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