Goofball

For the first time in more than a month I had work to do at work today. So what did I do? Spent all afternoon writing comments on other people's 'blogs and writing on my own 'blog and responding to comments on my 'blog and to comments other people commented to my comments on other people's blogs. Then I talked to Eskimo about politics for an hour. Jackass. I'll have a ton of shit to do on Sunday. I also still have SIX GODDAMN ESSAYS TO GRADE from ENGL263, and on Tuesday I get a fucking stack of 22 ENGL102 essays, not to mention 26 ENGL263 midterms I'll get on Monday.

ARGH.

Last night I read an article by William T. Vollman in Harper's that freaked me out. It's a strange story about his visit to a small Mexican town which rumor said was once over-run by Chinese people fleeing a subterranean fire. Apparently an entire community of expat Chinese who came to the Americas during the gold rush were living in an elaborate tunnel system under the village--for a CENTURY. Vollman spends a great deal of time trying to find someone who'll admit the tunnels exist, before he actually gets to tour several of them. It reminded me of



or, perhaps of



[WOW. I mean, WOW. Sometimes you wait on patrons who are just WOW. Oh man. I've got Mad HA Disease]

Big Trouble in Little China is a silly movie but I always watch it whenever I happen to find it on TV. It comforts me. Plus, it's odd to see Kim Catrall before her big success in Sex and the City.

But back to the question at hand--tunnels under a town--that's fucked up shit. The Chinese apparently say they fixed up tunnels that were there when they arrived. Who built them? The Knights Templar? The Freemasons? The Maya? Mary Magdeline and Joseph of Arimathea? The Chupacabras? Julio used to take me down in an abandoned Nike Missle base across the street from his house. We had to lift a huge steel door which was embedded in a huge steel silo cap and climb down a runged ladder into the darkness. He knew those tunnels so well he could navigate them in the dark. There's some fucked up shit down there too--post-apocalyptic supplies, uniforms, gas masks, Bibles, love dolls, Ron Jeremy. When I lived in Fairfield PA after my parents' divorce at my grandparents' house there was a hollowed out mountain nearby called Ravenwood--it's one of the potential d-day sites where a post-apocalyptic government would flee in the event of nuclear war. One day I was at my baby-sitter's house in town and an enormous explosion rattled the entire neighborhood. I was flung off the bed in which I was napping and flew at least five feet across the room. No one ever explained it, but something similar happened in England recently. Reportedly there's a tunnel linking Ravenwood to Camp David and another linking it to the White House: