This work is a collection of notes made by hand in the doldrums of unemployment, divorce, and travel-trailer living off the grid in the high and waterless meadows of Potrero, California. Written in the beginnings of the late summer of 2003 and through the ends of 2005, this is the meandering of a drunk and stolen mind, slowly being reclaimed by the rightful owner.
I always imagined that the rugged, boulder-strewn, and chaparral-thick mountains of Potrero were not unlike the sea; the blowing of the wind, the cresting of the mountains, and man, eternal, upon his great quest.
Meth has taken on its own character, and it's apparent when you finally see it up close. It is not just the familiar trappings: the missing teeth, the sores picked and picked and picked open, the 500 cigarettes and 4 liters of orange or yellow soda and the weird collections of electronic bits or anything metal or plastic and quite a few parts of kids' toys, and possibly any of these things combined with aluminum foil. There might be a Jacob's Ladder, purple arcs of electricity rising sequentially between copper rods in the garage. Or a steel bookshelf with mismatched casters welded to the axle of a semi-trailer, or a guy followed by his dog walking across the junkyard, hunched over, with a shiny aluminum blower from a big-rig diesel. And they smoke a lot of weed.
The Big Joke is that they still call it a "Lab". There are no scientists, carefully jotting notes in white lab coats beneath high-hanging fluorescent lights. No organized sets of Pyrex test-tubes, beakers or glass titration tubes clamped above Bunsen burners.
Instead, there are just bits and chunks of smashed dishes and flasks on a broken portion of the Earth, while the real action is taking place in windowless back sheds and travel-trailers with a propane tanks boiling stuff that doesn't take much to boil.
Pirates, on the other hand are all fun, all the time. Adventures and dress-up with some cute buccaneering. All very romantic, all very Disney; until someone loses an eye or an arm or a leg, or something more valuable.
