Read to the end for a better photograph of my brand-new milk-drunk daughter, Arden River Baumgart.

Topics Covered: Meat, Tonglen, Blood, Erewhon, Tapetum Lucidum, Investing, Tibetan Buddhism, Black Metal, Cold-Storage, UFOs, Food Systems, Parenting Advice. Read Time: 3 hours, 47 minutes.

I left my last post—about a catastrophic fire at a massive Los Angeles cold-storage warehouse owned by the $5.4 billion company, Lineage Logistics—hanging on a bit of a cliff. Or maybe the better image is a hook.

Invest in Dumpster Fires

That last post was left hanging in a moment of high tension, amidst smoke and flame and falling debris, with an image of a lone brave firefighter groping through the dark, trying to determine exactly what his brigade was up against, until, cutting through thick layers of industrial packing wrap and adjusting his headlamp, he discovered a stinking red pallet dotted with… USDA Prime stickers.

Besides the Prime sticker, I almost wrote Kirkland logos and barcodes into that paragraph last month, but I chickened out. Now I wish I hadn’t. Turns out my intuition was on track. According to a recent report from the LA Times, the Boyle Heights warehouse held 85 million pounds of animal product, “including Kirkland brand meat that fills Costco freezers.”

I deleted the Kirkland nod, not wanting to suggest the possibility of having any such uncouth brand on the brain. As most readers know, I shop exclusively at the Erewhon in West Hollywood and Victor is the only valet attendant I trust enough to park my BMW.

All of which is to say… the myriad duties of fatherhood—complaining, sitting on a couch, looking at my phone, taking photos, complaining, buying diapers at Costco, buying formula at Costco, buying food at Costco—have kept this essay hanging for a couple weeks...

But today is a good day to resume.

Share

Today is the day (I’m writing on August 14) that Lineage Logistics actually missed the deadline established by the city of LA to complete their full cleanup, this despite having over 400 people at the warehouse working around the clock at a cost of $1 million per day.

If you recall, it was my suggestion in the previous post (“The Boyle Heights Dumpster Fire”) that the true instigating event in the unfolding horror story of the warehouse was not the cold storage fire itself, but something else. The story actually starts, for me, when the lone brave firefighter wanders far enough back into the building to ascertain its contents. Apparently, something akin to this imagined cinematic moment did happen.

“Initially it was reported to us that the majority of that product was bread and wheat products,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Chief, Jaime Moore. But that intel changed. “We’re slowly learning as we get into this building that it’s far from that,” Chief Moore clarified. “There’s a lot of meat products.”

In the previous post, I blabbed on further about the building exterior. I said it was interesting to look at photos of that flat panel building with broad chunks of its exterior ripped away by tractor claws… Interesting to look at all those bays and cubes and racks hanging in the blackness… It’s interesting, those missing panels, the gaping black floors and burned-out compartments you can see from the building exterior.

“Each one sits there like an open box in a storyboard, another blank line in a beat sheet awaiting some ticking-clock disaster thriller.”

I was trying to suggest in my own roundabout way—before I got distracted talking about Arden and my mom—that the Boyle Heights fire offers a view into the heart of something. It peels back a wall. It is a window.

The Boyle Heights fire opens a window on a reality we would rather not see. It reveals a story that we cannot film and will not contemplate. It peels the curtain back on a plot so unsettling our own sanity requires we deny it exists every single day.

A Google News search for “Boyle Heights Fire” caps its results at page 30, with the 300th article dating back only one month. Given that the fire occurred two months ago—with coverage peaking during the initial weeks as toxic smoke blanketed the region—there are almost certainly hundreds more articles that the search engine leaves unindexed.

That’s probably 700+ news pieces and not a single one mentions what I want to say.

Indeed, I ran a number of advanced searches across multiple engines with a few key terms and found not one article or video on the internet willing to give that window an honest look.

Share Dumpster Fires

The hundreds of articles talk about the possible cause of the fire, the health impacts, the parties responsible, the city response, the perils of the structure, the discovery that it was 85 million pounds of meat sitting inside, the rapid rot, the people “tormented by the horrible stench,” plagued by rodents, swarms of flies, ammonia fumes, smoke and chemicals and trucks and liquid runoff and the huge costs to local businesses and citizens.

None of what follows is meant to overlook the suffering and injustice inflicted on Boyle Heights’ historic Latino community. Dozens of previous reports have rightly criticized the city and Lineage, while making clear that industrial disasters like this one inordinately impact low-income, minority neighborhoods.

Yet I still find it impressive that across 700+ news pieces nobody will talk about what 85 million pounds of meat might actually mean.

It is estimated that more than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for human consumption every year across the globe. That’s something like 200 million animals killed every 24 hours to feed a single species. That’s over 8.3 million animals killed every hour.

138,888 land animals are killed in half the time it takes educated, urban me to draw a full breath of pristine Los Angeles oxygen. Some of them are slaughtered a few feet beyond my living room window (read here).

Reliable data for the year 2024 puts the number of living beings slaughtered so they could be eaten by human beings at 88 billion.

There are apparently 8.3 billion people alive on planet earth at this moment. Imagine the fullest football stadium you’ve ever sat within. Take that stadium and build another in your brain and then construct another at the far end of the carless parking lot. And keep the mental exercise going. Do this 120,000 times. That’s how many human beings cover the globe.

Now imagine that every year, a warm sweating mass of humanity 11 times larger than the incomprehensible picture you just painted, 11 times larger than what sits here now spread across the hemispheres snacking and staring at smart phones and dreaming of wealth and celebrity and big mansions far from Boyle Heights across the LA basin in Bel Air—imagine they were all slit open, bled out, and sawed into pieces to feed a superior species.

Imagine what “85 million pounds of meat” actually means.

If the full weight of the Lineage Logistics warehouse that caught fire in Boyle Heights were composed of equal parts pig and cow, that would mean that the Kirkland Signature USDA Prime bags swollen with gas, bursting, and dripping brown sludge would have had the muscle tissue of 85,000 individual cows packed within their plastic. That’s a number almost identical to the human population of Boyle Heights itself.

The warehouse’s remaining cubic feet of 42.5 million pounds would require the lives of 303,000 individual pigs.

Pigs are smarter than dogs by most measurements, ranking among the most intelligent land mammals on earth. If you kept your dog confined as many pigs spend their lives, in cages without enough room to stand and turn around, you would likely find yourself locked behind bars. And yet, as the philosopher Peter Singer long ago noted, a hog farmer, rather than facing jail, “is more likely to be rewarded with a tax concession or, in some countries, a direct government subsidy.”

42.5 million pounds would produce around 212,000,000 Big Macs worth around $1.2 billion. These numbers roughly approximate what McDonald’s does in Big Macs annually across America. Put another way, the Golden Arches are just one small jigsaw in a puzzle whose neat tessellation is truly chilling. “Over 1 Million Served.”

The Lineage Boyle Heights warehouse that burned and is still rotting right now was hardly an anomaly in terms of size and scale. Nor was it an outlier in the area—Lineage operates five other giant buildings nearby. You can see the vast warehouses everywhere in this part of the city although their blankness makes them easy to miss. It’s not just Boyle Heights but Vernon, Commerce, and East LA, a vast cold-chain corridor that wraps around Bandini Blvd, Washington, Fruitland and 55th, keeping much of the historic core of Southern California preserved at -18°C.

There’s something weirdly fitting in this cornucopia of stored life just sitting there beside the river. A journal entry from John S. Hittel, writing in 1863, captures the typical impression the LA River made on visitors to the city as it flowed beneath Boyle Heights and onward into Vernon.

“The song of Mignon came vividly to me as I walked through the gardens of the city of Los Angeles… Luscious fruits, of many species and unnumbered varieties, loaded the trees. Gentle breezes came through the bowers… The water rippled musically through the zanjas. Delicious odors came from all the most fragrant flowers… The general impression upon my mind, after spending the last week in September in the place, is that it is one of the most pleasant places in the world.”

Of course, today, the river has been paved over and the vineyards and fruit trees are gone, but a trace of that plenitude, of the breadth and bounty of nature, still endures along its banks. You can feel it sometimes. Even under the hundred-degree sun. It is a cold feeling, and one often accompanied by an alarming revving sound because it’s not just paradise lost but your job if you don’t run the next red.

I used to catch it sometimes hurrying to work, crawling one light at a time through the northern limits of the LA cold-chain, glaring up at the great white walls wrapped in barbed wire, the warehouses windowless, wordless, silent save for the ubiquitous rasping of the rooftop condensers, their panels and ducts often decrepit and rusted, looking themselves like unhappy animals, elephants stuck there bleeding and sunburned the past half-century.

Most of these older cold storage facilities have been torn down now, replaced by new block-long apartment buildings with brick facades, designed to suggest antiquity and authenticity. They suffer from too many vacancies. Perhaps there is a suspicion some nights stranded on the sixth floor as you peer across Alameda Street, paying $5,100 a month, and see those windowless relics still standing from an earlier era—that the city is just one big storage business. And so too you. Your body, it doesn’t matter how fit or fat it is, nor where you keep it, the neighborhood or price of rent, it’s just storing the carcass you’re preparing.

My friend John and I used to share a music studio near Vernon surrounded by cold storage. We used to park his van on random streets and smoke Camel cigarettes and fist big bins of Kirkland peanut butter pretzels. We were recording a black metal album in an old machine room overlooking the river and it was good to go outside and listen to the latest mix on different speakers. The blast beats and piano keys would burrow out into the twilight while swallows circled the trickle at the middle of the river, and I’d watch those frosty white walls across the channel still shining on into the dark and wonder, “How many pigs are in there?”

Of course, it’s hardly all cows and pigs in the warehouses. There are chickens, vastly more chickens. And there is seafood. Humans are estimated to consume 1-3 trillion individual fish per year, and beyond finfish, tens of trillions of individual marine organisms like lobsters, oysters, octopus, urchins, squids, crabs and mussels.

Look closely around the LA River south of downtown next time you fly over. A measurable chunk of the fish and land animals slaughtered each year across the earth trickles down here, rinsed and washed, packed, hidden, awaiting our consumption.

The incomprehensible scale of the harm, death, and suffering we inflict on other species—not simply our own—will be the stigmata our civilization carries, the gaping moral hole by which future generations will judge even the best of us empty and corrupt.

We worry about climate and the environment but these are abstractions. What we really worry about—if we do indeed worry— are species, living things, the animals that fill the plains and grasslands, feel pain and pleasure, and possess far more consciousness and intelligence than we prefer to admit. Even things that appear vastly different from us and perform functions we cannot imagine probably possess some meaningful experience of their own remarkable, mysterious existence.

According to emerging scientific consensus, it is “a realistic possibility” that even a single worker honeybee is cursed with conscious experience. As the science writer Dan Falk notes, “a bee’s brain contains only about 1 million neurons, compared with some 86 billion in the case of humans. But each of those bee neurons may be as structurally complex as an oak tree.”

In April 2024 evolving research spurred The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a formal academic consensus statement published during a conference at New York University. The document was originally signed by 38 top scientists and academics. The total number has climbed today to 605. The document summary states:

“There is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.”

Further, “empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”

The document expands upon the 2012 Cambridge Declaration On Consciousness, which stated that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” The New York Declaration goes beyond, however, in affirming that not only are humans not unique, but that there is good reason to believe that other animals—many animals, most animals, in fact—likely have what we have.

Share

A few days after the Boyle Heights fire was knocked down, I happened to put on the documentary The Age of Disclosure while my stepdad and Christina’s mom were sitting on the sofa with Arden. The film features interviews with 34 high-level current and former members of the US government (including senators, the Secretary of State, naval admirals, army colonels, tenured Stanford and Harvard professors in biology and astrophysics) who claim that there is evidence that a non-human intelligence of vastly greater technological capacity is and has been interacting with humans on earth.

Setting the truth value of such a remarkable claim aside for the moment, the film remains powerful insofar as it forces a fruitful thought experiment.

Lue Elizondo, former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a former investigative unit inside the Pentagon charged with evaluating military UFO/UAP sightings, puts it bluntly in the documentary, “We’re not the alpha predators.”

“What happens when society realizes everything it’s been taught about the entire history of our species has been wrong, and everybody learns all at once that we’re not the top of the food chain?”

What if we were not the top of the food chain? What if we were to find out that there was something else of vastly greater intellect and technical know-how nearby or here right now? Would you do anything differently? Would you start to worry? Where does so much human aggression and harm come from?

The total number of human beings estimated to have ever walked the earth, drunk from its rivers, gazed at its sun and moon and stars and fed off its fruits and vegetables and animals is 117 billion.

In just fifteen months, the number of conscious animals we butcher beats the entire headcount of human history.

What can you do? What’s there to do about anything?

Lately I’ve been doing this weird Tibetan practice called tonglen. It means “giving and taking” or “sending and receiving.” Sit and stare during the day—with eyes open—staring at the ground in front of you, and as you breathe in, you try to inhale the suffering of the planet, the entire planet, every sentient being alive at this moment that will one day die in pain, or you picture someone you know, or a stranger, or an entire banquet of acquaintances, or the wild boar you saw on Instagram in Africa, a baby, its legs twitching as a leopard held it aloft and bit down on its neck. Picture Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk. Think of your mother and father. Feel the suffering of the meth dude in your alley setting the dumpster on fire.

Picture the suffering and think, “That’s suffering,” and breathe in. By the time you exhale, 138,888 land animals will have died at the hands of human beings. The suffering was always there of course, it predates us, but we have brought more of it, vastly more of it. As you exhale, think, “May you be free of suffering… and cause of suffering.”

Do the practice for 20 minutes. Do it with your eyes open.

It is important to keep the eyes open.

I remember for years I was fascinated by the evolutionary mystery of the tapetum lucidum in the eyeball of land mammals. Basically, every mammal on earth except human beings has a tapetum lucidum, i.e. the bright reflective lens that gives your cat or dog that occasional creepy eyeshine and lets them see better at night. Tapetum lucidum means bright tapestry.

What did human beings do to lose the light in their eyes?

The science says that, for whatever reason, tens of millions of years before the arrival of modern humans, primates must have somehow begun to prefer the sharper color vision afforded by daylight hours. It was in the process of becoming diurnal, as opposed to nocturnal, that primates shed the tapetum lucidum.

But it’s interesting to look at today.

There’s another animal that once occupied a similar niche across the planet, and it too lacked the tapetum lucidum. In fact, this animal once exerted such enormous pressure on mammals that its presence led to an eventual “nocturnal bottleneck.” Mammallian species that failed to develop nocturnal vision did not make it through this evolutionary choke point and vanished into oblivion. Today, 65 million years after this ‘bottleneck’ widened, nearly all mammals retain the essential features of this long midnight sojourn.

“One hundred million years of nocturnality—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—it’s got consequences,” says Chris Kirk, co-author of a ground-breaking 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that analyzed the eye morphologies of 266 mammal species from 23 orders.

And yet, one would think at least some mammals would have given up their night vision, shed the tapetum lucidum. “It’s a bit surprising to still see the effects of this long period of nocturnality on living mammals,” says Kirk.

It’s almost as if the mammals knew that—after the dinosaurs—there would be something else coming, another animal even more violent and terrible that would dominate the daylight.

Share

Peter Thiel, investor and billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, has been secretly steering human evolution for tens of millions of years. His name is, of course, a perfect anagram for THE REPTILE.

Invest in Dumpster Fires

The largest dumpster fire on the planet is nearly extinguished today just east of downtown LA. Officially the fire was ‘knocked down’ several days ago, but until a few stubborn hot spots are fully snuffed, fire crews will remain on the scene and in command.

Reports of a blaze among a solar panel array on the rooftop of a 500,000 square foot Boyle Heights cold storage facility reached authorities around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 17, around the same time I snapped the below photo of my daughter, Arden River Baumgart. She was just four days old. It seems appropriate that within 96 hours of my spawn emerging from the womb the largest, foulest dumpster fire in recent human memory would erupt only a few miles away.

The name Arden is gender-neutral and nature-themed and means ‘high valley’ maybe, or ‘eagle valley’, or ‘great forest.’ The name would, on first glance, suggest an angelic being born of pristine rural highlands, the product of some pagan aerie far beyond the sunbaked pillars of downtown LA. Yet the name may also derive from the Latin ardere, meaning ‘burning’ or ‘fiery’. Perhaps it was little Arden, the ardent-hearted, whose passionate screams on the afternoon of June 17—utterly disconsolate at having her diaper changed for the fifteenth time—somehow started the fire at the cold storage facility a few miles away.

“The cause of this incident is not known and remains under investigation,” reads a statement on the website of Pearce Services, a subcontractor working on the solar panels at the time of the fire. The company admitted that four of their workers were on the roof when flames started.

“They attempted to try to extinguish it. They dialed 911, and it was off to the races,” Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore said during a press conference.

Nonetheless, “The cause of the fire is still unknown,” said LAFD spokesperson Jamie Stewart.

In my experience over the years living at Château Westmoreland, most fires in Los Angeles are started by people who are on meth and mentally ill who become frustrated after discovering I have failed to provide the alley dumpsters with a sufficient number of empty beer cans to justify a trip back across Beverly and Virgil to the Temple Recycling Center.

Indeed, there were months when the dumpster fires that started outside my window every time I sat down to write were so numerous and distracting that I eventually decided I should probably just start a blog and make them my main subject matter. Perhaps it all would have worked out better and we never would have brought Arden into the world if I had started to document the destruction in my alley years earlier—but something about the phrase ‘dumpster fire’ just felt so hackneyed, overplayed.

Indeed, those two words have taken on quite a career over the past ten years.

Share Dumpster Fires

I remember the first frail flicker of synchronicity, that sudden weird feeling that world events and the trite ephemera of my life were coalescing in ways a little too neat. I was standing on the roof of Château Westmoreland, directly over our apartment unit, drinking a beer and talking to my mom Pam on the telephone. Christina and I had been living in the building about a year and a half then. It was early evening, late in the summer of 2016, and my mom Pam—a somewhat educated once-single mother from the suburbs of San Diego—was telling me how much she hated Hillary Clinton. She simply couldn’t vote for the witch. Donald Trump was a vicious bastard with small hands, she said, but—

“Don’t use that term,” I remember interrupting her. “I am a bastard, mom. Trump is just Satan.”

Pam was trying to translate some of Trump’s more inflammatory rhetoric into more palatable terms and that’s when I saw the pallid drifts lifting past the fire escape railing. Then I heard the crackling. A loud BOOM.

“Lemme call you back.”

I crossed toward the southeast corner of the building that offered a decent view of downtown and peered into a pit of swirling hellfire. It was the recycling container that held it. Blue exterior paint dripping away in phosphorescent flames, igniting the swastika-tagged IKEA mattress abandoned at its feet. Flurries of faux snow cast by burning Amazon Prime boxes kept blowing north toward the Public Storage Building. I stared down into the alley, transfixed by the beauty, until another shotgun BOOM! sent the shrapnel of an aerosol can whizzing past my temple.

Behold, I thought. Behold the beauty, in all its deadly flesh…

A dumpster fire. Yes.

There was one phrase that day on everyone’s lips, two words pumping through all the pupils glued to Twitter, a sudden trending spittle of slang that seemed to encapsulate the putrid nihilism of Donald Trump’s rising political star better than any other. And later on, after the 2016 election, when those two words kept buzzing through ever more dumbfounded mouths… they represented a real triumph for democracy.

The erudite elites who guard the hallowed gates of the English lexicon found themselves eventually forced to bow before an overwhelming mob majority.

In 2018, Merriam-Webster added to the dictionary the popular informal phrase—dumpster fire.

But burping Arden a week ago, doom-scrolling the news, World Cup soccer kicking on mute as she barfed on my shoulder, I didn’t want to write about the Boyle Heights disaster and I did not think of it as a dumpster fire—not until I read about the food.

Share Dumpster Fires

Authorities were first informed that the building was full of bread. According to Los Angeles Fire Department Chief, Jaime Moore, "Initially it was reported to us that the majority of that product was bread and wheat products.”

The initial report appears to have been a bit of wishful thinking or, more likely, a temporary panic abating fib disseminated by the building’s all-star tenant, Lineage Logistics, the largest cold storage firm in the world, a publicly traded personhood that appears to have benefitted, at least up until last week, from a long lineage of health and safety violations—one of the most glaring being a recent 2024 fire that erupted, unfathomably, at the very same solar array atop the selfsame cold storage facility as the current Boyle Heights fire.

“It warrants a thorough investigation to see why there were two fires on the same roof over a two-year period,” attorney Will Sykes, who is helping Boyle Heights residents sue Lineage, told CBS News.

The 2024 fire occurred the same year that Lineage went public, raising $4.44 billion in the biggest IPO of 2024, growing exponentially from a single Seattle warehouse to the globe’s largest cold storage behemoth with over 500 temperature-controlled warehouses plopped across 19 countries.

The company’s founders Adam Forste and Kevin Marchetti, former Morgan Stanley investment bankers, currently appear on the Forbes billionaire list. And yet, standing on Union Pacific Avenue, staring at the open north-east walls of the warehouse, one wonders if throughout their rapid ascension, a few crucial corners were not cut.

It’s interesting for me to look at these photos of this flat panel building with broad chunks of its exterior ripped away by tractor claws, the interior of the structure too dangerous to enter after the flames slipped from the roof and slithered down into the dense insulating foam packed all throughout the building.

“We still cannot send firefighters into this building,” said Chief Moore. “It’s incredibly dangerous, and to be quite honest, we’re probably never going to send anyone into this building.”

It’s interesting to look at all those bays and cubes and racks hanging in the blackness, each one divided by dense layers of polyisocyanurate (ISO) foam sandwiched between sheets of corrugated steel that allowed the fire to just go on smoking and slowly baking, sealed off from the water cannons used on oil rigs that went on blasting around the building, unable to reach the molten middle of the warehouse, and somehow still protected from the massive helicopter water drops once the vast roof collapsed. It was mostly the foam—foam and plastic packaging and rotting wet food—that allowed the fire to go smoldering and creeping for over a week, releasing particles of unknown safety all over the Southland, suffocating Boyle’s Latino residents, and causing a large uptick in ER visits.

“These contain many particularly toxic components,” said Michael Jerrett, an environmental health professor at UCLA, “and we know little about how these mixtures affect health.”

It’s interesting. Those missing panels, the gaping black floors and burned-out compartments you can see from the building exterior—each one sits there like an open box in a storyboard, another blank line in a beat sheet awaiting some ticking-clock disaster thriller.

No doubt some jack off is already under contract cranking out a script based off the following real-life facts:

• Ignition begins on top of massive roof, completely out of reach from ground-level hose lines.

• Hundreds of active, live-wired commercial solar panels block physical access, creating an immediate electrocution hazard for roof crews.

• Thick foam insulation panels trap the fire’s thermal energy inside, transforming the building into a giant, self-contained oven.

• Ruptured high-capacity refrigeration lines release toxic ammonia gas and spark micro-explosions, forcing a total tactical retreat from the building.

• 56 lithium-ion forklifts begin to off-gas deadly hydrogen fluoride, threatening a catastrophic chemical flashover.

• The compromised roof collapses inward, burying the core of the fire beneath an impenetrable shield of twisted steel and solar debris.

• Industrial steel racks holding millions of pounds of food warp in extreme heat, creating an imminent threat of a vertical domino-effect collapse.

• Cardboard packaging and food absorb millions of gallons of firefighting water, doubling the structural weight on the verge of collapse.

Share

But the jack off isn’t me. No. For me those open walls peel back the veil on something else, which would never sell, yet remains far scarier than any catastrophic warehouse fire.

If Warner Brothers ever consulted me, and they won’t, the first real unsettling thump of the film, its actual instigating event, happens well after the fire starts. It’s an atmospheric moment, and it ends in an image, a symbol, a puzzle…

Watch. A shaky handheld camera hangs close on the O₂ tank of a skinny rookie. Call him Kevin. He’s played by Timothé Shallowmay. Before the firefighters make their full retreat, we see him wandering a little too far down one of those narrow lightless corridors that rise 60 feet on either side toward the rafters that burning and rumbling invisibly overhead. Chunks of solar panel rain around him. The gloom crackles with their bursting glass.

His headlamp weaves through the thickening smoke, its white beam lingering an extra beat on a pale and hulking mass mummified in miles of taut stretch wrap. The camera steadies as Kevin reaches out and starts to tug at the sparkling plastic pulled tight above the pallet, his yellow Kevlar glove thrashing and jerking now as he begins hacking with a crowbar, hurrying, prying through the layers of plastic, whispering “Shit,” while the crew keeps calling through the gloom, “Kevin, hurry up! Kevin, get back here!” until the camera at last lands on a strange symbol and holds.

It’s a sticker. USA flag colors in the shape of an interstate highway sign.

USDA Prime, it says.

Cut to: Kevin watches the fire chief on TV later that night.

Chief Jaime Moore did clarify during a press conference later, regarding all the wheat and bread, “we’re slowly learning as we get into this building that it’s far from that.” His voice continued reluctantly. “There’s a lot of meat products.”

85 million pounds of meat.

“Environmental hazards from industrial disasters too often fall on communities like Boyle Heights,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement.

But this is not an essay about Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, or baby Arden.

Share

Leave a comment

Tune in next week to find out what’s actually hiding inside that building, lost between all those factual story beats.

Spoiler—it’s not meat.

Photos of Boyle Heights disaster were snapped by Mario Tama, Aaron Cantu, and Genaro Molina in that order for the LA Times.

There is no reason that the bulk of California’s population of 39.5 million could not be arrested and compelled into similar productive service for Silicon Valley’s elite and the state’s top 200 billionaires through a similar piece of progressive legislation.

It is my hope that in the coming years we will all learn to accept governance and protection with equanimity and walk quietly into the peace of a voluntary human extinction.

Signed,

Share

COOL bro

The human commons taken without consent, compensation, or negotiation, processed into proprietary infrastructure owned by a handful of private entities, then sold back to the people who produced it as a service they must pay for… Great long-standing business model.

That’s called colonialism.

Anyways, I forgot to dispose of this little malcontented bit of video content on Dumpster Fires last month but it’s more relevant than ever today.

Enjoy this delightful mini documentary about California’s very first law, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.

Except, well… here’s a great detail that did not make it in the mini-doc:

After annihilating the federal parks budget, President Ronald Reagan was so desperate to dredge the money to purchase Saddlerock Ranch that one of his aides actually wrote a letter to Saudi Arabian billionaire Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi asking for a donation. The sheik did not reply. His bro-in-law sent $200.

And another:

When owner Ronnie Semler rejected Reagan for the last time, he was sitting in federal prison, having pleaded guilty to selling helicopters to North Korea. He was especially touchy at the time because his latest bid for early prison release—starting a non-profit program for disadvantaged children with learning disabilities (LO fuckin’ L)—had been dismissed by the courts.

Share

In other life affirming news, the large and thriving brewery I’ve worked at for the past too many odd years closed last night. I made an uncharacteristically vulnerable and heartfelt post about it on Instagram yesterday.

I’ll have more to say about the closing of Angel City Brewery in the future. Its unnecessary death is a serious loss to the city of Los Angeles. This hundred-year-old JA Roebling warehouse was a major communal space in the historic core of Los Angeles, blocks from El Aliso, and like that tree the brewery remained a central pilgrimage point for people from all over the planet and all throughout the city and SoCal.

Hundreds of times, if you’d flown in from Sweden or Brazil, or Japan, landed at LAX, and Googled ‘brewery’, you were standing in front of me ordering an IPA an hour later.

Pasty boomer men terrified of white replacement and urban spaces, convinced of the ‘American carnage’ and the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Los Angeles and Gavinor Gruesome would order a pint from me and I’d tell them about P-22, El Aliso, etc. and encourage them not to be a pussy, score some PCP up street on Skid Row, and finish things off with a quick stop at The Slammer in my hood.

I have to believe some of these people, while they will retain the stain of MAGA hat hair for the rest of their days, found themselves enjoying better beer and a broader mind after leaving our brewery.

I was an ambassador… for craft beer, for a brewery and brand, and also at times the city, and civilization itself. I will miss this. Fuck my life.

If you know anybody hiring for something better than Walmart greeter… please drop me a line. I start work at the Walmart Supercenter in Lancaster on Valley Central Way next Tuesday. I’m excited but also a little apprehensive. I’d love to find something better, more adapted to my strengths, which are researching and weaving stories, selling alcohol, telling stories, and selling alcohol, and having conversations, and not selling writing.

Share Dumpster Fires

Big thanks to Etan Rosenbloom for encouraging me to visit Saddlerock Ranch. If you’re not familiar with Etan or his blog, Etan Does LA, Etan is an insane man (and passionate historian) visiting every single LA County landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are 625 such places. He is rapidly nearing his 300th visit and post.

If there is anything I should be researching and reporting on that I don’t know about or something that you specifically would like to see me founder upon, drop a comment or DM. And please, if you like those posts, go to Substack and like them, and share them!

This past Sunday I appeared for a second time in the LA Times talking about the absolutely dumbfounding and unfathomable cost of US war on the global climate.

Share

The stats and hypocrisy on display in the brief opinion piece represent only the tip of the iceberg on this dark and murky subtopic. My first book China Lake makes an appalling and totally plausible argument about the US military’s future role in ‘battling’ global climate change. That argument was the darkest I could muster at the time and also felt like a fair conclusion to the absolutely fucked facts I was finding. I was guided during those days—days when I was actively thinking about the US military permanently dimming out the stars—by a quote from the great pessimist himself, Cormac McCarthy, in particular a line from his play Sunset Limited:

And yet, having experienced two separate ‘full release’ doses of 5-MeO-DMT over the past nine months, I can confidently say that I no longer believe the above to be fact. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nonetheless, the unsettling climate picture presented in China Lake appears more and more plausible to me as the years drag on. At least I know one person ultimately will have benefited from the book. As Landon Bates wrote of China Lake in The Los Angeles Review of Books shortly after it appeared in 2017: “I decided I probably won’t be having kids while reading it.”

Okay. Anyways, please take away grand pappy’s iPad. He’s done.

Read my piece by clicking the below link & please fire off a couple comments. There’s some real crusty gerontocratic boomer diaper blather gathering down there.

Writing not confined to any dry LA Times informational style slouching forth soon.

Unspoken cost of U.S. military is a stunning volume of pollution

I think of that afternoon often, and a lot lately, when the freshman ROTC came out after the national anthem in full uniform twirling fake rifles covered in football tape and marched toward the fifty yard line chanting in unison and tossing their guns while the entire stadium full of 5,000 people stood frozen in silence for two whole minutes with their hands over their hearts and at some point I snapped and yelled “Fuck US Imperialism” and security escorted me out and my mother started weeping in the bleachers and wouldn’t talk to me for several weeks afterwards so I stayed at my friend Kyle’s house and his parents were kind and so were all the others. They told me not to feel too bad.

“Don’t be too embarrassed,” they said.

I was just young, an idealist, and had to give it time, a few more years, perhaps, they said, to develop a more complex appreciation of geopolitics.

I remember Casey Madden’s dad. He was so certain. He smiled, supremely condescending.

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

I’m still trying to understand the contradictions. I don’t know what to believe. But I don’t want to be naïve.

“Is the Pentagon hiring?” I asked Barry.

“Probably,” he said. “You could apply online.”

Barry straightened his tie and checked his watch again. He said he had to get back to work. We turned and started back toward the mezzanine above the security checkpoint. Walking down the long concrete ramp, I contemplated buying something in the gift shop or having a penny crushed into the shape of the Pentagon or working for an important think tank. This was the adult way to think about climate change and the history and future of the world. Protests don’t change things, powerful people do.

Barry stepped behind me onto the escalator above the checkpoint and grabbed the rail. Only one more question remained.

“Can the Pentagon actually go Green?”

On this point Barry finally laughed.

Share

The above is from my book China Lake.

“The song of Mignon came vividly to me as I walked through the gardens of the city of Los Angeles… Luscious fruits, of many species and unnumbered varieties, loaded the trees. Gentle breezes came through the bowers… The water rippled musically through the zanjas. Delicious odors came from all the most fragrant flowers… The general impression upon my mind, after spending the last week in September in the place, is that it is one of the most pleasant places in the world.”

The river also kept carrying people away quite literally, as one observer of the 1884 floods recalled:

“Day after day it rained in great sheets. The river became a boiling yellow lake. Houses, torn from their foundations, floated downstream with the smoke still escaping from their chimneys. Horses, cows, sheep, and now and then the ghastly form of a human being, were part of the strange driftwood. Sometimes the water came in waves fifteen feet in height.”

Share

The above is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, the book that launched this block. Which one day I will finish, maybe… until then, at least for now, these drips…

And if Dumpster Fires seems quiet lately it is because the fires of creativity (i.e. misery) are burning. I’m working feverishly on the above book to the detriment of health, sanity, and most crucially, online CONTENT.

Perhaps one day soon, as I have hinted at previously, I will begin to properly excerpt the pages here.

• In the meantime, please reach out if you know a literary agent or manager. I’m looking to sell the forthcoming book and some of my other Intellectual Property, so I do not have to feed my family cats in dogs in the coming the years.

Finally, I DO HOPE YOU’VE BEEN ENJOYING SPREAD OF FASCISM ON US STREETS! Fuck ICE, seriously. Fuck those dudes. Fuck them. Profoundly. Fuck them. And fuck Kristi Noem. And fuck Stephen Miller. Profoundly. FUCK HIM. And fuck the Heritage Foundation. Fuck them. And fuck the Democrats. And fuck the tech oligarchs who confuse “success” with merit. And FUCK the Christian Nationalists in this country. FUCK THEM. Fake Christians all. And fuck you. But big thanks to JD Vance for calling Donald Trump, “America’s Hitler.” He was right about that back in 2016. And fuck me, I have to go put on my eye shadow now…

But here’s a poem I penned to the Trump family and the Epstein Presidency while eating a can of sardines last week.

“Defend the Homeland,” say the propaganda posts pumped out by the Trump admin recruiting incels and cosplay cowboys for DHS and ICE.

But whose land is it? Whose home is this? Ask yourself, truly, who owns all this dirt upon which we pass our too brief and disappointing lives? Who has a right to be here? For whom—or what—is this land home?

We all came here from elsewhere. Even the Native Americans crossed Bering Land Bridge before the end of the last ice age. But what was truly born here? What belongs here? We stand today wholly divided, facing each other as warring tribes ready to tear one another apart over a truth that none possess.

America is not a Christian nation. It is not a white, European nation. It was built by pagan slaves, conquered through Native American genocide, engineered by wealthy elites to ensure their own hegemony. And today, after so much erasure…

Share

Who or what really belongs? Who was here first? There are days, most days, I’m tempted to side with the great William S. Burroughs.

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”

It might do us all well to remember a little humility. The soil we claim so confidently to own—it is waiting. It is ready. It will swallow us whole.

More info about the Treaty of Cahuenga reenactment ceremony happening Sunday, January 11th at 12:00PM can be found at Campo de Cahuenga.

Have you ever heard of the BACULUM? It’s the perfect holiday gift!

It’s all natural, affordable, and sure to spark fun family conversation about the FALL of MAN. It’s also dredges up a bit of abysmal trivia I’ve dropped to no avail in a few unpublished essays over the years—trivia which I share now in video form for your morose delectation.

As I continue to empty my pockets of choice research nuggets in the form of failed viral content in the hope of increasing my Instagram following to the extent an agent or publisher might imagine me an entity with an organic following potentially deserving of a lucrative book contract, I hope you will share my shitty content and send any hungry gatekeepers you are acquainted with my way.

Share

She always kept a dish of vinegar out to keep the fruit flies off the apples. But that day the ramekin lay empty and overturned. The letter had been lying there a long time. The pages, brittle and yellow, were curled up at the edges and had drained the sentences into dry wordless pools of blue punctuated by the bodies of little dead bugs. “You tend to over privilege the role of language in human experience,” she said once. Yet it was she who told me that day that Eve was created from Adam’s baculum. For her it was a kind of game. She never read the news, just played the crossword puzzles. I don’t know where she read the article, probably it was some kind of joke at the back of a science journal. Supposedly, though, in the Old Testament, the word for rib, tzela, could refer to a hillside, the walls of a temple or wooden planks of doors and walls. It also referred to the trunks of trees.

“Biblical Hebrew had no term for dick,” she said. “How would they have referred to you?”

May you think fondly of our redeemer in the coming days.

I told her it would be a book about Los Angeles. It would only pass through the Simi Hills and the meltdown site. The focus would be LA history.

My devious little plan was to buy a bunch of books to back up the appearance of this claim and then quickly figure out once and for all just how Los Angeles ever grew so grotesquely gigantic, how it was that it ever swelled all the way out from the feet of humble El Aliso, stretching far and wide, all the way out to the desert and north across the San Fernando Valey, each new tacky tract leapfrogging the last, the sad stucco perimeters of Los Angeles expanding like some kind of monstrous plasm replicating itself every few years, cellular division by subdivision, growth after superfluous growth crusting outward forever into the hills and mountains and valleys in pursuit of more space, more peace and safety until, well… the metastasis landed eventually at the gates of the radioactive Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

My plan was to read a bunch of books, not just the one that everyone reads, City of Quartz. I wanted to find out definitively how the city grew. How was it that they started building those faux-Tuscan McMansions in the shadow of America’s largest nuclear meltdown?

My plan was to answer that question, and then under cover of dozens of LA history books, go on writing that book about that nuclear meltdown, which needed that question addressed, of course. But I wouldn’t get bogged down in ancient history. No. I was going to go on Oprah, land a full page spread in People, write the first book about the meltdown, sell it off, make a million dollars, go on tour with Erin Brockovich and the lady from Eat, Pray, Love.

It was going to be perfect.

Share

The plan, however, did not pan out. I read way too many books—an evasion, it seems now looking back, a way of avoiding and not dealing with the psychotic prohibition that launched that crazed reading spree in the first place. And all this confused bibliomania, which left me sprawled all over Southern California, my mind stretched out like the metropolis itself, it made it increasingly difficult to find my way back to Woolsey Canyon Road and the secretive Boeing Facility hiding above the San Fernando Valley that was my whole reason for remaining in Los Angeles after the summer of 2017.

One benign offshoot of the meltdown of my relationship and the disaster of the Santa Susana book project, however, has been that I know a shit ton of Los Angeles history.

Rather than saving the above bit about George Chaffey for the six to seven readers that might eventually make it to page 432 of my forthcoming book about the meltdown that has no publisher and is not finished (shoot me a message if you know a good lit agent; I need an agent…) I figured it might be better if I started putting some of my more delectable research nuggets together in pithy little informational packages that might attract more social media followers (agents and publishers want to see your numbers!). The above is extracted not from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz but another equally brilliant but lesser read beast, Material Dreams by Kevin Starr.

Consider gifting your cousin this Christmas not City of Quartz but some other Los Angeles classic like Material Dreams, or better, Southern California: An Island on the Land, or The Fragmented Metropolis or, your best option, Barret Baumgart’s absurd and slender opus, YUCK.

Buy YUCK

Speaking of which, I’ll be in conversation with my friend , author of the important new book The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands at The Last Bookstore in Studio City on December 17th. Our conversation with journalist Dana Covit will raise money for the Mojave Desert Land Trust and beer will be provided by Angel City Brewery.

Hope to see you there!

Share Dumpster Fires

I swear this is the last time I will post about my new book YUCK!!

But this one feels warranted. The Los Angeles Times today published an opinion essay that I somehow snuck through the slush pile. Hundreds of comments and dozens of complaints sent previously to LA Times in protest of Gustavo Arellano’s plagiarism of my El Aliso reporting were, apparently, not enough to put me on a blacklist permanently.

Read it: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-11-18/joshua-trees-climate-change-extinction

The article is brief and not exactly brand-new info to any diligent Dumpster diver but it’s quick and punchy, worthy of sharing with your uncle, or co-worker, or teacher, or ex-boyfriend, or anyone who might enjoy learning something surprising about the world they inhabit.

It’s also a powerful bit of validation for a strange small book that was supposed to die alone unread in an underwear drawer.

It’s also a little hopeful.

I love that it is the stubborn weirdness, the confounding grotesquerie of the Joshua tree itself that furnishes—maybe—the source of its hope.

It’s almost poetic, possibly enough to weave a weird book around…

Share

Other non-news: I’ve been sitting on ton of writing and not hurling it here. Not yet. But rest assured, deep down beneath the Amazon Prime boxes, the Hello Fresh boxes, and the Chewy boxes, a fertile bed of fetid embers burns.

The strange saga of Joshua Tree antipathy was largely forgotten until, well, I dug it up and turned it into a new book—YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia.

For Halloween, I thought I’d toss out a couple of the more merciless and inspired attacks I came across in my research. These choice bits all come from the astonishing and largely overlooked California Desert Trails, written by Joseph Smeaton Chase in 1919.

“It is a weird menacing object more like some conception of Poe’s or Doré’s than any work of wholesome Mother Nature. One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant… A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal.”

Share

“Wild-looking shrubs leaned out overhead and stared down at us with startled air. Strangest of these were the so-called Joshua trees… Nothing in the vegetable world is more unprepossessing than this scarecrow, all knees and elbows, with handfuls and mouthfuls of daggers for leaves.”

“My friendly trees ceased at once at the foot of the canyon, leaving only the Joshuas, which always seem to have been arrested in the midst of some uncouth antics, brandishing daggers like a juggler.”

Please, will somebody be a Joshua Tree for Halloween already?

For more on the mysterious forgotten master of American nature writing, JS Chase, see my previous post, “Cosmic Bard of the California Badlands.”

In other news, you can catch myself and writer, photographer, and adventurer —founder of the Forgotten Lands Project and author of the important and powerful new book, The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands—live in conversation in Los Angeles at the Last Bookstore on ✦ Wednesday, December 17th ✦

We’ll be speaking with journalist Dana Covit about forgotten lands, forgotten histories, and the importance of preserving both.

And if you haven’t checked out YUCK yet, published last spring by Wandering Aengus Press, you can get a feel for it in the above Halloween-themed video. You can also purchase it in paperback or audio here.

For now, be very afraid…

Contact the FBI

And, well, I finally got around to it—albeit in the form of a deranged 3 minute Instagram Reel, created largely in the hopes of improving my numbers on social media so that I might eventually attract a literary agent to sell my next book, an agent search now being a regrettable necessity as I foolishly fired my previous representation some years ago after he proved unable to seize the moment, i.e. that week Kim Kardashian started Tweeting about her discovery of the nuclear meltdown site hiding behind her mansion in Hidden Hills, a site whose radioactive fallout the Woolsey Fire was then in the process, possibly, of seeding all across Southern California.

Anyways, Santa Susana is safe now for people and mountain lions—if you would believe the glossy brochures produced by the Boeing Corporation.

Share

Of course, P-22 is hardly hidden history. I’m not sharing anything new. And yet, as my Reel makes clear, and perhaps the below paragraph… I’m constantly astonished how few people—even Angelenos—know the improbable true story of the Mad King of Griffith Park.

Share Dumpster Fires

One of my favorite experiences bartending at Angel City Brewery has always been educating people about mountain lion habitat in Southern California… “Give me a P-22, people will say.” “P-22?” “Yeah,” they’ll say, “the mountain lion one.” I’ll pour it and come back, a twinkle in my eye, voice a soft purr. “Do you know who P-22 is?” They’ll say, “Uh. Who? It’s like some kind of hop,” they declare, an educated guess. And say, “No, bro. It’s not a hop. P-22 is the world’s most famous mountain lion. He lives alone on an island.” And when they look at me like I’m crazy, I’ll say: “He’s the most sexually frustrated cat on earth.” And when they’re starting to look afraid, I’ll say: “He lives alone on an island at the center of Los Angeles, and he’s never had sex.” And when they’re trying to rapidly complete the transaction and move away as quickly as possible, I say: “He crossed like six freeways. Most mountain lions get obliterated by a semi-truck trying to cross like one. But he’s tough. He crossed like six. All to eventually maroon himself friendless and sexless at the center of Los Angeles. Most thought he’d move on in search of a mate, but instead he stayed.” “An island?” they’ll say. “Yes,” I say, “Griffith Park, a figurative island surrounded by the wasteland of like 50 freeways, the largest urban-wilderness preserve in the United States at 4,300 acres.” Most people, even if they’re from LA, still haven’t heard of P-22. “Is this, like, a myth?” they’ll say, and I say, “No, bro. It’s P-22. P stands for puma. He’s numbered and has a radio collar. There’s some scientist somewhere who can look on a computer and see where he’s chilling all the time. But he just stays on his island at the center of Los Angeles, not bothering anybody, never seeking a mate, just feasting on mule deer, jack rabbits, and recently, a chihuahua until...”

P-22 passed away near the end of his natural life cycle in 2022. Angel City Brewery began brewing the beer in honor of the boy in the Fall of 2018.

October 25, 2025, is P-22 Day in Los Angeles. To learn about events and help protect SoCal cougars go to SAVELACOUGARS.ORG.

Hiking in Griffith Park just isn’t the same anymore…

Leave a comment

Share Dumpster Fires

I suppose Kristi must imagine that a few months ‘among the Sierra Nevada’ is all the National Guard would need to restore ravaged and chaotic California to its former splendor. But Bierstadt, like Krisi, was mostly selling fiction. None of old Albert’s cosmetic creations ever made it to market without, first, a thick fat basecoat of Botox. And let’s be honest, the only thing that might beautify this great nation today is if the National Guard were carrying the trash that is the Trump family out of DC in those big industrial Glad Bags.

For your morose delectation, I have included my full comment on the Department of Homeland Security’s post below. Please enjoy.1

Share

Dear Kristi, whereas previous works name specific sites like The Domes of the Yosemite, or Lander’s Peak, here Bierstadt leaves the locale of his Sierra Nevada, a mountain range eighty miles wide and five times longer, mysteriously vague. And yet even knowing it depicts no true mountain view, I suppose Bierstadt might easily be forgiven. If the landscape painter’s task is, as Ruskin insisted, to “direct people’s attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe,” then the painting is unquestionably successful, for although the technicolor mountains, inflated to a height beyond hyperbole, certainly do not exist in California’s Sierra Nevada—as someone once employed by the US Forest Service building trails in the Sierra, I might know—one must assume, given theoretical physicists increasing insistence on an infinite number of possible worlds, that they do exist in some corner of ‘the material universe,’ even if that corner does not include the planet Earth. Not so much a composite as a work of fantastical art, Among the Sierra Nevada perhaps has value as a kind of proto surrealism, pointing the way toward the science fiction visions of, say, H.R. Giger or Zdzisław Beksiński, postwar painters of alien worlds and landscapes where bones, bodies, and machinery continually combine and entwine, expanding and building forever outward toward some inscrutable purpose one is happy never to fathom. And in fact, in Bierstadt’s Sierra, the snowy slopes rising above the emerald valley floor, receding and ascending over further terraces and balconies into increasingly swollen heights everywhere pierced with outlandish slanting spires, teetering pinnacles, and bony buttes do eventually begin to suggest, more so than any realistic mountain landscape, something gathering its limbs, struggling for birth as it strives to push its brittle bones through the pale tissue of some kind of pyramidal egg sack. Rays of gold project through a dome of swirling cloud, showering the scene in what Bierstadt must have intended as some kind of heavenly light, although the longer you stare at the painting the easier it is to imagine the blinding glare emanates from the descending eye of some kind of malevolent drone come to harvest another hatchling deformity from the smoldering hive. Disney illustrators working beside the Los Angeles River in their Burbank offices would later study such nightmare effects in eras before the advent of CGI. And yet I have a feeling that today, behind the fantasia, we might find nothing more than another Jurassic shipping crane stretching its limbs. Certainly, Bierstadt required the advent of some sort of similar implement as the gigantic ten by fifteen-foot canvas went trotting all over Europe, from Rome to London, Paris to Moscow, and Berlin’s Royal Academy where it won the Exhibition’s Gold Medal. At the very least, the painting reveals that by 1868 Alfred Bierstadt had stopped seeing what was actually there. Mark Twain himself had already admitted as much. In 1867, perhaps finally grasping that ‘intelligible something’ he found so maddening in Church’s Andes, he mocked Bierstadt’s Domes of the Yosemite, calling it “very beautiful, considerably more beautiful than the original.” Ambrose Bierce cut deeper, glimpsing beyond the theatrics something abominable and grotesque struggling for birth. “It is with grim satisfaction,” he mocked, “that we record the destruction by fire of Bierstadt’s celebrated picture of Yosemite Valley. The painting has been the prolific parent of ten thousand abominations.” An early mountaineer of California’s Sierra Nevada, Clarence King, likewise found Bierstadt’s mountains too lurid, flimsy, and finally just fake. He wrote in 1872 that “It’s all Bierstadt and Bierstadt and Bierstadt nowadays! What has he done but twist and skew and distort and discolor and belittle and be-pretty this whole doggonned country? Why, his mountains are too high and too slim; they’d blow over in one of our fall winds… He hasn’t what old Ruskin calls for.” On a deeper level, though, beyond the charge of infidelity, Bierstadt’s desperately exaggerated summits, the endless unfurling hulk of their unrealism, their too high and too slim peaks crowned with improbable protruding mountain horns—they do not lift a song of God’s glory or the Country’s inexhaustibility. “O beautiful for spacious skies… For purple mountains’ majesties…” In fact, by what Alan Watts might call The Law of Reversed Efforts, they whisper just the opposite. Even the deer at the foreground of the painting seem to hear it. They stand frozen beside a silver stream, ears pointing, listening as they peer alarmed, away from the light, toward something in the forest outside the painting’s frame. What do they hear? What might they see? It’s hard to say, but I believe it’s what Blakelock finally saw. A conviction that sunk to the depths of his marrow long before he touched California’s shores. Something visceral that urged him away from realism, and eventually, beginning in the 1880s, before he went insane, compelled him to utilize the color black more than any other painter in history. You can see it, too, albeit indirectly, in Bierstadt’s Sierra, which means saw, from the Spanish serra. The painting reveals unconsciously, precisely through all its striving heights, a dark underworld of doubt, a lurking suspicion, indeed the mounting dread and creeping terror that the palace of Nature may not be the benign and limitless monolith once pretended. And the voice outside the frame that whispers to the startled deer? It is just what we have most to fear. The voice is our own, the approach of Man, bearing the ravages of the axe and saw…

The above is an excerpt from my third book, which—somehow, yes—is about the 1959 nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory at the end of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

Soon I’ll post a longer excerpt from this insane section of the book that bridges the bits hinted at from my previous El Aliso post, connecting Bierstadt and the Hudson River School painters to the Los Angeles River and the trauma and genius of an even better artist, Ralph Albert Blakelock.

I’ll remind you: the headwaters of the Los Angeles River begin at and flow off of the irradiated, alien-looking hills of the Boeing-owned Santa Susana Field Laboratory…

Leave a comment

Share

My El Aliso Instagram Reel, viewed 23,000 times, with a total watch time of 127 hours, 526 shares, 193 saves, and 59 comments, “broke” the story (earth-shaking news, I know!) that the historic plaque for this sacred, little-known, long-dead tree was missing. Beyond that, in a brief and pithy little package, it unpacked some serious virtually unknown history that stunned and delighted thousands of viewers with its combination of humor, heaviness, and meaningful informational content.

On Monday, I was shocked to see dozens of messages coming at me from friends and strangers alerting me to the fact that the LA Times, and its star ‘reporter’ Gustavo Arellano, had traveled to the exact same site and reproduced the same shots as my Reel in their own wildly popular video posted to Instagram, YouTube, and the LA Times website. Their video even drew attention to the strip club behind the plaque’s location, as I did at the start of my video (to humorous effect), and of course pointed out the tragic, unacceptable fact that the one forlorn, miniscule memento this once sacred tree has been allowed (the plaque) is now gone. Stolen.

#stolen

Gustavo Arellano denies knowing of the existence of my Reel. He told me when I reached out to him that he had no idea of its existence. He said he had arrived at the location by the same means I did, “reporting.” He also said, “I always cite sources.”

Share

The LA Times has been expanding their reach and staying afloat through an increasing pivot to social media content creation under new billionaire ownership. It’s hard not to see Gustavo’s posting on the El Aliso just six days later, after my Reel had been seen tens of thousands of times, as mere coincidence. This was an opportunity for some great content to bolster the Lard King of The Los Angeles Times.

#coincidence

Of course, I don’t own the topic. It’s public knowledge. In some ways I’m flattered by this flagrant and obvious copy of my quality original content. This could have turned into a great opportunity.

Gustavo could have credited me in the first place, complimented the quality of my video, the writing that went into it, the time it took to produce, cut together, etc.

He also could have done none of that.

When approached, he could have said, “Man, what a coincidence!” He could have continued that line for some time, whether true or not. “What are the odds! Wow! I can’t believe! I’m so sorry! I had no idea! That’s so cool! You’re Reel is really great, man! Jeez. Again, what are the odds!?”

He could have acknowledged the extremely unlikely concurrence of our arrival at the same place to produce the same content—with him stumbling up a mere six days later. I would have accepted this, and bought him a beer, and we could have become friends. Perhaps this is still possible.

But his defensive tone and utter dismissal of my concerns felt immediately disingenuous, and I’m now persuaded it demonstrates a genuine lack of integrity. I have spoken to dozens of people on this matter, and as the unrelenting onslaught of critical comments posted on Instagram beneath his and the LA Times’s Reel shows, nobody is buying his “reporting” line.

The fact that the LA Times lifted and repackaged my work becomes even more preposterous when I ponder the fact that the publication has utterly ignored every pitch I’ve ever sent them, offered not one response, not a single sentence to the numerous requests for op-eds and articles I’ve sent, to say nothing of having ever reviewed or looked at my books which offer, possibly, serious and sustained value to our understanding of Los Angeles, Southern California, and the landscape and history of the West.

But sure, go ahead and allow one of your biggest reporters—one of the most visible media figures in Southern California—to lift the first piece of social media content I create that reaches a broad, general audience. Thanks a lot!

This is all pretty small potatoes, but it’s left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I used to enjoy hearing Gustavo’s voice on the radio around SoCal. I’ve always appreciated his reporting and writing and sense of humor. But in this instance he has flopped, and people have taken notice.

Further, his trite take on the tree in the second half of his LA Times video represents a watered down, feel-good Disneyification of history that is very nearly offensive. His breezy, upbeat suggestion that El Aliso constitutes some universal symbol of resistance for all the oppressed of Los Angeles whitewashes that actual, grim reality at the root of this tree—a history of literal slavery in Los Angeles. To claim that El Aliso was a place of gathering for Spanish, Mexicans, and Native Americans is inaccurate and it cheapens and glosses over the history and is potentially insulting to the Native American community for whom this tree was literally the center of a world, a world that the Spanish, then Mexico, and later rapacious white landowners literally raped, enslaved, and erased. Such a claim, however, does fit his Gustavo’s blasé brand. But it does not fit the history.

And if there is anything I’ve learned this week, reviewing the history of the past few days, is that I should not be surprised if the LA Times refuses to publish me but happily steals from me.

But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s all coincidence! But I don’t believe so. If I am wrong, however, I will happily apologize and retract and buy Gustavo two beers!

If you want you can read a bit of the note I sent to the LA Times below, which speaks to the unlikelihood of the coincidence angle, the easiest thing for Gustavo to have countered with.

No doubt books are built out of other books. The world is an interconnected web of reference. We all steal and repurpose. But don’t steal from the little guy at Dumpster Fires. My two books rest upon a massive foundation of journalism and history, which I credit (at times in the end notes to excess). The LA Times should have credited my reporting—or at the very least waited more than 6 days, at which point my Reel would have burnt itself out and no one would have noticed their flagrant rip-off.

Share Dumpster Fires

• See the comments below the Gustavo/LA Times’s Reel if you want to wade into the muck and fun.

• See the comments below the Reel I created in response to the LA Times plagiarism. The exchange with user sexington is illuminating.

Below is an excerpt of the letter I sent to the LA Times. Coincidentally, this was the first time I ever heard back from them. “Thank you, Mr. Baumgart, for this detailed message which I'm forwarding to Gustavo and editor. I appreciate your thoughtful outreach.”

Of course, the timing could just be coincidence. However, this seems unlikely as the site in question, the subject of the Reel (El Aliso), is not widely known at all. To illustrate, on Instagram and across social media and the blogosphere there are virtually no Reels or popular posts of any substance on the subject of the El Aliso tree (it remains totally hidden history, overlooked). Over Instagram’s ~15 year existence there seems to be one Reel that was made three years ago, and it is very generic, superficial info that does not approach the informative deep dive that my Reel attempts. Given the lack of general information, public knowledge, and total absence of anything viral, creative, entertaining, etc. on social media regarding this El Aliso tree...

I'm left with the impression that Gustavo and the LA Times simply saw a very well-crafted, entertaining, informative viral Reel produced by a small, largely unknown writer/creator (Myself) and then proceeded to travel to the exact same location, reproduce the same shots, lift the topic of tree entirely, and report its pertinent information as though it were their own, particularly the fact of the stolen historical plaque.

Is there anything that can be done about this?

Is there anything you can do?

Reach out to the LA Times HERE and let them know you are concerned about the quality and integrity of their reporting.

The below is a brief written excerpt from a chunk of my next book, which is about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s 1959 nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles, an event which basically no one has ever heard of and that has perhaps killed thousands.

A chunk of this book follows the Los Angeles River and marinates in the beauty and misery that once existed alongside the famous El Aliso sycamore tree. In the book, I imagine my favorite painter, Ralph Albert Blakelock, camped at the base of the tree in the 1860s and sketching the LA River and El Aliso in his journal, sketches he later translated into one of his famous, haunting nocturnes (all of this, of course, before he went insane, was put in an asylum, and started painted American money while his family lived in poverty and his paintings fetched record-breaking sums at auctions, none of which he saw a dollar of; cheerful story).

Share

I’ll eventually post this long section featuring Blakelock and the El Aliso tree. It connects to the crazy Terminal Island post I made a year ago.

Over the years I’ve tried to determine if more vines were planted or people buried in 1853, the year LA supposedly suffered more murders than any other municipality in the country. It’s hard to say for certain. What we do know is that most who visited Los at the time left either calling the place the City of Demons or the City of Vines. Not surprisingly, the city’s two competing faces actually constituted two sides of the same coin. Few understood the fact better than the Gabrielino Indians. As it turns out, progressive California’s very first law, passed by the new state congress on April 19, 1850, happened to be a perverse bit of legislation known as "The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. The law ensured the protection of Native Americans by denying them the right to vote or testify in court, and it allowed for their immediate arrest should “any reasonable citizen” discover or suspect them of being unemployed or drunk. Horace Bell, an influential lawyer and publisher for whom Bell Creek is named—a small stream among the red rocks of the Santa Susana Mountains that constitutes the ultimate headwater of the Los Angeles River—recalled the city of Los Angeles’s steadfast and ingenious application of California’s inaugural law in an 1881 memoir: “By four o’clock on Sunday afternoon Los Angeles Street from Commercial to Nigger Alley, Aliso Street from Los Angeles to Alameda, and Nigger Alley, would be crowded with a mass of drunken Indians yelling and fighting. Men and women, boys and girls, tooth and toenail, sometimes, and frequently with knives, but always in a manner that would strike the beholder with awe and horror. About sundown the pompous marshal, with his Indian special deputies, who had been kept in jail all day to keep them sober, would drive and drag the herd to a big corral in the rear of Downey Block, where they would sleep away their intoxication, and in the morning they would be exposed for sale, as slaves for the week. Los Angeles has a slave mart as well as New Orleans and Constantinople, only the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty-two times a year as long as he lived, which generally did not exceed one, two, or three years under the new dispensation. They would be sold for a week, and bought up by the vineyard men and others at prices ranging from one to three dollars, one-third of which was to be paid to the peon at the end of the week, which debt, due for well performed labor, would invariably be paid in ‘aguardiente,’”—a cheap distilled wine of 50% alcohol whose name meant ‘firewater,’ ardent being the Catalan word for flame—“and the Indian would be made happy until the following Monday morning, having passed through another Saturday night and Sunday’s saturnalia of debauchery and bestiality. Those thousands of honest useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way. Vineyards were of great profit in those days, and would be today, if we could recall the times as they were before the conquering Saxon came with his boasted perfection of laws, and his much-vaunted ‘advance civilization.’” Thus the city of Los Angeles, employing a system of exploitation truly befitting a City of Demons, protected Native Americans from “leading an immoral or profligate course of life”—as Section 20 of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians stipulated—and as a cheerful spin-off of such legally sanctioned darkness, a sunny agricultural Eden began to take root at the bottom corner of the continent. Naturally, the city took for its first official seal not a grinning man with horns but a cluster of ripe grapes.

Leave a comment

Share Dumpster Fires

In January 2008, I uploaded a photo album to Facebook called “My Friend the Continent Europe.” It was meant to advertise the permanent authenticity I imagined I had purchased for myself after spending a season traveling alone as a depressed twenty-year-old sleeping on strange men’s couches and eating only the lowest quality street food while it snowed.

In one photo I sat on the edge of a bed bending toward the dim lamplight of a rundown budget room I’d found not far off the cathedral square in Segovia, Spain. In my hands I held a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick. The room, a rare splurge, had, in hindsight, probably been purchased for this prideful excursion, a proto-selfie. Behold the lonely genius fast at work! Here he was caught in a rare light, a candid glimpse of the young auteur studying his craft.

It was a powerful portrait of devotion and discipline captured by a discount JBL digital camera set on timer mode atop the windowsill behind the second of the room’s two twin beds, neither of which the great writer could persuade a girl to share, not even the American study abroad students whose drunken garrulous cries in shrill Valley Girl accents echoed over the cobblestones and through the serpentine streets of the old Gothic quarters, poisoning the night as they carried out over the cathedral spires of every city like some loud public service announcement declaring the death of all mystery.

Share

Years later this dreadful photo earned its first Like. It came from a beautiful young woman named Christina who, to my terror and delight, turned out to be stalking me. Upon this singular act of pity we established a profound and lasting bond.

In any case, all this is to say I’ll be reading alone tomorrow in a rented room in Los Angeles and it will be broadcast live on Zoom.

Join me at 4pm Pacific for a live reading from YUCK followed by a Q&A. The event is hosted by my publisher Wandering Aengus Press, and I’ll be joined by fellow WAP author and poet Majda Gama.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88921757250?pwd=lbyd4i2jKG5Rn1UbfWDc6BXbYccLpS.1

Or click here

Yuck,

B

Buy YUCK Bundle

Leave a comment

Share

“Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”

Unfollow Barret

In second grade, my mom started giving me money for a school lunch. Before that she made it herself, a baloney sandwich on white bread. At school I’d eat the sandwich. After school I ate the plastic bag it was wrapped in. The woman whose house I went to daycare at drove a white minivan and hidden behind the rear wheel at the back of the garage I’d crouch and tear off tiny slivers from the main body of the bag, eating as many as I could manage before the fear of being found overwhelmed me. My behavior was a source of shame, a bitter compulsion that I couldn’t control and I hid it from other children, the daycare lady, and my mother. In my mind, the baloney sandwich was the heart of my sack lunch but it could never have performed its essential duty without a plastic bag to guarantee its safe passage from kitchen cutting board to school and stomach. Ignoring the bag was impossible. At the back of the garage each day, a new sandwich bag lay hopeless in my hand—just another sack consecrated to a weekday’s doldrums, destined for the dumpster, totally unfair. The bag could not help what it was… Like every human being, I suppose, I had to pay witness to suffering or invent it to keep life interesting. But unlike many, and to my detriment, I could not watch or pretend passively. So I took swift action, or I tried to—hours after lunch, finally alone in the daycare lady’s garage, I gagged down the day’s plastic as quickly as possible, a process seldom speedy since you had to carefully roll each sliver into a tight wad then swish it in your spit. Any other way and the scraps would lodge in your throat and make you choke, a setback that necessitated a further round of retching as your fingernails scraped over the cilia of your esophagus, searching for a loose end of the unraveled bag. By the end of it all, thoroughly sapped and sickened, I used to wonder if there wasn’t another way. But it would not have been enough to simply hoard the bags, to tape them together into a raincoat or some other bricolage. There were several years when my growth in inches exceeded San Diego, California’s annual rainfall amount. My mother, too, obsessed with cleanliness, would never have tolerated my collection. Of course I could have snuck around, jammed the bags in some larger plastic sack and prayed the baloney fumes never escaped my closet. But if they did, if my mother ever discovered and opened that grocery bag, she would have seen inside it not only a nest of bacterial infection but also perhaps her son, a boy whose insides too were tangled and improperly hoarded. Better that I went on my quiet way carefully incorporating the bags into my body and being. Rising from humble synthetic origins to join the organic cycle, the bags transcended their earthly destiny, and I was brave. My living body became itself a bag, the stomach lined with impassable scraps a vessel guaranteeing the life of the lonely souls that I had invented and freed across so many solipsistic afternoons of onlychildhood.

And it was generally after one of these plastic-fueled pity parties that, disconsolate and constipated, I turned to my mantras.

Where they came from or how the ritual ever commenced, I can’t say precisely. Looking back, though, it seems they were always there, as mysterious and sudden as my own appearance in the world. Indeed, even part and parcel of it. As though included with me, like a can of paint, there came instructions for my proper disposal. The manufacturers were terse.

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I?

Terse and rhetorical. Yet they worked. Carefully incanting the trio of demented questions on the daycare lady’s couch, before the greenish tint of her big screen TV, slowly, the feeling of separation, the certainty that I was a body with a brain and name in a certain place and time, a discreet unit of flesh and plastic independent from the crushing flux of the world’s revolving wheels, this sensation of isolated self would gradually melt away, and as it did so my anxiety would fade.

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I?

Alongside the mantras, my own eye floaters, once I found them, became an indispensable alley in my nascent quest for ego death. At some point that year, an evening when my father didn’t show—a common occurrence whenever he planned to pick me up—I’d made the cheerful discovery staring at the TV that my cornea was covered in small clear scars, a series of tiny fissures that seemed to float like water spiders over the surface of my vision. And seated there on the daycare lady’s couch, watching them drift before the big screen as I mumbled Who am I? What am I? Where am I? the realization slowly dawned that it didn’t really matter if my dad forgot me or if he never showed his face again. It didn’t really matter either if the Jerry Springer Show was then welcoming a reluctant guest named Sandra, a transsexual, as Jerry called her, who at age thirty-five decided she was a woman, and by age fourteen had already determined she didn’t want her legs. “I didn’t want them. My brain just kept saying, ‘Get rid of em.’ So I had to get rid of ‘em.” It was easy to get rid of Sandra, to peer past the stumps hanging from the seat of her wheelchair, easy to peer past all appearances in fact—even the image of the revolving wheels of my father’s van coming to rest before another home with another child, the other son three years my senior, whom he shared with a lawfully wedded wife—easy so long as you kept intoning your mantras, knew how to find your floaters, and let the thoughts go.

Really, it was just as Master Soggy might advise: “Neither follow thoughts nor invite them; be like the ocean looking at its own waves, or the sky gazing down on the clouds that pass through it.”

Or—I might add—be like an eye staring at its own floaters.

Some afternoons the best you could do, less depressing than ingesting another hour of Disney Channel laugh track, was to cable surf south, away from those waves of toxic optimism, down to Maury, Jerry Springer, or Sally Jesse and watch your corneal cobwebs curl around the room, and wonder, as you listened to the eternal hum and bleep of the world—BLEEP! BLEEP you! You BLEEPing bastard! BLEEP sucker!!!—a world upon whose shores you found yourself so freshly thrown…

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I?

…the eyes but two soggy non-grasping globes glinting out from the back of the living room as the broccoli started steaming, the microwave buttons beeping, the TV softly BLEEPING… And before it always the Flying Guy, my favorite floater, the one I always looked for first, a dirty little figure woven from the clear wicker of mosquito wings, his transparent twist ties twirling over the paternity test results, twitching as the teen mothers tore at their hair, flying over the airborne chairs that followed the polygraph results, the loud cheers of the makeover reveals, drifting over the shoulder of Darren, who wanted a drama free relationship, or Steve, so desperate he’d marry a horse, and Bob, who didn’t trust Regina. That’s why he watched her shower. I remember Kevin, too, a rebellious teen who went from gothic freak to gorgeous and chic. And Chiquanna, 15, who admitted to trading sex for a lobster buffet dinner. Brinkly, 17, attacked by the ants that came out of a flower.

And Chad, 27—who could ever forget poor Chad?—a sobbing dwarf who fled the stage while his lover locked mouths with another man, a fat biker, and Jerry Springer standing by acting scandalized, mumbling some cliché about the heart’s caprice as the audience cackled, others cringing as the kissing continued audibly onstage, everything set for commercial break, a few important words from our sponsors until Chad bounced back brandishing a baseball bat and started swinging for the fences, every one of his homeruns fanning the Flying Guy higher and higher until he eventually floated out of frame and the daycare lady yelled my name.

“Barret!”

Yes, there really was so much beauty in the world. Sometimes you just couldn’t bear it.

“Why are you watching such… trash!?”

But I couldn’t tell the daycare lady the truth. You simply couldn’t swallow that many bags without coming to a similar conclusion. I was trash.

And yet being trash had certain advantages, as Brinkley, Chiquanna, and Kevin could no doubt attest. People tended to look past you if you weren’t pestering anyone, paid you no more mind on a warm laissez-faire day than the broken lever on their La-Z-Boy. And reclining amidst its commodious neglect, intoning the mind’s mantras, it was possible not only to trade sex for a lobster buffet, but also to train your eye on its own weird water spiders and slowly drift away… elsewhere, into a kind of ecstasy… a place where the sad sack of self somehow ceased to exist, had proven itself more disposable than any SC Johnson Ziploc, and all the pain and worry and plastic it carried, with nothing more to protect it, dissolved wholesale suddenly, like blue pigment in that warm fluid boundlessness in which all things abide, suspended and floating, including the BLEEPing Flying Guy.

Who am I?

What am I?

Where am I?

Leave a comment

Share

“Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.” —W.G. Sebald

Weird is an older, stranger word than most realize. It derives from the ancient root wert, “to twist or to wind.” When we ask, “How did you wind up here?” or when we say, “I lost my keys, but then they turned up,” we get a hint of what WEIRD used to mean. Originally weird meant something like fate. Weird was “that which comes…” Whatever arrives unbidden, carrying some kind of import or meaning, as if somehow sent, directed, dispatched from somewhere beyond is… weird.

Or so I claim at the start of the above mini-doc produced by Nick Lacy that captures the magic and misery of my book release party at Angel City Brewery last month. Between this brewery presentation, and a few other speaking engagements and podcasts, I seem to have irrevocably committed my art and soul to word weird. But if you’ve been following me or read any of my series “The Heights of Weird,” you might not be surprised.

Share

Many thanks to Nick Lacy for producing the above short film, Brandon Lien & Brandon Tran for shooting and editing, and Anton Lieberman for loaning the Joshua Tree video art which you can see on loop at Autry Museum of the West in Los Angeles. Thank you as well to Jessica Jelley and Angel City Brewery, and Christina Catania at Burro Social Co.

After this release party, YUCK has had a pretty fun run:

• YUCK has been featured on local radio in Joshua Tree at Z107.7 FM.

• For the past month YUCK has hovered at or just below #1 Best Seller slot in Amazon’s “Desert Ecosystems” (Amazon’s most competitive category).

• I was honored to be featured on ’s phenomenal desert conservation podcast 90 Miles From Needles.

  

• I read and did an interview with Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.

• I read and did a Q&A in Twentynine Palms.

• More interviews/content on my Instagram, too much to list.

• Find YUCK at all the cool stops: The Station in Joshua Tree, Mojave Flea in Yucca Valley, Hi Desert Times in Twentynine Palms, and in Los Angeles at Skylight Books, The Last Bookstore and Book Soup.

• Two more podcast appearances booked in the next week and several requests in the works.

• Readings being planned in San Diego and West Hollywood. A presentation of YUCK is also scheduled in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz on June 26th.

Thank you to everyone who has bought and read the book and/or listened to the Audiobook.

If you’ve enjoyed YUCK, please leave a review on Amazon right now!!!

“Even the trees are in misery.” —Werner Herzog

Scroll to the end for radio news, YUCK t-shirts & totes, and upcoming events.

I never would have written my new book YUCK, which came out last Wednesday, if I had not stumbled onto the brilliant forgotten work of Joseph Smeaton Chase, whose California Desert Trails (1919) is an unsung masterpiece of American literature and one of the greatest “Travel” books ever written.

YUCK is dedicated to this dead Englishman who captured the beauty and brutality of the Mojave and Colorado deserts in poetic brushstrokes still beaten by nobody in American letters—not even the late great masculine master of the desert west, Mr. Cormac McCarthy.

I’ve never spoken to or corresponded with any other living human who has read Joseph Smeaton Chase, and my knowledge of the abiding obscurity of his genius has long afforded me a secret pleasure.

How is it that one of the greatest books ever written about “Nature” or “Travel” is still totally unknown, out of print, impossible to find except in some shit edition printed off some guy’s computer in San Bernandino? It is an enigma analogous to that which I encountered over a decade ago with J.A. Baker, an author I wrote about at length back in September (“Pagan Vision for the Autumn Season”) and who rivals J.S. Chase as perhaps the most ecstatic, visionary, and underappreciated “Nature” writer of the 20th century.

How do artists of such daring vitality go on hidden? And when you’ve found them—should you respect their cultic slumber or set a blazing dumpster fire in the back alley to broadcast their brilliance?

Share Dumpster Fires

I was tipped off to the works of J.S. Chase by an excellent and important essay by , host of 90 Miles from Needles: The Desert Protection Podcast. A quote from J.S. Chase, featured in Clarke’s essay, set the ominous tone for the wedding Christina and I planned for April 2020 in Joshua Tree, California—a connubial ritual that was ultimately canceled three times by Covid and later never consummated.

You can read briefly about this conjugal disaster and the backdrop that birthed YUCK in the book’s Preface… And if you must know, YUCK is also dedicated to the woman whose passion for the desert outstrips my own.

It was Christina who first brought me to Joshua Tree, and while much of YUCK concerns how blown up that town and park have become, I remain cheered by the enduring unpopularity of its greatest poet, Joseph Smeaton Chase. He is in himself a microcosm for the California desert, a vastness that remains on the whole ignored and unexplored, unknown and unimagined, dead and undreamt of to the hurrying swarm of humanity waiting in long air-conditioned lines to invade the National Park each Saturday.

And such obscurity gives me hope.

There is a tendency to assume we have unearthed all the good stuff, dissected and disenchanted this crowded corner of the continent, that every good mystery and mountain canyon must be mapped and cataloged, its ruins carted off, sorted and analyzed and posted online. It’s easy to fall into a habit of thinking that there is nothing new to discover and discuss except the next snafu barreling down the sewer-brown stream of our social media. But as I continue to find, whenever I dedicate my attention to the desert landscape, there is a wealth strangeness still sitting there.

And it was the abiding mystery that captured J.S. Chase, “the pale, grave face of the desert,” as he said, that “if once you look long upon it, takes you more subtly captive and keeps you enchained… as if you were bemused by the gaze of a sorceress, or had listened over long to some witching, monotonous strain; or had pondered too deeply on old legends of weirdry or parchments from tombs of strange, forgotten lands...” Chase goes on:

“I ask myself again, into what single impression does the desert render itself? …The answer must be, there is none. At every point the desert meets us with a negative. Like the Sphinx, there is no answer to its riddle. It is in the fascination of the unknowable, in the challenge of some old unbroken secret, that the charm of the desert consists. And the charm is undying, for the secret is—Secrecy.”

Yes, the Mojave Desert is ripe with secrets. It is a realm not of geology alone. There is something else here, alive, biding its time... And if you stare and listen too long, it may hold you captive, keep you bemused, obsessed, stranded until you finish a first, a second, and soon, I hope, a third book.

As I said last week at the release party for YUCK, I don’t know how I keep discovering such weird shit in the desert, or why it keeps finding me.

But in either case, I have a relationship with the Mojave. We are intimate. Entangled in some way. But this acquaintance, as Chase wrote, “Certainty it is not love, in any degree, that one feels for the desert… whatever it is, there is something of haunting in it.”

And as Chase concludes, it “is a haunting that lasts for life.”

Purchase the book or audiobook—narrated by me—on Amazon or Audible today and write a review.

YUCK on Amazon

Z107.7 FM, who “broadcast live from a vortex near Joshua Tree,” interviewed me on Monday. Look for that Friday. The radio segment on YUCK also mentions my reading and signing happening outside Joshua Tree at Hi Desert Times this Saturday, April 5th at 2:00 pm.

If you know anybody who’d be interested in discussing the strange, buried history of the Joshua Tree that YUCK uncovers, send them my way.

And finally, if you’re in a good mood and want to consume, I have some shirts and tote bags leftover from the book release party.

YUCK MERCH

Thinking of things seen and unseen… I mentioned Cormac McCarthy earlier and I’m reminded of the final note in YUCK—note #103—which occurs on the last page of the book, page 117:

103, We are waiting for you: have waited since eternity began: These spectacular lines are borrowed from the transcendent and vastly underappreciated visionary masterpiece frequently quoted throughout this text, a book that initiated much of this research in its passionate and disorienting depictions of the Joshua’s grotesquerie. What kind of author is crazy enough to claim that “A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal”? Even in broad daylight!? Joseph Smeaton Chase’s unrelenting California Desert Trails (1919) deserves a new edition from a reputable publisher with an inspired intro. I’m certain the book influenced many writers, even some of the best, particularly Cormac McCarthy. It is interesting to note that the latter’s Southwestern novels, despite the dark precision of their surrealistic prose painting, eschew any rendering of the desert’s most repulsive landscape prop, the Joshua Tree. The omissions is really quite weird. Yucca brevifolia is mentioned only once in an unremarkable phrase at the start of Blood Meridian. “All day they climbed through a highland park forested with joshua trees and rimmed about by bald granite peaks.”

How is it that in all the enviable, unfathomable cinematic montages and mind-blowing million-dollar landscape portraits Cormac McCarthy lofts across the 1,200+ pages of his western novels, he managed to mention the phrase “Joshua Tree” only once… and to do nothing with the image?

It makes me think of that impressive Vanity Fair essay that came out a few months ago—one of the biggest literary scoops in recent years—written by , wherein the author mentions, by way of McCarthy’s former lover, that McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, never actually once rode a horse.

Apparently, he also never took a good look at a Joshua Tree.

I hope after reading YUCK you won’t ever look at a Joshua Tree the same.