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Leonard’s Mountain
I’m going about seventy miles an hour, a hundred feet a second, when I hit a white wall. It has been patchy fog all the way from the coast but now, suddenly, it is dangerous. And approximately, poetically, this is about how I expect to die. First I will be invisible and then I will [...]
Continue reading...Historic Route 66
17. November 2008
Don’t call it Route 66. Call it “Historic Route 66.” That is what it says on thousands of signs like tombstones in hundreds of lingering little towns. Route 66 died right after Vietnam. Or, if you prefer, you can call it the “Mother Road.” You know like, “meet me at the corner of Mother Road [...]
Continue reading...A Brief Reminder
4. November 2008
I want you all to know that I understand that many of you are disappointed and frustrated that I do not share your enthusiasm for Sons Of Anarchy. I know this must be particularly true for those of you who write for, act in and produce this melodrama. However, as stated on the contact page, [...]
Continue reading...Hells Angels Best Breast
17. October 2008
The Hells Angels are the defining brand of the outlaw world. All due respect to the Mongols, Bandidos, Outlaws, Pagans, Sons of Silence, Vagos, Warlocks and Vietnam Vets. All due respect to everybody who is not on this list. No offense. But, today, most people who look at bikers from the outside use “Hells Angels” [...]
Continue reading...Weather Report
14. October 2008
The seasons in Los Angeles are spells. Most places call this week Indian Summer. In El Lay this is the season that sets the devil loose. People call Los Angeles a basin but it is a cauldron, really. The city is surrounded on all sides by 3000-foot-high plateaus and 7000-foot-high mountains. You usually have to [...]
Continue reading...Reno 911
1. October 2008
Bikers rally as trappers rendezvoused. The tribes gather. The loners assemble. The traders raise their tents. The locals load their guns. The big, Fall rendezvous on the West Coast was last weekend, September 24th through the 28th, in the Truckee Flats, in the Sierra Nevada. Sort of that was where this event was. Actually, this [...]
Continue reading...Saturday Night In Ely
24. September 2008
After 9/11 every newspaper and magazine in America ran at least one story titled “After 9/11.” The day the Twin Towers came down is now regarded as America’s mile stone zero. There was the way we were and then there is the way we are now. And, this simplification is always most stridently expressed at [...]
Continue reading...The Great Basin Highway
21. September 2008
North Las Vegas is your last chance to buy gas. There is a Shell station on Range Road. If you miss that there is a Mobil on Speedway. You climb one of the grades that frame the desert cities. Eight percent, maybe ten, for five or six or eight miles. From the summit you can [...]
Continue reading...Friday Night In Vegas
20. September 2008
Two or three hundred years before Christopher Columbus, a lame prophet wandered the Southwest with a flute. He told anybody who would listen that the world had radically changed. It wasn’t the world anymore. It was a wonderful and terrifying new world where false had become true and true had become false and all the [...]
Continue reading...The Rebel Rides
9. September 2008
I was not my mother’s pride and joy. Let that go right there. My father could never have managed to play a father on TV. I don’t know what my brother who died could have grown up to be. My sister went to Bible College so now she can speak authoritatively when she states her [...]
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7. January 2009
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