i had an errand in dodge city yesterday. dodge has a local tradition where visitors are asked to pay $10 admission to a dubious-looking museum. for me, this is a tax deduction.

the museum is a simulation of the old dodge city front street. front was where the action went down, where wyatt earp and bat masterson slung guns and cleaned out the dirtbags (so that the peace-loving settlers could continue to massacre buffalo for the purposes of starving out the indians, in accordance with then-federal policy). dodge was founded in 1872. all the famous gunslinging went down in the next dozen years. in 1885, front street with its characteristic wooden structures was destroyed by a fire. in its place, solid victorian brick houses went up. the brick houses were demolished in an urban renewal project in the 1970s. a parking lot stands in their place.

locals, confusingly, refer to the boot hill museum as a place where you can still catch the flavor of front street, now that front street has been renewed into nonexistence. what they don’t make clear is that the western-style superfamous front street was gone before the second demolition of front in the 20th century–that the front street everyone’s talking about existed for just 13 years, a century and a quarter ago. furthering the confusion, i learned that some of the bricks from the demolished victorian buildings were used to build a part of the museum. this was meant to enhance credibility, the feeling of the reality of the place. the meaning of the bricks is that the past is here: present. but those bricks are from the future of the front in the museum. you get a tortured sort of presence in dodge.

photo: deerbourne’s flickr

he misses my business. shockingly.

and in this interesting segment he offers some pretty explicit guidance on designing online gambling transactions (deposits, withdrawals) to evade US law:

klemas. what failure. it’s saturday night. we all have giant brains and we’re american. anything could be ours. we have the right to bear our arms to the entire globe. we could laser-etch, from space, a six-acre portrait of salman rushdie on the greens of the back nine of enquelab golf club, tehran. those of us who are kansas-based bachelors with pure hearts and roofs overhead, and are new to the town, free of soul, well-groomed, basically well-groomed, satisfactorily groomed, of acceptable stature, etc., could experiment in 84 ways. there’s herzogfest in victoria. inception is playing at the dream. there are friends to be made (one would think). action, one thinks. give me rock.

give me hard blood and ferocity.

life, come thwumping like hail…

i managed to get pants on after a reasonably long day of what i still call work. i thought of victoria, of the cathedral of the plains, made of limestone. much could be tried or experienced. the failure came when i got in Jim Cannon, my car, and although he was pleasant to sit in and i savored the glory of ownership and the intelligent korean styling, i didn’t want to go. i had no lust.

i need fruit, i was thinking. it’s good to have fruit in the morning.

so the whole limitless infinite hot-hearted saturday night ambition ended like a phone call, and i was on my own in Jim Cannon, all humble, bopping down main street’s uneven stones. klemas is the name of our grocery store.

what could i do? i bought food. this is what a man could amount to. i errantly picked out noxzema. i happened to be strolling in that part of the store. what happens, i asked, when one washes one’s face? i got the fruit, too, and some other provisions, and shambled to checkout, chose the line to the pretty brunette’s little stand, but then was left flailing when two other stands became free while the hombre in front of me dawdled. aw, hell…

and i paid. i walked out with my bags. what do you think was up there dominating the consciousness of anyone crossing the parking lot?

sky is the word for this thing, but usually it’s a dead and irrelevant syllable conveying all of butkus. sky. there was sky. it wasn’t just over us like a lid. it was a whole ancillary cosmos rammed face-to-face with our planet. it was complicated as shit, and it was rich as all the coffee in brazil. flabbergasting and nutty.

i deferred to the sky until sunset. i walked around my lawn and i was altered. i’m always aware in the few weeks i’ve been out of new york and been living here of the lack of the new york things. of action as it’s typically conceived. shit, though. what if there’s life? what if there’s more than i’m used to? what would it mean if there’s more? what if there’s the same amount? what would that mean?

kansas is okay. thank you, t.c. (at the moment i’m off elsewhere because of travel. (so rob my house! great shit in that house! there’s a hand-carpentered sideboard of impressive build! good sofa! teak dresser! teak! very well-polished teak! there’s nothing light. no jewelry. nothing easy you can carry. i have the only computer here with me where i am. but the thief with balls and enough of a truck and manpower and composure to go for the furniture, basically, is welcome  to the furniture.) but that is part of the beauty of kansas, being right in the middle. centered. conveniently you can access every acre of the continent not on the coasts – which who needs? – in fewer than seventeen hours by car. it is like living simultaneously in every state with the exceptions of california, oregon, washington, maine, either vermont or new hampshire, rhode island, massachusetts, connecticut, new york, jersey, maryland, delaware, virginia, the carolinas, florida, and alaska. and hawaii. puerto rico, guam, Checkpoint Charlie, the green zone, panama, and the united kingdom.) the fact of generally widespread gun ownership in the state has brought an interim resolution to my twelve-year quest to start not resorting so immediately to the flipping of the bird when faced with really stark, reckless aggression from drivers. i’m growing cautious in my dotage. or wise. more seriously there’s peace, for me, in a place like the western plains because the world you think about most and you encounter most baldly is not the human but nature’s, the world of storms and wind. storms, wind and heat are inarguable. and no one thinks to fight them. you sit nakedly with them. you sit. and flip no one the bird.

kansas i’m liking. i fucked up the blog. i apologize, as usual.

This is either true or false. Some of us own new cars, Meri, though. What’s a new car but a permanent connection with women?