Boston, December 14th, 2008: Cholo Bangladesh!

Look, I’ve always known this, so don’t feel bad– it ain’t no declaration of outsiderness– but I am a weird guy. Always have been, always will be. My thinking diverges, and though I pass the Captain Beefheart test, the mystery of my existence has been the tension between this weirdness and a desire to blend– to be mistaken as no different than the other well dressed eggheads. But that’s neither here nor there. None of this is a value statement; life stays life, even for the strange. It remains a pain in the ass.

A weird person sees other freaks. Across the street, across the room. It’s a simple trick, a skill akin to spotting junkies. I know my own kind, and in so knowing, I say this: let us give current President George “Dubya” Bush a hearty fare-well. I will miss him as deeply as it is possible to miss a public figure with whom you have no personal acquaintance. I will miss him like an estranged friend.

Don’t get me wrong; this ain’t a lament for the war crimes, the torture, the criminal negligence, the incompetence, the buffoonery, the willingness to pass the buck or the petty thuggish malice. I have no illusions about Dubya’s responsibility. We spent six years pretending like Dick Cheney was the problem– but our troubles were emanations from Bush’s heart, manifestations of his rotten character.

Yet for all of his lip service towards the Right Wing, the Christians and Big Business, Dubya was Our Guy– the biggest freak to win the Presidency since Richard Nixon, a dry drunk with daddy issues and a wickedly cruel sense of humor.

For reasons I never understood, Dubya gave people flashbacks of jocks in high school– how many times was he called Frat Boy in Chief? And yet his Yale years reveal so much: frat life for Dubya appears to have been about branding emblems into human skin and leading cheers. This was never a normal man.

We suffered eight years of Clinton’s base philandering and ineptitude– the 1990s were consistently stupid but never strange. Clinton longed to be unique, to be special, but Bubba was only another Rhodes Scholar winking at his reflection in the mirror, reassuring himself that he was dead sexy. As unique as buttermilk. Nine years of Dubya has been spectacle after spectacle; two screwy elections, choking on Pretzels, falling off a Segway, a secretary in state dressed like a dominatrix, name calling, incredibly strange faces, dancing with Ricky Martin, Jenna, shoes being thrown.

The thing with the shoes; how perfect a valedictory! Yes, I understand, the shoe is an enormous Arabic insult, but still– shoes? And what other President could’ve unflappably dodged and cracked wise a minute later? Andrew Jackson? MSNBC ran this text: “PRES. BUSH FORCED TO DUCK TO AVOID SHOES THROWN BY JOURNALIST.”

Perfect Dubya.

So good-bye, George, you misfit. We’ll never see the like again.

“Rustic Canyon Ruin May Be a Former Nazi Compound,” Los Angeles Times, September 4th, 2005, by Cecilia Rasmussen:

Southern California has been the cradle to many odd cults, credos, utopias and dystopias. Among the most mysterious are the ruins of a Rustic Canyon enclave once known as Murphy Ranch…

…Wrapped in canyon lore, the remnants are believed by one local historian to be those of a small, short-lived colony of Nazis. Although no one can say with certainty who lived there or what they did, Randy Young, a former commercial photographer turned book publisher, said his research indicates that it could have been home to up to 40 local Nazis from about 1933 to 1945…

… According to Los Angeles County records, a Jessie M. Murphy purchased the 50-acre parcel in Rustic Canyon in 1933. That’s how the place came to be known as Murphy Ranch.

Young suspects that Murphy was a front name used by the Nazi group to buy the property. There are no other records of Murphy, nor does the name surface in stories passed along by old-time canyon residents, Young said.

A man known through oral histories only as “Herr Schmidt” supposedly ruled the place and claimed to possess metaphysical powers. He purportedly used the ranch to introduce his Nazi-inspired political philosophy.

Full text.

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November 30th, 2008.

This is where you enter:

Here are mountains, which make a man feel as though he has entered the Land of the Lost:

One may continue on to the main gate, or descend these stairs:

The first thing you’ll see is a big ol’ stupid gas tank, then there will be more stairs with weird mechanical boxes along the railing:

Five hundred or so more steps down, and a brisk walk along a crappy road, you come to the abandoned power station. It is covered in graffiti and empty. It has a crawl-space for a basement, like every other building in Sunny Southern California.

Travelin’ farther on the path, you come to the devastation of former living quarters. Note that the bathroom tiling has been subject to classy graffito, simulating a glory hole in white and blue. Also DEATH PIRATES graffiti featuring a circle with an A in the middle. Lots of piping and junk.

Assorted debris along the way. Hell Run, a fireplace in a ditch and a crashed-out hippie Van with an UCLA gate pass from 1969:

Further along are the stables. Gated and abandoned.

Walking uphill, one comes to the backside of the front gate. But first there is the water tank:

Goodbye, Goodbye:

Truly questionable eating. An LA tradition decked out Xmas style:

It offers salvation…

….and sin:

Yes. I ate that: