And now for a few notes on almost getting hit by a meteor and what else is lurking, exactly, out there

Bards of Mythville and Shiprect guitarist Anticide and I were on the way home from taco night when he saw a piece of a falling meteror right over our heads, perhaps 100 feet above. I could smell the sulfur. It was right over the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, lined up with Indian School Road, downward to the east. It burned out right above a parking lot. Which means only one thing. In terms of meteorite awareness, I'm good to go. My chances of getting hit by another one for the next 500,000 years is what, maybe one out seven? Whew. That's one less thing to worry about.

I may not be a rocket scientist, but the word on the street is people here in Scottsdale, Arizona don't need to worry about other disasters spreading like contagion across the globe. On the day of the earthquake in Mexico, however, I did some low-tech scientific readings. Based on these readings, the ground was rolling. Later that day, I sat at the bus stop, not even playing my harmonica to mock the honking vehicles like I often do at Scottsdale and Shea. I just sat there, staring, taking it in, in a kind of simple-minded bliss, thinking to myself: "Hmm. This stuff all around me all looks pretty damn solid to me."

But that is falsehood. Everything is porous. Everything. It's all atoms and molecules, brothers and sisters, and the world we see is a mere illusion based on our limited censors perceiving it as stable.

The late Edward Abbey once wrote he lived in Arizona for, among many other reasons, this one: Nothing bad ever happens here. It's solid as a rock. Wrong, Everything is in flux.

Things change. Perhaps because of this: Experts in the field will tell you there are no natural disasters, only human errors. Build by the sea, pay the price. Build on the desert, make sure you have enough water. And in the heat, in Arizona? C'mon man, just look at what happened to this place in June, with temps going over 120 and records going out the window. Live on a mountaintop, look out for lightning. You get the picture. But let's set that aside, for now.

Nuclear war is a kind of cheap answer to this question of immunity from the apocalypse. Mostly because of its unthinkability. There is no rational reason for their use, since mutually assured self-destruction is always going to be the posture. But a nuclear accident? Yeah, that's out there. So are acts of terrorism with nuclear materials. Worrying about that, though, is the job of highly paid paranoids in the fear-is-security-industrial-military complex, and I'm just going to let those folks stew in their own sweat, hatred and self-loathing of all of the mosquitoes out there looking to bite us, hitting America where it ain't.

Arizona is, nevertheless, about as safe as it gets in terms of all thing militaristic. The economy depends on the military. War is Arizona's lifeline, courtesy of the U.S. government. I won't bore you with the stats (So here they are). But from end to end, this state is armed to the teeth, with everything but a navy. Air assets. Ground assets. Space assets. Probably even men-who-stare-at-goats assets. If war comes, the Southwest is bank.

In addition to that, for example, just Scottsdale alone is loaded with human shields. The international elite mutton here like locusts. They drive drunk, do their coke, bring their slave women here. It's party, party, party in Scottsdale for the uber rich. Which is what inspires this little sermon, I suppose. Watching their dance of indifference on these days when earthquakes, hurricanes and all the rest are turning the planet inside out, I ask myself, what do these people know that I don't? They are building a new Egypt in Scottsdale, and the architecture is state of all arts. The masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe called them in "Bonfire of the Vanities," have big plans for Arizona. They have access to all the data. The ears of the governments and the corporations. The run the big money seas as they swell and burn. Why?

Well, that one thing not being considered is this: Human error. And arrogance. Incredible arrogance. See the greed? Yep, arrogance.

So I know this couple. Two of the smartest, hardest working, motivated, tuned-in people you can possibly ever know, and they are ready to book, as in flee Phoenix because they are completely convinced the gig is up ... in a matter of days. They are getting survival gear. They are dialing up both mobility and wireless techno. They are thinking about food and water and where is the best air to breathe when the shit goes down. Their conviction is infectious. And I look at this and go, well, where do you run, really, when you don't really know what's going to happen from moment to moment, much less tomorrow or the next day or month or years to come. I think about such films as "Mosquito Coast," with Harrison Ford taking his family to some far off place in South America, all geared up to build their new Jerusalem. All I can think is, you wanna take all of that off-the-grid American know-how and take it where, to make what part of your lives and the world better? With that kind of approach, aren't you just bringing the Beast with you?

But like Roland Emmerich, who did all of those disaster films like "2012," "San Andreas" and "Independence Day," I will now consider several Arizona-based scenarios because hey, it's fun to think about.

Numero Uno: Did you know the San Francisco Peaks, mainly Sunset Crater to the northeast of Flagstaff, are still active volcanoes?

Numero Dos: Public officials in Flagstaff live in fear of what might happen to the downtown area if a 100 to 500 year flood were to come, since even during the monsoons right now the amount of water running through there is unreal.

Numero Tres: The Grand Canyon. Period. One big gash in the earth capable of doing anything, at any time, it wants. Floods. Earthquakes. Dinosaurs or new races crawling out from beneath the Earth. Anything.

Numero Quatro: Native American legends tell of biblical floods. It is glued to their beliefs, and even if some of it was morphed into by the Spaniards and the Jesuits "civilizing" the Southwest. They say the white band on top of Superstition Mountain is from that flood. They say the Apache Mother landed in a little hollowed out log after the great flood in Boynton Canyon, outside Sedona, Arizona.

Numero Cinco: Dinosaurs. All over the place. Bones. Tracks. Dead. Quite Suddenly, it seems.

Numero Six Six Six: Trump.

Numero Seven: Solar storms. Let's just say the same kind of solar storm that hit America in 1859 struck again. Lights out. Electronics bursting into flames. Even paper caught on fire. Imagine the Valley of the Sun with known of its wonder-tech in working order. Fountains running on electricity, done. Traffic lights, dull, leading to panic and gridlock. Looting. Shooting because the place is loaded with both guns and economic disparity. The polarities of social and political angst are just as on edge in the Valley as it is in Los Angeles or New York. A powder keg. Take away that one thing holding it all together, electricity and communications, and, well, could get pretty wild around here.

Numero Eight: Water. This is a fucking desert. When is this place going to get serious about its usage, now that yet another huge influx of refugees are headed here after the torments on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico?

Numero Nine: Aliens

Ten: The Great Wall. Interesting thing about walls. While in Mexico, heading north, they are mere impediments to be gone around. However, in Arizona, going south, We the Sheeple aren't so well-trained in getting through them, if, for any reason the need to go southbound were required, en mass.

Yep, This One Goes to Eleven: Boy, Arizona is really becoming such a diverse place. People from all over the world come here. In fact, I think I caught a cold from one of those people who came from someplace else. Good thing it wasn't anything worse. Like some zombie plague or anything. Whew!

OK, that's all for now. Personally, I like what the Buddhist monks once told me. There is no need for an end-of-the-world myth or story or fable or prophecy. As long as we are at one with the Creator, all else is irrelevant.

Happy dancing, Scottsdale.

Namaste.

And now for a few words on buying a plastic Chinese compass at Walmart

You hear them gun up. They are like tanks gassing for battle. Just as the sun rises. You are at the Wal Mart distribution center in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and the not-so-tiny army is just getting ready for the pusch.

You want to salute, but a tall, highly distinguished looking, slightly limping, downright admiralesque truck driver is watching you, watching him, and that already, as the sun continues to climb, makes the perfectly "normal," well, perfectly "paranormal." The distribution center features a huge complex, maybe four or five football fields long, with vast numbers of trucks in the back, enclosed by a barbed wire fence. Activity is continuous after the sun rises. It is systematic. Ghosty, with few souls to be actually seen. Downright robotic.

But you are simple folk. Practically human. Actually somewhat happy. Your plan for the day is to buy a compass at the Wal Mart nearby, and if it wasn't for the blazing orb in the bright orange in the circus animal clouds, you'd never be able to tell that the Mt. Pleasant Super Center is directly east. However, you do know this: If the great cities of the earth are 24-hour-a-day hotspots, your friendly neighborhood Wal Mart burns just as brightly in the spangles still gleaming, the stars brightly steaming, and so on .... With retirees at the door. Half the county is employed there, at the Super Center, actually. The other half? Most likely running in and out of the Super Center in a kind of wild-eyed state of panic.

The panic is for going in, quite truthfully. The release can be determined, the very sense of a short-term satisfaction, maybe only as good as the car ride home, in the trail of candy wrappers, soda cans, plastic pieces of all kinds of things, that stream, chaotically, along a nearby access road bordered on both sides by fields of corn grown for ethynol.

The front of the Super Center big box store is more palatable to the eye. The front is decorated with the words "Always" in a kind of cursive, red, giant type, and "low prices," half as large, directly below: reading, thus "Always low prices." But above is not always as so below, so when it comes to the medium being the message in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, you really only know one true thing: Something is quite FUBAR here. Because, for one thing, if you check the prices in the surrounding small towns, prices are far lower, just to compete and ... maybe, just maybe, even survive.

Meanwhile, over the technologically zombiefied distribution center, the angry sun continues to rise in the east and the trucks continue to gun up and line out for invasion and the people, one out of seven in America now living in poverty, continue to get, well, hungrier, angrier, more anxious, more in panic. Toward the north (one supposes, since we are still sans a compass), the trucks slowly move out in a parade of equally metered marches to thy mind in a military mode.

The Wal Mart trucks, loaded up with every conceivable kind of petroleum- or corporation corn-seed-based product, are streaming out in a viral march into every demographically correct corner of middle America. Humming onward sweetly. Moving not-so-discretely. In perfect echelons of control. One might consider how each truck driver might be as equally automated as the consumers they are targeting now.

However, as those consumers line in and out, one is more easily led to understand quite the opposite. People who work at Wal Mart are completely varied human beings, with their own tastes, flavors, beliefs and so on ... So before you go on categorizing the consumers of middle earth as being a race of Lilliputians gone completely insane, let's set ourselves in proper motion. Let's ground ourselves. Let's first seek to maintain a proper moral compass. Let's just do that first. As the sun rises. Before it sets.

One handy way to do just that is to take a closer look at what is happening within the concentric circles of what is happening, even as you read this, in other small towns in southeastern Iowa. In places like Morning Sun, for example. Maybe 30 miles away as the crow flies. In Morning Sun, you will find, the situation downtown is dismal. The whole place could be bought up now with Monopoly money. The only storefronts or commercial retail spaces left standing look burned out, bombed out, forgotten, dead, de-neighborized, closed for the rest of steaming eternity under the angry sun.

O sure, there might be, in any one of these surrounding towns, the occasional shop keeper left standing, who will greet you like Daffy Duck, waving his finger. He wags. He complains. He dreams of moving getting out his business, entirely. If not for the few good folks who come in to shop locally, he'd be in Bermuda by now. Since the finger wagging is a universal sign indicating the common small-town accusal, meaning, "Shame on you," each of these towns on most days would be classified better as ghost towns.

"Shame for all who shop at Wal Mart," they might say. "Shame on all of you who drive out of their communities, burning all of that gas, burning all of that time and money, to go out of their way to destroy the very towns they live in. Shame on all of you, far worse criminals than the little thieves who sit in their tiny small town cop jail cells, who go all of that way to buy all of that foreign-made crap, when they can buy some of my crap, much of it frequently locally produced, that they could buy instead."

But holy Ronald Reagan, sweet finger-flipping Jesus, as everyone must not know, as all wild-eyed Wal Mart shoppers do not feel or deny or fail to understand, they know not what they do. They know not that they are citizen soldiers as well for the zombied technological armies of the corporately sponsored siege against the American dream. They can't even see how they are bleeding their own communities dry. They do not know that, without their moral compass; hell they can scarcely listen or even be told, how the Wal Mart army is a big bluesy vampire sucking their very vitals, their lifestyles, their values, completely dry.

So go ahead, buy your plastic, Chinese-made compass at Wal Mart. Notice how it breaks easily. It will happen ... someday soon. You can always buy another one, and another, and another ... and if you have enough money, in great bulky bulks at Sam's Club, too ... all soon to be built on the surface of the moon.