► Bizaar Village
► Tattoo Asylum
► I. B. Gas
► Space Alien Cafe
► “We’re Leasing! Stop In And See Why.”
► …and some place I can’t remember the name of but it was a shack with hubcaps nailed to the front and a not-professionally-handpainted sign promising “Interior Decoration”.
And I didn’t even have to leave the state. Now Twin Peaks makes a lot more sense.
My sister, bil, and kids visited the “Alien Jerky Store” on their trip out west this summer. That takes some thinking about.
And here is my daughter Rachel (on the left) with her friend Mary in Pie Town, NM, where…just last month…they passed through and had 5 kinds of pie for breakfast.
This is somewhat spooky. My roadtrip was in fact on the way to Braham, MN for a gig at their annual “Pie Day” and it is an event of statewide reknown, supposedly. First I ever heard of it. They have slice-o-pie pictures on their street signs, and the courtesy oasis for the performers was six sunbaked blocks away in the funeral home. And no coffee. A funeral home. With no coffee. Something is very, very wrong in that town. The signs on the road to Braham told the future like a tarot deck at a cheap carnival.
The competition had often remarkably imaginative pies for the most part, if you discount the predictable “Cow Pie”. Which had no beef in it, by the way. And that got me to thinking: There was no savory pie category, and there should be, dammit. I am going to make one, enter it, and call it the “Sweeney Todd”.
No it’s not. Deal with it. We are, in some sense, harvested from the same rice paddy. There are bound to be synchronicities.
(I, however, apparently have to use relational surrogates for now.)
long as the wi-fi works while yer under the bed…
Then it should come as little surprise to you - the hints are already too, too broad - that from approach to arrival to departure my frame of mind was inevitably just so. On the way back as we passed through lovely, bustling, tree-lined Cambridge I looked around me and said, “This would be a great place to hide a body if there weren’t so many houses.” My bandmates were shocked. Which is silly, because I was NOT wrong.
Once you announce a place is good to bury a body, it’s no longer a good place to bury a body. You ruined it for yourself by yourself.
Really, do you think I’m so unsubtle?
First of all, let’s clear one thing up: I didn’t say “bury”. I said “hide”. As in, dragging it out into the backwoods and leaving it would suit me just fine. Now that that’s taken care of, let’s get to brass tacks. You assumed I wanted to, or was planning to, get rid of (pardon me: bury) a body there. I said no such thing. I was conversationally admiring the scenery from a particular perspective. Sheer idleness aside, this actually does serve two purposes, though: first, the entertainment of striking fear of the unknown into my compadres; and second, if I were to actually bother myself with the tedium of doing such an unrefined and unsanitary deed as dragging bodies around, me being self-respecting I would now do it somewhere else of course - no doubt you’ve heard of misdirection (and I WOULD NOT DO IT WHERE THERE WERE HOUSES. Which fact I already alluded to, so stop that).
I hope you’re not a cop; 'cause I’m not a criminal, yet even so with the conclusions you jump to I do believe I could run rings around you. 
It’d be so much more jolly if you played along somehow instead of leaping at what looks like an opportunity to try to poke holes in my logic and peeing all over a thread, don’t you think? 
When bodies start missing all around you, no one is going to be misdirecting. Everyone is going to be ‘memberin’ how you was always looking for good locales. That’s the problem with villians. They can never keep their brilliant plans to themselves. They always gotta be telling the good guys how smart they are. This gives the good buys plenty of time to foil their plans. Quit talking and just kill 'em.
Well, I DO agree with that, hands-down.
I was talking with a fellow who maintained that the best way of all was first with posturing, teeth-baring, and bloodchilling displays, and then do them in. In other words, warn them. I peered at him and said, “You’re not a natural killer, are you.” “Uh…no,” he replied.
What he wanted was the ritual of the fight. Despite what he consciously told himself, killing was not really the goal; it was just another point in the greater theatrical process of playing at “Clash of the Titans”. Display - warning - necessarily renders the success of that point, the time of the attempted kill, negotiable. If it’s made negotiable because one has not pared away the unessentials, then killing could not have been the goal; feeding the ego would have been the goal, and so killing is merely incidental. He might as well just go about butting heads to see who dies first from that sport.
Of course, if that’s what floats his boat, great. Just best not to confuse the two.
From road signs to pie to the Tao of killing your fellow man. What a splendid bunch you all are. 
Emmline, regarding the photo of your daughter in Pie Town, New Mexico, have a look at “Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943”, which is linked on the last page of the “Odd News” thread. There are several excellent photos of family life in Pie Town, New Mexico, circa 1940. There is quite a contrast from the modern day Pie Town that your daughter saw.
[Tuco is in a bubble bath. The One Armed Man enters the room]
One Armed Man: I’ve been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.
[Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam]
Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.
… Can you tell us why they were leasing, now? 
Sorry. We didn’t stop to find out because
we were resolutely on a mission, Brahamward-Ho, and all that;
we had the acumen to guess that roadside attractions were unlikely to pay us for our time;
we were laughing so hard that it was all we could do to help keep the driver oriented to the road and thought it best to move along; and
when you see signs like that, one ponders the local mindset, what passes for their sense of market, and of course one’s personal safety.
As you can see, it was quite simple. It was sort of like when one of the guys decided he was hungry and we were coming up to the food-n-fuel joint. “No. NO,” I snapped. “Any place to eat but a place called ‘I. B. Gas’. We’ll hit the next spot, all right?” Well, the next spot was the Space Alien Cafe. We sighed and drove on.
Sin City, Wisconsin, talk about buried bodies.
