we have seen before it. If I watch Mr. Baseball, starring Tom Selleck, I metabolize it and place it in the context of other baseball movies, films made in the early 1990s, stories set in Japan, or of similar “fish out of water” tales. I remember a scene where the titular “Mr. Baseball” smokes a cigar in a Japanese train, and recognize how it was a faux pas both in the film and would be so in real life — then and now. I compare his experience visiting Japan to my own, as well as other trips abroad where I took part in a faux pas or two (usually by accident) and was always a “fish out of water.” I then compare and contrast those experiences. Maybe I think about Selleck the actor in the context of the films and TV shows he did around Mr. Baseball. Maybe I remember the first time I watched it (as a kid with my aunt and uncle) and compare that viewing experience to when I watched it again, this time as an adult with my wife. Essentially, I watch Mr. Baseball and metabolize it, letting the figurative nutrients spread out to any number of other things with various degrees of similarity and connection. One experience gives birth to a hundred others.

Now Dig This: Music Edition

Back in January I had plans for “Now Dig This” to be a recurring feature where I share cultural bits and bobs that you might also enjoy — books, movies, essays, music, etc. That didn’t quite happen, but to finish out 2024 here are some of the tunes I’ve been jamming to.

This past December has been all about folk music, specifically from or influenced by the Canadian Maritimes. Canada has a rich folk scene, some of which successfully spilled over into the US during the 20th Century — think Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell. Two artists, Stan Rogers and his son Nathan Rogers, have been on repeat. If neither of those names sound familiar, then I’d recommend Stan’s “The Flowers of Bermuda” and “Northwest Passage”, the second is considered an unofficial Canadian national anthem; for Nathan, the one-two punch of “Mary’s Child” and “The Jewel of Paris.” Nathan’s two songs can be enjoyed independently, but tell one cohesive story about a 17th Century Huron boy taken from the woodlands of Canada and raised to adulthood in Louis XIV’s court. Despite the heavy-sounding nature of that subject matter, neither song is a work-out. I promise.

A few other tunes (making the rotation in my “Current Folk Obsessions” playlist) that I recommend include:

1. “Dominion of the Sword” by Melrose Quartet (original by Martin Carthy)

2. “Back Home in Derry” by Scythian

3. “Stick to the Craythur” by The Green Fields of America

4. “Dogger Bank” by The Teacups

2025: Looking Forward

Without making too many assumptions or carving too many things in stone, I think your email in 2025 is going to see an uptick in desert dispatch newsletters. A lot of the growing pains this past year were internal, as opposed to external, and have been figured out — or rather, metabolized.

What that means is that you’ll see more individual newsletters (like this) covering an array of topics with more short-form content; newsletters will feature extracts from longer-form essays that I will then post to my website. The newsletter will function as an appetizer and if a particular longer-form essay doesn’t appeal (based off the extract) then you can just scroll past it. The website will, in turn, see more regular content updates.

There will also be more photography! For whatever reason, my photos seem to be as popular as my writings — hey, you’ll get no complaints from me. Take care and I’ll see you all in 2025.

It’s summer 1888. You’re a private with the 4th Cavalry stationed at Fort Bowie, high in Apache Pass in Arizona Territory. The Apache Wars are over and life is good. Very good.

You remember 1886 as the year the Apache Wars ended and 1887 as the year the fort got its ice machine. It’s the thing — using a nearby spring, a man-made reservoir, and a steam engine — that lets you enjoy ice cream and, on a really hot day, cold beer. You find yourself with some free time, a rarity even with active campaigning at an end with Geronimo’s surrender. Do you wander up the fort, to gaze at Major Beaumont’s two-story Victorian mansion? Or should you mosey over to the bar, the one tucked into a nice, quiet corner of the Sutler’s Store? Maybe you could challenge one of the non-coms to a game of tennis at the new court.

Yes, it’s 1888 and you’re a cavalry trooper in the high mountains of Arizona, but this is the good life. One might even say, ice cream in hand, that it’s the sweet life.

It’s winter 2024. I found myself at Fort Bowie National Historic Site, one of the least visited sites within the entire National Park System — this includes everything: parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, etc. By the numbers it received exactly 8,333 visitors in 2023. To put that number in perspective, two of the most notoriously difficult-to-reach National Parks in the country — Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arctic, both in Alaska — had more visitors than Fort Bowie. To top it off, Fort Bowie is the least visited National Park site in Arizona.

And it's literally only miles away from the vineyards and tasting rooms of the Willcox American Viticultural Area. What I’m saying is, is that it’s a little out of the way, but it’s far from remote. Nor is it inaccessible. The site has a park ranger, one who raises and lowers the fort’s American flag every single day. Really, the perception is that Fort Bowie is hard to reach — not that it actually is.

It’s our perception or assumption about something, historical or otherwise, that can linger. For example, when we think of “Fort Bowie” and “Arizona” we might think of any number questions or musings like: Was Fort Bowie named after Jim Bowie of the Alamo? Or maybe it was named after his knife. It’s a fort, so it must have been built for a war, right? If it’s in Arizona, it’s definitely surrounded by desert. And maybe: why put a fort so high up in the mountains anyway?

Good questions all. I asked myself the same ones. The answers are: No, it was named after George Washington Bowie, a soldier who came from California by way of Iowa. And, related to that, no it was not named for the Bowie knife. Yes, it was built for one war and ended up serving in two. No, this particular stretch of territory is not desert, but a mix of grassland, chaparral, and riparian woodland. And finally: It’s as high up as it is because, during frontier times, the pass was a short-cut to Tucson and had several freshwater springs — for years the Apache used the pass as a source for water, firewood, and good hunting.

And one assumption we’ve made, straight off the bat, is that there was only one Fort Bowie when, actually, there were two. One was, more or less, an ad hoc encampment thrown-up during 1862 — think hillside dugouts covered with tarpaulins. While you may assume the fort was constructed to handle the threat of Hank Sibley and his “secesh” troops trying to make Arizona Territory confederate, it was actually built to defend the pass from attacks by Apache warriors — specifically those under Cochise. Confederates, if they had been the first ones through Apache Pass, would have been forced to do the same thing since the warriors of Apacheria fought everyone: settlers, immigrant caravans, Mexicans, Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers alike.

The second and, arguably more permanent, Fort Bowie was under construction by 1868. While the war was over between Union and Confederate, it was not over between the Apaches and the world. Even with a temporary halt to the conflict between 1872-1876, the war between the United States and the Chiricahua Apaches (whose homeland lay in eastern Arizona) continued for another decade until Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. The fort would remain garrisoned until its closure on October 17, 1894.

In that short history, we see immediately how wrong some of our assumptions are: there were multiple forts at the same site, not just one; the fort may have been built during the American Civil War, but it was to keep the Apaches (and not Confederates) at bay; the conflicts that swirled around it ended, but the fort remained for nearly a decade.

Even for a fort in the hinterlands, the living was surprisingly good in the late 1880s — and I’m not just referring to the ice machine wondered-at by our 4th Cavalry private. The fort had a school-house, a library, and a bar for the grunts and non-commissioned officers. The Sutler’s Store, where the bar was, also featured a pair of rooms just for the officers: a club room designed for drinks and card-playing, and a separate billiards room. The place even had a pair of water closets for when nature telegraphed.

If you were an officer at Fort Bowie then things were even sweeter. The fort held five adobe-walled officers quarters, each with a kitchen, sink, and washroom. Although the fort’s alkaline soil made growing crops a challenge, there was enough room behind each building for a garden. In 1886, cottonwood trees were planted to shade the buildings along this rather homey Officers Row. As a bonus, a tennis court was installed near the fort’s central parade ground.

If you were the fort's commander, you were guaranteed fine living in a 13-room mansion near the base of Bowie Peak itself. The building, originally designed as a duplex, featured a drawing room and a separate sewing room, complete with its own skylight. There was also a dining room and seven bedrooms. The exterior included two verandas with plenty of space for relaxing on cooler summer evenings — hardly the tough living one expects on the frontier.

If anything, Fort Bowie near the end of its life was refined. Excluding the daily dress parades, it could probably be said that things were getting rather casual. It must have seemed like a kind of Eden, albeit covered in cottonwoods and beargrass. When one takes into consideration the surrounding ranches, towns, and homesteads, Fort Bowie almost transforms into a pleasantly rustic American Berchtesgaden — except instead of the Alps, it’s nestled between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains.

And what about our typical trooper from earlier? Well, if he had stuck around as a 4th Cavalry soldier for another decade — like Henry Ware Lawton, who served with the 4th during the hunt for Geronimo — he would have found himself in the Philippines in 1898, fighting against a different type of native: this time a Filipino one.

It is a strange thing that we can connect the life of Fort Bowie to both the Apache Wars in the American West and the final act of the Spanish-American War in Southeast Asia. Yet our perception of the Old West as just the Old West would prevent us from even looking for or considering such a connection. But regardless of our perceptions, history has made these connections for us — whether we ever know it or not. That’s history for you.

Debbie and I rolled back into Arizona late on the night of October 12. The only highlights of the drive home were our, roughly, three hour hunt for a copy of the latest edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune (we had zero luck finding one) and a stop off in Yuma for ice cream. More like Yum-ma, am I right?

Jokes aside, stopping in Yuma was a fitting final stop on the journey since the Padres, from 1970 to 1993, used to play at Desert Sun Stadium during Spring Training.1 We thought about visiting the old stomping grounds, paying our respects as it were, but the stadium is now a soccer complex. Oh, well.

Speaking of paying respects, it would have been a poor trip indeed if we had not stopped at the Peter Seidler mural in downtown San Diego. It’s lovely, if unassuming, and shows Seidler smiling away from the viewer. It’s a remarkable likeness of a man who did so much for not just a sports team, but for San Diego as a whole.2 The mural has become something of a pilgrimage for Padres fans, so it was only fitting we stopped by.

Several versions of a final “Follow the Friars” dispatch have made the rounds inside my head. Nothing complete, just fragments and hints of ideas. I knew from the get-go that I would need to write one of these eventually; I had hoped it would be from the “World Series” side of “World Series or Bust.” Instead, well: bust.

Debbie, that incomparable fount of undiluted baseball wisdom, told me before Game #4 that we had to win because she did not want to go back to LA — no way, no how, no thank you. Heading back to LA, back into the dragons lair, was full of menace. And no, she wasn’t just talking about the parking situation.3

After leading the NLDS 2-1, the Friars dropped two-in-a-row to the Dodgers. Let’s just say, Debbie knew.

I could bemoan (and will, if just for a moment) Dave Roberts’ crying wolf and the shenanigans of writer Ken Rosenthal, or the fact that our bats went cold for twenty-four consecutive innings — the longest postseason scoreless stretch in MLB since 1991. However, could is the operative word. At the end of the day, the Padres lost. Game over, man.

The funny thing about losing is that it’s the opposite of winning — no kidding, I hear you cry. Except, here’s the thing: Fans don’t care how you win, just that you do. Fans care deeply and passionately about how and why you lost, almost as much as the fact that you did. If you get the “dub” all is well, if you “take the L” no one is safe. Not even Luis Arraez — who, you’ll recall, just won his third-consecutive batting title — is safe from criticism.

Fun fact, but Arraez had been playing through the pain of a torn ligament in his left thumb since mid-June. In spite of such a debilitating injury he played in 70 of the team’s final 78 games; he also played in all seven of the Friars’ postseason contests. Anyone who’s ever hurt their hand, let alone a finger or thumb, knows how much more difficult doing anything is, let alone playing baseball or winning a third-consecutive batting title. Sheesh. Some fans really are that cataclysmically dumb.

While “Follow the Friars” has come to an end after seven dispatches, yours truly will be up in Phoenix this coming week to catch some Arizona Fall League baseball games. As an added bonus, my wife will be joining me!

We’ll be seeing three games in two days — two of those games featuring the Peoria Javelinas whose squad includes highly-rated prospects Ethan Salas and Leodalis De Vries. I know, I have a problem and the only cure is more baseball. If all goes well there may even be a dispatch in it.4

Of course, this newsletter won’t go away. It’ll switch back to its original premise of “microdosing life’s marginalia from deep in the American Southwest" which entails whatever I interpret that to be on any given Sunday, but has usually been: history, poetry, contemporary issues, music, and the weird. The dispatch archive can be found here and my website, where these writings also live, is here.

Other then that, I shall continue watching the postseason and rooting very, very hard against the Dodgers and Yankees. Thank you all for reading along, commenting, and subscribing. As hokey as it sounds, I really do appreciate all of the support and love. Thank you. Really.

And for the remainder of the 2024 postseason it’s: Go Cleveland and Go Mets.

Until next time.

Subscribe now

Follow the Friars

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

• Part 5

• Part 6

On October 9, we watched the Padres get trounced 8-0 from a little house in Escondido. To be honest, after the running-and-gunning of the past nine days, I was glad my commute home was no further than a walk from the living room to the bedroom. I imagine even the Gaslamp put its lights out a little earlier than usual that night.

While these dispatches have focused solely on the great and amusing, we’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Amidst all the driving and game-attending, we’ve both been working — to say nothing of my striving to get you dear readers a little something every few days! So, two days of body-imposed house-arrest were not so much pleasant as mandatory.

Despite that, Debbie and I had gone back and forth over trying to get tickets for the, as we imagined it, series clincher. However, as dawn arrived on October 9th, it was clear we were both wiped out. Tickets were getable — if pricey — but while the spirit was willing the flesh was plum tuckered out. The Padres looked a little worse for wear by day’s end, too.

But, a few thoughts before tonight’s game. Before the final big push over the top, boys. 

For her part, Debbie has been the most fierce defender of Dylan Cease. He’s her guy. So, watching him get rocked by the Dodgers during Game #1 and Game #4 was rough, in large part because his getting thumped really didn’t cause us to lose: the bullpen slumped and the bats were cold. You can imagine how she felt reading the headline CEASE AND DISASTER in the October 10th edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Twitter was no more kind to him. 

It’s easy to forget, or to ignore entirely, that Cease was a stud all season. He made 33 starts this year, more than any other pitcher in MLB. He threw the third-most pitches out of all pitchers and finished tenth in innings pitched. He achieved his first-ever — and only the franchises second — no-hitter on July 25. He then started on only three days rest. He’s been a dawg, a real mensch. I hope we win tonight so that Cease gets another crack at a start, just to show the nay-sayers how well he can shove.

Yesterday also saw the birth of a new thing for the Friar Faithful to rally-around, to inspire and reinvigorate hopes: the Rally Mantis. During yesterday’s team practice in Dodger Stadium, Luis Arraez found a praying mantis on the ballfield. He carried it around, showed it off to teammates, and gave it a little place to stay in the clubhouse. The Faithful online have since made drawings and photoshopped little Padres hats onto the mantis. I suspect t-shirts will be rolled out any minute.

Some cultures consider the mantis sacred, and a portent of good fortune. The Greeks saw the mantis as an entity that could show lost travelers the way home, and maybe it can show the San Diego Padres the way to a home series against the New York Mets in the NLCS. I think we would all be okay with that.

But, this new creature for Padres fans to hold up — like a mandible-waving Simba at Pride Rock — is part of a long line of sacred animals in Padres lore. It is a mantis now, but before it was a light-green stagmomantis californica it was a rally cockroach (thanks to local talk-show legends Ben and Woods), the Rally Goose from the 2022 playoffs and, earlier in the same season, a black panther statue named Feisty Tom. We Padre fans really like our animals. 

And who can forget, of course, the San Diego Chicken. 

Tonight’s watch party will feature three Padres fans — myself, Debbie, and our lovely host Mary Jo. We aren’t chickens, or panthers, or geese, or cockroaches, or praying mantis’. But, we are fans, and we’ll be fully-kitted out (hats, jerseys, and all) to watch the Padres do what we all know they can do: win on the road in clutch situations. 

If I’ve learned anything on the road these past eleven days it’s that you never know what might happen, where new friends might be lurking, what new experiences lie in wait. For us, like the Padres, all it takes to get by is a little help from your friends.

Subscribe now

Follow the Friars

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

• Part 5

All The Small Things

The top-fold in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports section featured a photo of Fernando Tatis Jr. mid-celebratory shout, his bat flipping in an arc away from him. Nando had just crushed a two-run homer, giving the Padres a 6-1 lead over the Dodgers. Behind him in the photo are a sea of San Diegans, all on their feet; the now eponymous rally towels are swirling, yellow blurs. It was a good night to be a Padres fan.

Debbie and I were way, way up in the 300’s on the third-base side of the field; the Dodgers dugout was somewhere below us. We had seats this time, not that we used them much. We were on our feet — jumping, shouting, flailing, and making a truly fanatic raucous — that we might as well have been at the gym for all the sitting we did.

It was a special night, from beginning to end. The ceremonial first pitch was thrown by “San Diego Padres legend” Jorge Alfaro — the man himself who coined the slogan “LFGSD”, a phrase now baked into the DNA of Padres fans everywhere. During the bottom of the 8th, San Diego native Tom DeLonge led 47,744 other Padres fans in a sing-a-long of Blink 182’s “All The Small Things.” Well, he tried to lead us — the singing was so loud, so enthusiastic, that all he could do was move through the  crowd being, essentially, just one of us; just another Padres fan. When they showed him on the jumbotron it was clear he was choked-up by the overwhelming response, but, as he himself knows, it’s about the small things.

Roberts’ Rules of (Dis)order

Last night’s game came on the heels of a Padres win in Dodger Stadium on October 6 — and all the sniping, opprobrium, and controversy the game engendered. A lot of it came from Dodgers manager Dave Roberts during post-game interviews; a guy who accused Manny Machado of throwing a ball at him in-between innings and went so far as to submit video evidence of the alleged incident to MLB. Spoiler alert: nothing came of it, except yet more bad blood, and it has been the postseason's biggest nothing-burger.

Roberts’ actions make a lot of sense, however, at least to me. His team had been dismantled 10-2 in front of a home crowd, a fanbase that had paid $50 for the privilege of parking in the Dodger Stadium lots only to see them lose to their “little brother” from the southern end of The Five. Roberts was lashing out, painting his team as victims and underdogs, trying to do anything to whip his team into a frenzy. To spark something. The shenanigans didn’t work. The Dodgers lost Game #3 of the NLDS 6-5, giving the Padres a 2-1 series lead. 

Subscribe now

I think Roberts, who has managed the Dodgers since 2016, senses his time is almost up — despite signing a contract extension through 2025. You can’t lead a team for that long, with a lineup that features Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Clayton Kershaw, and Shohei Ohtani — with a $228M payroll of $228, the highest in baseball — only to win only one, single championship. A championship won during the 60-game pandemic-shortened 2020 season. A season that, for what it’s worth, is considered by many non-Dodger fans (myself included) as deserving of an asterisk. 

So, all that looming in the background, it makes sense that, when Roberts’ was announced over the Petco Park PA system, it was he who was subjected to the most deafening roar of boos. All the Dodgers players got boos, of course, but those for their manager were the loudest.

Stay Classy, San Diego

Before we left for the game, our lovely host Mary Jo printed out an email sent out to fans penned by Padres CEO Erik Greupner — “Greup” as fans call him. His call, in short, was for San Diego fans to be classy and stay classy. “Our game is at its best when our players and fans give everything they have for their team and city,” he wrote, “while showing respect and sportsmanship towards players and fans of the opposing team.” 

There wasn’t really cause to worry about Padres fans acting up or acting out. His call for civility, in my mind, was probably a best practice, a way to get out ahead of any possible issues that might arise — when I worked for my college paper we called something like that a “CYA” moment, short for “cover your ass.” My bias may be showing, but Padres fans are not (and were not) the issue. Fans of the brown-and-gold were never the problem in LA — not at the game Debbie and saw — nor were Padres fans ever likely to cause problems in their own stadium, in front of their own team. Padres fans are not about to hurl a $15 can of Ballast Point onto the field, let alone doing so onto their own field.

And to that point, I can say that last night, in our section, there were probably two-dozen or so Dodger fans absolutely ready, as they should be, to root for their team; to shout and holler and clap. There were even chants. When Teoscar Hernandez demolished a sweeper from Michael King, giving the Dodgers a riotous grand slam in the top of the third inning, the Angelenos in our section went wild — as they should have. All I could do, for my part, was sit there, nod, and shrug. Hernandez’s hit to center field was immaculate, of course they should cheer it. I know I lost my voice cheering for everything, great and small, that the Padres did. That’s baseball, that’s what it means to be a fan.

A Fan Marches On His Stomach (And So Much More)

After the game — the chants of “BEAT LA!” echoing down and through the concourses of Petco Park — Deb and I made our way around and through the Gaslamp. After so many evenings spent there, well, it's starting to feel familiar. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be surrounded by so much brown-and-gold. 

Our rambling led us back, once again, to the Knotty Barrel. We ran into Twitter mutual B-Dubs and tied one on. This time I had the Kicked-Out Stout, an English Stout made by Knotty Barrel itself. It was 6% by ABV and infinitely quaffable.

While re-reading this dispatch, it made me realize how much what we eat and drink can impact the overall experience of something like a trip. We’ve hit the Knotty Barrel twice, had coffee at Yayas — a wonderful coffee shop ensconced in a tattoo parlor, shout-out to Selena and Tyler — and had tall, cold lemonades at Petco Park. Yes, I’ve of course had social sparklers at the ballpark but, being a ballpark, I’m much less picky and prefer something in a frosty can thrown to me by a salty vendor. I did refrain from imbibing at Dodger Stadium — being so deep in enemy territory it seemed wise to keep my wits about me. Discretion is the better part of valor.

Earlier today, before sitting down to write what you’re now reading, I walked to a little shop called Blue Mug Coffee & Tea. It’s in a little mall in Escondido and the first thing you notice is the umbrellas and outdoor seating — a shady spot is exactly what the doctor ordered. I ordered a large, iced coffee called “Tomas’ Special” made with medium roast coffee and snickerdoodle.

All The Small Things (Redux)

When I was inside I did what was, for me, kind of an odd thing — I made straight to the community corkboard at the farside of the shop. When one thinks “coffee” their next thought is probably not “corkboard,” but I was soon staring up at a sheet of paper, a flier, with the words: “In Loving Memory of TOMAS HERNANDEZ.” 

On the flier were two color photos, both showing Tomas and his family. One photo is him with a baby in his arms, kissing the babe’s cheek. The other is him and his family — a partner and two kids — all decked out in San Diego Padres gear, standing in Gallagher Square with the sea-green seats of Petco Park towering behind them. Tomas is wearing the home pinstripes, his girlfriend and older child in the road browns. His youngest is in a carrier slung across his chest. It’s a beautiful, wonderful family photo.

You can glean from the flier that Tomas was an Escondido local. Treasured, it said, and I believe it. In honor of Tomas, and as a fundraiser for his family, Blue Mug created a special drink called “Tomas’ Special” — all proceeds from it during the month of October would go to his family. 

The more I looked at the flier, the worse it got. Tomas passed away last month and he was only 30. As an extra kick to the stomach, he was just ten days shy of his 31st. His passing was unexpected — I found out afterwards that it had been a traffic accident.

Tomas’ flier reminded me of something Debbie had said a few nights ago, when we were driving south towards Escondido after seeing the Padres trounce the Dodgers in LA. There was “so much riding on this,” Deb said, so much hanging on this postseason run. It was a chase for the trophy, sure, and for the great parade so long overdue in San Diego. “One year soon the baseball gods will smile on the San Diego Padres and we will have a parade,” said the late, great Padres owner Peter Seidler.

But, as Deb made clear, this was about more than fortune and glory. “It’s for the organization,” she said, “but it’s for Peter, for Tony Gwynn, for Mike Darr, Mike Sharperson, Alan Wiggins, and Ken Caminiti.” It’s winning it for everyone who never got to see the hometown team win it all. 

Such a win is now also for a young, family man from Escondido, CA named Tomas Hernandez. All the small things, indeed.

Subscribe now

Follow the Friars

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4