I checked our download stats at what passes for the internet café at the Fountain of Youth RV Resort down the road from glorious Niland yesterday afternoon, folks, and I'm happy to report our numbers have soared from 166 last week to a whopping 187 as of 1:33 p.m. this day just past.
So it looks like the passenger deck on this ship of fools is filling fast.
Can fame and fortune be far behind?
Almost surely not. But never mind that.
Jolly Rogers wants to thank you all for opening your ears, your hearts, your minds.
Remember: all you have to do to set sail with the whole sick crew is search out my revolving website. To find it, just listen to your closest friends. Surf the web with real curiosity. Open each and every piece of spam you receive. I plan on sticking around here for the great duration listening to what everybody has to say who God and His Gofers have forgotten…
Speaking of which, imagine me tonight, if you will, sitting cross-legged on a deserted beach somewhere at the end of the world. The clock on my computer screen says 3:12 in the a.m. The temperature is a balmy seventy-eight. The forecast, like our government, is bland and predictable. A light breeze wafts in across the blasted water, on the far side of which hangs a stark low mountain range on the horizon. Stars are manifest in hazy profusion. To coin a phrase.
Surrounding me is an abandoned playground, its swingless swing, broken seesaw, and monkey bars in the shape of a submarine's conning tower half sunk in what at first glance you might mistake for white sand. You would be wrong. The granular substance, if you examine it closely, is in fact composed of myriad crushed fish bones from myriad fish kills. The air carries a salty piscine reek that you can taste on your lips, at the back of your tongue, deep in the intricacies of your sinuses. Leave here and drive to Niland, to Mecca, to Palm Springs, and that taste will dog you, friends, reminding you for hours post factum of this alcove in Nowhere's Mansion.
Behind me looms the renowned deserted blue and white marina hotel with its empty graffitied swimming pool. The windows were long ago boarded up with plywood. The back door has been let us say renovated by indigenes to allow easy ingress by the odd intrepid traveler. To wander past what once was a meat locker through what once was the bar, now a dark ramshackle cavern concretized with gull guano and a-trill with the birds' uncanny coos, is finally to understand Mr. Tom Waits's voice.
To read the thoughts spray-painted along the swimming pool walls is to understand Mr. Lou Reed's lyrics.
Your name means nothing, they say.
Hell's cuties.
Nighttime flight.
Oh, yeah.
Make no mistake about it, friends. This is the zone of cars sunken nose first into the briny slush along the shoreline, back halves jutting above the surface like huge rusted fins. The zone of derelict cafés and dented golf carts propped on blocks in grassless yards. The zone two hundred feet below hope possessing a heat so malicious it can clear the searing streets for weeks on end, a pollution so ferocious it can evacuate the vast inland blue of every boat and swimmer for months at a stretch.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did we get here?
At the turn of the last century, the story goes, the eminent California Development Company, seeking to realize Imperial Valley's potential for unlimited agricultural productivity, dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. When not-unexpected heavy silt loads commenced inhibiting the flow, engineers created a cut in the western bank to allow more water through. Jump to periodic Biblical rains. Jump to periodic Biblical floods. Jump to breaching of the levees.
And witness, if you will, nearly all the river's mighty flow rushing headlong into what till then had been known as the arid bowl-like Salton Sink.
By the time the breach was closed in 1907, the present-day Salton Sea had been formed: fifteen miles wide, thirty-five long, an average of thirty deep.
Instead of evaporating, as some innocents had predicted, it more or less maintained itself by massive agricultural runoff from the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Combine that with the increasing salinity and inflow of highly polluted water from the northward-flowing New River, and witness a wild chemical broth that began to spawn monstrous algal blooms. The blooms starved the water of oxygen. The lack of oxygen spawned voluminous fish die-offs. The voluminous fish die-offs spawned immensely elevated bacteria levels. The immensely elevated bacteria levels spawned massive bird die-offs. And…
And what else could one possibly do when played such a surreal hand except make it into a tourist attraction that failed almost as soon as it was imagined?
All of which is to say: welcome to Dreadland, friends.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
And welcome to my humble vessel. My listing luxury liner. The inside of my head for the next twenty minutes…
Yo, Jolly Roger. Dan here.
Where you phoning from, Dan?
Seattle.
And what do you do there in the beautiful Emerald City?
I'm a member of this group of artists?
What kind of artists?
We're called The Heraclitus?
As in the Greek river one can never step into twice?
Yeah. Exactly.
And what, Dan, is your group's medium?
Cells.
As in small rooms in prisons?
As in one or more nuclei surrounded by cytoplasm and enclosed by a membrane.
Human cells?
Human. Cow. Fish. A stem cell is pretty much a stem cell. It's what you do with one that's important? We're into biochemical engineering.
I sit before you, metaphorically speaking, deeply impressed.
We take these like, um… frames? Think of them as frames? Polymer scaffolds? And we grow the cells on them into… stuff. You differentiate the cells into whatever you want them to be. Bone. Muscle. Liver. Whatever. Then you cook them in a bioreactor for a couple of months.
A bioreactor?
Yeah. This, um, this device that supports a biologically active environment? They're used a lot in tissue-engineering?
What sort of stuff are we talking about here?
Stuff that's kind of unimaginable, but not really? You can, like, embed an iPod Nano into a, um, dog's heart?
Say again, Dan?
With a hole in it for the dial and earphone jack and everything? That's what I listen to you on sometimes.
…?
Or you can craft this bio-jewelry? Real goat eyeballs, maybe, that you can hang around your neck? Or say you want to decorate your computer with human teeth? Or make your trackpad out of cat-tongue tissue for better traction? You can do that, too. Except that's not the really cool stuff. We're in the process of giving people the option to grow extra little things on themselves? On their, like, bodies? Not prosthetics or plastic surgery or whatever. We can, like… Okay. Picture tiny devil horns for your forehead made out of real, you know, growing bone tissue? You have to get them filed down every once in a while, just like you get a haircut? Or instead of a tattoo of bat wings on your back? You can get small living batwings implanted? One on each shoulder blade? You can't fly or anything, but still. It's pretty cool. Or maybe a miniature set of gills just below your ears… or maybe, like, on the back of your hands? Or what about a squirrel's eyeball on the tip of your dick?