Was looking forward to turning this over to someone else.
We finally got priced out of the house we were renting in Lancaster. We were trying to find a place farther south and more blue, but being on disability in California does limit one’s options.
After a rolling series of disasters that saddled us with a van we don’t really need and fifty acres of Mojave Wasteland that we can’t live on yet, we finally managed to acquire a mobile home in the bustling metropolis of Ridgecrest, California — even deeper into Tea Party Nation than we were in Lancaster.
Isn’t “Inyokern” what that guy in Street Fighter yells when he shoots fireballs?
You know, “Street Fighter”? The arcade game?
God, I’m old.
By the contract that we signed that got us the mobile home for five hundred bucks, we have to stay here for at least five years. So, I started off in a small town in the Mojave Desert and it looks like that’s where I’ll wind up.
So anyway, Ridgecrest is a town of about 28,000 in the northeast corner of Kern County, right beside Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. I have to admit, this is damn near the last place in California I’d expect to find a naval base.
People tell us — and people walk up to us and start talking to us for absolutely no Goddamned reason at all because small town I guess — that the closer you are to the base the more liberal and science-based your neighbors are because of the science that’s done on the base for science reasons, and we’re close enough that we get woken up by the reveille bugle calls on base every morning. There’s also a good game store/craft store/ educational materials store in town, so there’s hope that there might actually be the opportunity to get a gaming group together.
I was going to put up a picture of the low concrete domes that imply very strongly that this base does something that someone thinks is worth it getting nuked over, but I decided that I liked walking around outside whenever I want to, or at least having the option of walking around outside whenever I want to, so instead here is a picture of a cat.
Also, I am the worst survivalist in the Goddamned world.
This area was also home to the Coso people, known for rock art and petroglyphs. Ridgecrest, especially the main drag of China Lake Blvd, has a lot of petroglyph-style decoration and art because of this. I was going to put some big flat rocks in front of our house and paint petroglyphs on them, but I don’t know the petroglyph for I am a failure at life and very nearly every major decision that I have ever made has been bad and also I dont want to do the cultural appropriation thing and also big flat rocks are heavy so screw it.
So that’s what’s been going on with us lately. Good news is it looks like we finally have a stable place to live, and though I love Susan from 29 like a sister, at least it’s not fucking Twentynine Palms.
