Banditdamack Is on the Run
Hemet isn’t a place that you visit, it’s a vortex where you wind up.
The greatest rapper ever raised in California’s Inland Empire nearly gets busted, and it’s mostly my fault.
Good thing we weren’t smoking.
The sirens are off, but the silence is plenty ominous. Only a few seconds separate the moment when the Hemet police car bends the corner from when the cops bounce out of the late-model SUV to start lumbering in our direction. No time to do anything but react.
Until now, it has been an almost artificially pleasant Sunday afternoon on Presidents’ Day weekend. One of those subtropical 70-degree winter idylls that originally inspired the Eastern pioneers to exchange frostbite for the fertile soil of the San Jacinto Valley. But tranquility can quickly breed carelessness. Even if you’re Banditdamack, the hyper-vigilant 20-year-old storytelling phenom, who may already be the best rapper ever raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
The slipup was harmless enough. We’d agreed to meet at 2 PM at a spot in Bandit’s downtrodden hometown of Hemet, a former agricultural depot of about 90,000 …
The Front Porch
Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.
The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to …
No Time For Words
By learning to step out of the way of observation we can experience a greater degree of reality.
‘Stow it, Guv’nor’
Turn On, Tune In, Shut Up.
In the beginning, we observe. We watch, wide-eyed, taking it all in. At first, we do not know what any of it means. There is nobody teaching us, and we have no words. Our only option when we are very young is to sense the world directly — with our fingers and toes, our breath, our noses and our ears, and our eyes.
Soon though, so soon, we begin to have ideas. That person is a friend. This animal is soft. I like the taste of that. Those noises make me flinch. And soon those ideas come to replace observation. Soon we are interpreting as we observe, and it becomes difficult to tease the two things apart. What I am seeing becomes intertwined with what it means.
In the study of animal behavior, one of the most difficult things to learn is to return to a state of observation without interpretation. If you are trying to figure out what an animal is doing, and also would like to understand why, you …
