Dumpster Fires

As California’s gubernatorial candidates, tech executives, and mayoral hopefuls continue to contemplate the mass unemployment anticipated from continued advances in artificial intelligence, they would do well to look back at the state’s landmark 1850 legislation as a potential roadmap for handling large-scale unemployment throughout the Golden State. There is no reason that the bulk of California’...

The creation of this ephemeral under-clicked content required 27 hours so I’m not going to talk about it. Enjoy! Except, well… here’s a great detail that did not make it in the mini-doc: After annihilating the federal parks budget, President Ronald Reagan was so desperate to dredge the money to purchase Saddlerock Ranch that one of his aides actually wrote a letter to Saudi Arabian billionaire She...

In June 2005, I was ejected from my high school graduation ceremony at Patrick Henry High in San Diego, where I was wearing a white robe, having one of the top GPAs in my graduating class, for screaming the words “F**k US Imperialism.” The principal withheld my diploma. I think of that afternoon often, and a lot lately, when the freshman ROTC came out after the national anthem in full uniform twir...

Short of the great flooded valleys—the damming of Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite, which nearly drove John Muir to suicide, or the flooding of Glen Canyon Dam that created Lake Powell, burying 190-miles of the most fantastic sculpted desert canyons on earth under six-hundred feet of water—there remains probably no other landscape in America so substantially erased as that of Los Angeles River. But it was...

While the drunk t-ball coaches who never found the clit wear masks like f*****g cowards as they hunt Mexicans in unmarked GMC Suburbans across American cities—occasionally shooting soccer moms in the face—I thought I’d make a fun informative video about this important overlooked historical site down the street from my house where a group of mixed-race, multi-lingual warriors, with no proper legal...

Have you ever heard of the BACULUM? It’s the perfect holiday gift! It’s all natural, affordable, and sure to spark fun family conversation about the FALL of MAN. It’s also dredges up a bit of abysmal trivia I’ve dropped to no avail in a few unpublished essays over the years—trivia which I share now in video form for your morose delectation. As I continue to empty my pockets of choice research nugg...

Back in 2018 when Christina ruined my life by telling me she would kill me (by castration ) if I wrote about the 1959 nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—the largest nuclear meltdown in US history—I lied to her and told her that I would not actually make my new book about the nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. I told her it would be a book about...

Did you know that Joshua Tree National Park was founded on Halloween Day, 1994? It’s almost as if federal government had some inkling of the vast hate once heaped upon the lowly, humble, “demoniacal” Joshua Tree. The strange saga of Joshua Tree antipathy was largely forgotten until, well, I dug it up and turned it into a new book — YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca...

For years I’ve wanted to say something about P-22, formerly the world’s most famous mountain lion (RIP-22). And, well, I finally got around to it—albeit in the form of a deranged 3 minute Instagram Reel, created largely in the hopes of improving my numbers on social media so that I might eventually attract a literary agent to sell my next book , an agent search now being a regrettable necessity as...

On Monday, it came to my attention that one of the most prominent journalists in Southern California, Gustavo Arellano, lifted the contents of the viral Reel I shared with you and thousands of other people last week. My El Aliso Instagram Reel, viewed 23,000 times, with a total watch time of 127 hours, 526 shares, 193 saves, and 59 comments, “broke” the story (earth-shaking news, I know!) that the...

Happy #NationalWhiteWineDay #winelover #winetasting Actually that was yesterday. For years I’ve wanted to create some “content” about this insane spot in downtown LA, a couple blocks a from where I work. And, well, I finally got my s**t together and did it. Watch the video and weep. The below is a brief written excerpt from a chunk of my next book, which is about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’...

“Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.” —W.G. Sebald Weird is an older, stranger word than most realize. It derives from the ancient root wert , “to twist or to wind.” When we ask, “How did you wind up here?” or when we say, “I lost my keys, but then they turned up ,” we get a hint of what WEIRD used to mean. Originally weird meant somethin...

At the start of November I returned to the Mojave Desert to attend Ridgecrest’s 10th annual Petroglyph Festival. I’d been following the event for a decade, ever since I became obsessed with the petroglyphs on the China Lake naval base while writing my first book , but something felt different this year. At first I couldn’t figure it out. Outside the main gates I met the same protestors, members of...

Soothing New Podcast Content!!! Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts , or on the Substack app . I live behind an actual slaughterhouse , and around the corner from a gay sex club, which shares a back wall with a pet hospital and a new charter elementary school . There’s a lot going on here. It’s one of the things I love about Los Angeles—diversity. If you read the first important historical work wr...

Join me as we sink deeper into the Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare and tie it all back to my failed book project about America’s largest nuclear meltdown at the Boeing-owned Santa Susana Field Laboratory . Part 4 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” ( The New York Times ) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Here the horseshit really hits the fan… Erewhon is an absolutely insane...

Part 3 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” ( The New York Times ) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Here the horseshit really starts heating up… Did you know the obscenely overpriced, celebrity obsessed LA-based wellness grocer Erewhon is actually named after a fictional totalitarian Hell where it’s illegal to be sick or unhealthy? If you’ve followed my last few rants, you m...

Part 2 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” ( The New York Times ) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify . Recently I discussed how I arrived inside Erewhon , Los Angeles’s most expensive health food store, for the first time ever in my life. The traumatic fecal-encrusted episode was somewhat fortuitous insofar as I had been planning to write something about the grocery chain for...

Behold the origins of my dismal errand … to Erewhon . In an effort to improve my health and not commit suicide, I’ve been exercising more the past few months. It feels good to get out early and hate the thing you’re doing to yourself more than yourself. Sometimes, jogging, you can even imagine you’re going places. Such was the case in Studio City the other day when, having finally hit some kind of...

Los Angeles was for years the most murderous city in America. Newspapers called it Los Diablos instead of Los Angeles. “Some think it odd that there has been no violent deaths during the two weeks that we have been here,” an agricultural surveyor wrote home in 1860. “May the Lord watch over me.” Governors in Sacramento completely ignored the region for the first three decades after California join...