Snakes on the Mesa
Inside a packrat’s nest is a kitchen area, with little shelves where different kinds of food are stored. There is also an area like a refrigerator, with better airflow
Nuts and seeds are stacked in the warmer area
Why don’t serial killers ever talk about the good times?
Robert was still back and forth between California and the Mesa. When we first met, some years ago, he liked to watch Hallmark movies. They started with things like a beautiful lost veterinarian whose car broke down and a local farmer took her in and gave her coolant. When he made her pancakes, she realized her boyfriend was shallow and trivial. The lonely farmer and his tame deer — rescued from a hunter — were a better choice.
But once Robert was with me on the mesa, his tastes in programs changed.
He only watched serial-killer series, murder documentaries, and various other shows featuring men disposing of bodies. Screams from his cell phone in the other room kept me awake at night. He found it soothing.
Then he would return to California again, to get things finished up there so he could be here full time. It took him eleven hours each way and he was often gone for a week. The …
Q&A With Bob Mould
Hüsker Dü was the loudest, fastest band in the world while prefiguring nearly the entirety of '90s indie rock.
Now ex-lead singer Bob Mould speaks in his ‘quiet voice’ after living in a farmhouse with chickens for company.
Camped out on Jello Biafra’s back porch; though they were better than U2. Now he wants everyone to listen to Best Coast.
In order to understand what Hüsker Dü accomplished as a band, it’s important to look at the vacuum in which it existed. The band was created in 1979 — a time when the Ramones, the Damned, the Clash, and Buzzcocks were the hip new things. But when I listen to Hüsker Dü now, it doesn’t really feel like it’s from the same era. The Ramones can feel like classic rock. Hüsker Dü has eternally felt and sounded like a ’90s band to me. Their music has a forever-young Peter Pan quality. That’s because Hüsker somehow vaulted ahead of its own genre while introducing a specific sound that people had never heard before. In a great documentary by PBS, titled Hüsker Dü, the Fastest Band in The World, one of the first things said is this: “I said, like, ‘What’s Hüsker Dü?’ And he’s like, ‘They play fast.’ ‘Like what, like fast… like the Ramones?’ ‘Like, maybe faster.’ ‘Like, really?’ ‘Faster than the Ramones.’ You’re …
Ticks
They looked like stone busts of Roman emperors or something
Gorged on Beagle gore
If not a willing carrier, I have been a faithful one.
Sometimes at night when I shut my eyes, and sometimes, for that matter, when I cinch them in prayer, what flashes up on the walls of my mind is a series of three images. Like the dinosaur slides my daughter switches in and out of the View-Master, which, no matter how familiar, retain a capacity for surprise, the first picture emerges from out of darkness and is replaced by darkness before the next one, and then the next one, appears.
Three deer ticks, each the size of a grape, bigger, are arranged in a loose triangle on a stone splash block at the edge of a house. That’s the first image. In the next one, three blood stains, dark, distinct, are all that remain. In the last, the blood on the stone has likewise vanished. Something or other has washed it clean.
The sequence derives from a memory, or collection of memories, from my childhood in Tennessee. Why I’ve smuggled these pictures across …
