August 13, 2003 Hole in the Ground Spent the weekend riding a giant white whale across the largest flat open stretch of nothingness in America, weaving to and fro in the imagined "surf" with a giant pirate ship on wheels (right outa Pirates of the Caribbean). Amazing even to me. Friday afternoon i got an email from Tom reminding me about the whale gig and inviting me out to ride the "burner"-free playa and help out, and who could pass that up? It was a $150/plate fund raiser, free for Whale Crew. They served a full-course meal on the pirate ship. There was an open bar and lotsa half-naked wenches running around, live music, a live reading of Coleridge's rime of the ancient mariner and plank-walking pole-dancing gyrations. And you can't get much more private than to have your party out in the middle of a frikken dry lake bed the size of Connecticut. Getting to man the whale's propane cannon "blow-hole" was alone well worth the 12-hours of nearly-straight driving to get there, seven hours to the Nevada border where I slept just above Mono Lake and the ensuing five or so hours drive Saturday morning. My Friday night was a blissful 6-hour nap on the roof of the Chevy beneath a full moon a few hundred yards off a road carefully chosen for its remote location and low probability of ANY traffic at 2 in the morning. A more blissful sleep I cannot recall in many months. And not many a modern man could have so peacefully slept out there, unprotected from the wilds, the elements, the cops, bandits, scorpions and that buggery blazing blizzard of a moon. But I did just fine, no late-night registration or I.D. required. Just me and the Jack Pooh Bear God of the Open Road. If I'd had a girlfriend, anyone to answer to, which I do not, I would have justified my spontaneous escape into the unknown with these ever-so-true albeit insufficient words: I needed this. Saturday morning I awoke refreshed to the roaring desert sun and rolled into the army munitions dump town of Hawthorne Nevada around nine. Winding out of the mountains and into view of that weird gopher mound graveyard of a place beneath which is buried God knows how many millions of pounds and rifle rounds of killing power, I thought back to Texas friend Stefan's answer to a question of mine. We had been discussing the art scene in Houston when I asked him where all the money came from for all the arts funding there, hell, for everything in Houston. And in his forever unpretentious matter-o-fact generous Texan way, Stefan answered "From a hole in the ground." The truth behind this slick little forty-weight euphemism would probably seem quite obvious to many, but to me it was both novel and cleverly put. I rolled it around in my mind for quite some time. Money. Oil. A hole in the ground. Never had the concept of riches seemed so utterly, down-in-the-dirt ironic and just plain dumb. Now gazing out over the vast gopher mound-like Mecca of munitions storage bunkers, a new thought congealed in me and the irony came full circle. Here before me was the other end of man's cycle of stupidity and of God's big joke at our well-deserved expense. Up from a hole in Texas had sprung money in the form of oil. And here, a thousand miles away, Man, in his infinite irony, had stuffed the money, in the form of weaponry, right back in the ground. A no-brainer indeed, Rocky. -RSM the Duke of Irony Holes RANTS! HOME ©2003 Rick McKinney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED