Dumpster Fires

Saddlerock Ranch Insanity

The creation of this ephemeral under-clicked content required 27 hours so I’m not going to talk about it. Enjoy! Except, well… here’s a great detail that did not make it in the mini-doc: After annihilating the federal parks budget, President Ronald Reagan was so desperate to dredge the money to purchase Saddlerock Ranch that one of his aides actually wrote a letter to Saudi Arabian billionaire Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi asking for a donation. The sheik did not reply. His bro-in-law sent $200. And another: When owner Ronnie Semler rejected Reagan for the last time, he was sitting in federal prison, having pleaded guilty to selling helicopters to North Korea. He was especially touchy at the time because his latest bid for early prison release—starting a non-profit program for disadvantaged children with learning disabilities (LO f****n’ L)—had been dismissed by the courts. In other life affirming news, the large and thriving brewery I’ve worked at for the past too many odd years closed last night. I made an uncharacteristically vulnerable and heartfelt post about it on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/p/DXxLKBVgcT8/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==] yesterday. I’ll have more to say about the closing of Angel City Brewery in the future. Its unnecessary death is a serious loss to the city of Los Angeles. This hundred-year-old JA Roebling warehouse [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Roebling] was a major communal space in the historic core of Los Angeles, blocks from El Aliso [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/p/el-aliso-tree], and like that tree the brewery remained a central pilgrimage point for people from all over the planet and all throughout the city and SoCal. Hundreds of times, if you’d flown in from Sweden or Brazil, or Japan, landed at LAX, and Googled ‘brewery’, you were standing in front of me ordering an IPA an hour later. Pasty boomer men terrified of white replacement and urban spaces, convinced of the ‘American carnage’ and the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Los Angeles and Gavinor Gruesome would order a pint from me and I’d tell them about P-22 [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/p/the-most-sexually-frustrated-cat], El Aliso, etc. and encourage them not to be a pussy, score some PCP up street on Skid Row, and finish things off with a quick stop at The Slammer [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/p/it-will-get-brighter-optimism] in my hood. I have to believe some of these people, while they will retain the stain of MAGA hat hair for the rest of their days, found themselves enjoying better beer and a broader mind after leaving our brewery. I was an ambassador… for craft beer, for a brewery and brand, and also at times the city, and civilization itself. I will miss this. F**k my life. If you know anybody hiring for something better than Walmart greeter… please drop me a line. I start work at the Walmart Supercenter in Lancaster on Valley Central Way next Tuesday. I’m excited but also a little apprehensive. I’d love to find something better, more adapted to my strengths, which are researching and weaving stories, selling alcohol, telling stories, and selling alcohol, and having conversations, and not selling writing. Big thanks to Etan Rosenbloom for encouraging me to visit Saddlerock Ranch. If you’re not familiar with Etan or his blog, Etan Does LA [https://etandoesla.com/about-etan-does-la/], Etan is an insane man (and passionate historian) visiting every single LA County landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There are 625 such places. He is rapidly nearing his 300th visit and post. If there is anything I should be researching and reporting on that I don’t know about or something that you specifically would like to see me founder upon, drop a comment or DM. And please, if you like those posts, go to Substack and like them, and share them! Dumpster Fires is beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Inconceivable Consumption

In June 2005, I was ejected from my high school graduation ceremony at Patrick Henry High in San Diego, where I was wearing a white robe, having one of the top GPAs in my graduating class, for screaming the words “F**k US Imperialism.” The principal withheld my diploma. I think of that afternoon often, and a lot lately, when the freshman ROTC came out after the national anthem in full uniform twirling fake rifles covered in football tape and marched toward the fifty yard line chanting in unison and tossing their guns while the entire stadium full of 5,000 people stood frozen in silence for two whole minutes with their hands over their hearts and at some point I snapped and yelled “F**k US Imperialism” and security escorted me out and my mother started weeping in the bleachers and wouldn’t talk to me for several weeks afterwards so I stayed at my friend Kyle’s house and his parents were kind and so were all the others. They told me not to feel too bad. “Don’t be too embarrassed,” they said. I was just young, an idealist, and had to give it time, a few more years, perhaps, they said, to develop a more complex appreciation of geopolitics. I remember Casey Madden’s dad. He was so certain. He smiled, supremely condescending. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” I’m still trying to understand the contradictions. I don’t know what to believe. But I don’t want to be naïve. “Is the Pentagon hiring?” I asked Barry. “Probably,” he said. “You could apply online.” Barry straightened his tie and checked his watch again. He said he had to get back to work. We turned and started back toward the mezzanine above the security checkpoint. Walking down the long concrete ramp, I contemplated buying something in the gift shop or having a penny crushed into the shape of the Pentagon or working for an important think tank. This was the adult way to think about climate change and the history and future of the world. Protests don’t change things, powerful people do. Barry stepped behind me onto the escalator above the checkpoint and grabbed the rail. Only one more question remained. “Can the Pentagon actually go Green?” On this point Barry finally laughed. The above is from my book China Lake [https://www.barretbaumgart.com/china-lake]. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Mountains of Madness

Short of the great flooded valleys—the damming of Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite, which nearly drove John Muir to suicide, or the flooding of Glen Canyon Dam that created Lake Powell, burying 190-miles of the most fantastic sculpted desert canyons on earth under six-hundred feet of water—there remains probably no other landscape in America so substantially erased as that of Los Angeles River. But it was water that jumped the riverbanks in Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon, the waters of the Tuolumne River and the Colorado rising and filling the valleys. In Los Angeles, it was concrete—concrete that drowned the river’s bed, concrete the rose and covered its banks, and concrete finally that continued to spill over them, pouring passed the vanished vineyards and over the roots of El Aliso and expanding outward forever from the pueblo in every direction in a single unstoppable flood, a tide of deranged development that paved over not just the river but the all lands alongside it, and finally paving the way for endless more cement to be poured into further streets and freeways and eventually the foundations upon which the 28 million souls that make up the metropolis of Southern California now sleep. The river that had spawned the region’s initial growth remained the last obstacle to its continuance—or so it seemed in 1935 when the Army Corps of Engineers began lowering the riverbed thirty feet and widening its banks by hundreds before finally encasing the entirety of its length in 3.5 million barrels of concrete. The Los Angeles River that lured so many early settlers to the city kept carrying them away—not solely into poetic flight as it did for John S. Hittel in 1863: “The song of Mignon came vividly to me as I walked through the gardens of the city of Los Angeles… Luscious fruits, of many species and unnumbered varieties, loaded the trees. Gentle breezes came through the bowers… The water rippled musically through the zanjas. Delicious odors came from all the most fragrant flowers… The general impression upon my mind, after spending the last week in September in the place, is that it is one of the most pleasant places in the world.” The river also kept carrying people away quite literally, as one observer of the 1884 floods recalled: “Day after day it rained in great sheets. The river became a boiling yellow lake. Houses, torn from their foundations, floated downstream with the smoke still escaping from their chimneys. Horses, cows, sheep, and now and then the ghastly form of a human being, were part of the strange driftwood. Sometimes the water came in waves fifteen feet in height.” The above is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, the book that launched this block. Which one day I will finish, maybe… until then, at least for now, these drips… And if Dumpster Fires seems quiet lately it is because the fires of creativity (i.e. misery) are burning. I’m working feverishly on the above book to the detriment of health, sanity, and most crucially, online CONTENT. Perhaps one day soon, as I have hinted at previously, I will begin to properly excerpt the pages here. * In the meantime, please reach out if you know a literary agent or manager. I’m looking to sell the forthcoming book and some of my other Intellectual Property, so I do not have to feed my family cats in dogs in the coming the years. Finally, I DO HOPE YOU’VE BEEN ENJOYING SPREAD OF FASCISM ON US STREETS! F**k ICE, seriously. F**k those dudes. F**k them. Profoundly. F**k them. And f**k Kristi Noem. And f**k Stephen Miller. Profoundly. F**K HIM. And f**k the Heritage Foundation. F**k them. And f**k the Democrats. And f**k the tech oligarchs who confuse “success” with merit. And F**K the Christian Nationalists in this country. F**K THEM. Fake Christians all. And f**k you. But big thanks to JD Vance for calling Donald Trump, “America’s Hitler.” He was right about that back in 2016. And f**k me, I have to go put on my eye shadow now… But here’s a poem I penned to the Trump family and the Epstein Presidency while eating a can of sardines last week. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The End of Hostilities

While the drunk t-ball coaches who never found the clit wear masks like f*****g cowards as they hunt Mexicans in unmarked GMC Suburbans across American cities—occasionally shooting soccer moms in the face—I thought I’d make a fun informative video about this important overlooked historical site down the street from my house where a group of mixed-race, multi-lingual warriors, with no proper legal authority, accepted the surrender of a Mexican general in 1847, effectively acquiring 530,000 acres of land for the United States. “Defend the Homeland,” say the propaganda posts pumped out by the Trump admin recruiting incels and cosplay cowboys for DHS and ICE. But whose land is it? Whose home is this? Ask yourself, truly, who owns all this dirt upon which we pass our too brief and disappointing lives? Who has a right to be here? For whom—or what—is this land home? We all came here from elsewhere. Even the Native Americans crossed Bering Land Bridge before the end of the last ice age. But what was truly born here? What belongs here? We stand today wholly divided, facing each other as warring tribes ready to tear one another apart over a truth that none possess. America is not a Christian nation. It is not a white, European nation. It was built by pagan slaves, conquered through Native American genocide, engineered by wealthy elites to ensure their own hegemony. And today, after so much erasure… Who or what really belongs? Who was here first? There are days, most days, I’m tempted to side with the great William S. Burroughs. “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.” It might do us all well to remember a little humility. The soil we claim so confidently to own—it is waiting. It is ready. It will swallow us whole. More info about the Treaty of Cahuenga reenactment ceremony happening Sunday, January 11th at 12:00PM can be found at Campo de Cahuenga [https://campodecahuenga.com/]. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorry. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Argumentum Ad Baculum

Have you ever heard of the BACULUM? It’s the perfect holiday gift! It’s all natural, affordable, and sure to spark fun family conversation about the FALL of MAN. It’s also dredges up a bit of abysmal trivia I’ve dropped to no avail in a few unpublished essays over the years—trivia which I share now in video form for your morose delectation. As I continue to empty my pockets of choice research nuggets in the form of failed viral content in the hope of increasing my Instagram following to the extent an agent or publisher might imagine me an entity with an organic following potentially deserving of a lucrative book [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/p/high-weirdness] contract, I hope you will share my shitty content and send any hungry gatekeepers you are acquainted with my way. She always kept a dish of vinegar out to keep the fruit flies off the apples. But that day the ramekin lay empty and overturned. The letter had been lying there a long time. The pages, brittle and yellow, were curled up at the edges and had drained the sentences into dry wordless pools of blue punctuated by the bodies of little dead bugs. “You tend to over privilege the role of language in human experience,” she said once. Yet it was she who told me that day that Eve was created from Adam’s baculum. For her it was a kind of game. She never read the news, just played the crossword puzzles. I don’t know where she read the article, probably it was some kind of joke at the back of a science journal. Supposedly, though, in the Old Testament, the word for rib, tzela, could refer to a hillside, the walls of a temple or wooden planks of doors and walls. It also referred to the trunks of trees. “Biblical Hebrew had no term for dick,” she said. “How would they have referred to you?” May you think fondly of our redeemer in the coming days. Dumpster Fires is a beacon of light in a world of trash and sorrow. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe [https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]