DisOriented Express on the Road

The naked bookseller has been one of the highlights so far.

We left L.A. a little after eight this morning and encountered no traffic to speak of. I wasn't even sideswiped by a truck this time like I was in my first attempt to leave town on the last book tour. The radar detector did the job and we made very good time to Quartzite, Arizona where we stopped for lunch.

Colin, being English and a fishetarian, ordered the daily special at the small diner in the very small desert community - fish and chips. It didn't, apparently live up to its counterparts in the UK, although he implied that he's had similar served in his native land. He was, as is the usual case with foreigners in America, flummoxed by the enormous portion that was put before him. Quite sensibly he didn't eat it all. I ate all of my club sandwich, but it was smaller and not fried.

Then we went to visit the naked bookseller. I first heard of him on Lee Goldberg's blog and had been awaiting my next opportunity to pass through Quartzite to visit his store. There isn't a whole lot to say beyond this picture of Colin and Paul Winer the naked bookseller:

Next time you're passing through Quartzite, I suggest a visit. The store has an eclectic and interesting mix of books as well.

We did finally make it to Tucson. I always forget what a long drive it is. Our event at Clues Unlimited was fun. We enjoyed putting it on, Chris Acevedo the bookstore owner enjoyed it, and the crowd (okay, six people - what do we authors have to do to get more people to book events? Maybe if we were naked? Nah!), anyhow, the crowd enjoyed it too and they also enjoyed scarfing up all the Asian snacks that we'd brought along - as well as drinking up some Beer Lao - quite possibly the best beer in Asia.

Earlier in the week we kicked off the DisOriented Express with an event at The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles - sort of my headquarters mystery bookstore. We had about 20 people who also seemed to enjoy our extravaganza. It was our first show and we had a few minor kinks that we worked out. Good to do that at home before hitting the road.

Tomorrow - later today I guess - it's on to Scottsdale to Poisoned Pen, then a baseball game at night. Sunday to Sedona - The Well Red Coyote - where we will present a workshop on researching exotic locales. Basically - go there, have fun, be observant. Well, there is more to it than that, sort of.

Eventually we will make it to Madison, Wisconsin for Bouchercon, where among other events, Colin will be presented with his Dilys Award - for having written the favorite book to sell of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association last year. He doesn't know it - and unless he reads this I probably won't tell him - but I was handed the award in a box and asked to deliver it to Bouchercon. It's currently sitting on the floor of the backseat of my car, right behind where he has been sitting.

I'm tired and tired of fixing my typos - even in blogging, neatness counts - so I'm afraid I will have to shut down for now and come up with pithy statements and fascinating observations some other time.

The Ugly Stupid Season Kicks Off

Here we go again, it's 62 days of idiocy until the mid-term elections, then it will be at least another 62 of recriminations and chest thumping afterwards. The Republicans are getting nervous and that's going to make things even worse than usual. You don't corner a rattlesnake and expect it not to strike.

It burns my ass to say this - because I tend to agree more often with Democrats than Republicans - especially these days - but Republicans are better at playing politics than Democrats. That's because they're more ruthless, better organized and more unified.

The big push started yesterday. They are going to force a congressional vote on establishing legal military tribunals of the sort that President Bush already had shot down by the Supreme Court. Nevermind that the proposed tribunals stomp all over many of the very same rights that we're supposedly protecting from the bad guys. Nevermind that even a lot of Republican congressmen and senators get queasy feelings in their guts when they think about giving the President what he wants.

It's an election year. If dumbing down the debate over how to deal with terrorism to the President's level of, "you're either with us or you're against us," and hammering away at the Constitution helps the Republicans to keep control of Congress, well, that's all that really counts. Isn't it? Republicans stick together better than Democrats do when it comes to the really important things; like getting re-elected.

Keep in mind that this is a mid-term election; one in which voter turnout is traditionally very low. The party that wins this election is going to be the party that gets the most bodies to the polls. There's been an awful lot of speculation that GW Bush won Ohio - and thus the 2004 Presidential Election - because Republicans cheated. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know that the Ohio vote would not have been close enough to steal if it hadn't have been for the Republicans mobilizing voters to come out in droves to ban gay marriage.

The Republican Party has perfected the art of confusing the important issues in elections with hot button, emotional issues that rally their natural supporters. People flock to the polls to vote against gay marriage or medical marijuana (or civil rights ballot measures in the South in the 1960s and '70s; which is when and how the South started voting Republican). Since those people are in the voting booth anyway, they might as well punch another couple of holes for Republican candidates.

The problem is, how do the Democrats combat that? Fear, negativity and simplicity almost always have greater emotional resonance than anything positive or complicated or intellectual.

Unfortunately politics in the U.S. isn't so much a battleground of ideas as it is of personalities. The Republicans have succeeded in recent years because they've managed to scare people shitless; over taxes, over terrorists, over drug-crazed homosexuals coming for their kids. They've managed to pass themselves off as the nation's protectors from these terrible scourges.

The only way to fight that is with reassuring charisma. FDR talked Americans into believing that the only thing they had "to fear, was fear itself." JFK oozed charm and smarts and strength (which was a pretty neat trick for a guy with all his medical problems.) Jimmy Carter was comfortingly honest and fatherly and his timing was good; any Democrat could have defeated Gerald Ford, the guy who was appointed by and then pardoned Nixon. Bill Clinton wanted to hug everybody, and there was something about him that made people want to hug him back. LBJ was the exception. He rode in on the coattails of the even-more-popular-after-his-assassination Kennedy and he also played the fear card nearly as well as the Republicans do today. He cast his opponent, Goldwater, as the crazy guy who was going to blow us all up.

I don't know what's going to happen in this mid-term election campaign other than that it will be gruesome and stupid and brutal and by the end of it anyone with a lick of sense will be even more fed up with politics in this country than they are already. Two years from now though, it's going to be even uglier. And the Democrats either need a candidate with charisma, a lot of it; or they need to find a way to scare the pants off voters about four more years of a Republican president.

My First Special Guest Blog

I've got a friend who's a writer and a cop. She works for the CSU division - CSI for you TV viewers. She's been working the graveyard (bad joke in that) shift and sending me the occasional email about her night at work when she gets home in the morning. It's interesting, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny, sometimes sick-funny stuff. She's given me permission to occasionally use some of her emails here if I want.

I want. I'm going to put them here verbatim. Keep in mind that my friend is a very careful, good, polished writer, but when she sends me these emails it is after a long, hard overnight shift at work. Here's the first one, from yesterday:


Nobility & Nitwits
It was a busy night. We had 5 calls last night, four deaths and one aggravated sexual assault suspect. I had no sooner arrived at the office than the phone rang and we were rolling out on a suicide. This was a stark contrast to the idiot from last week who shot himself after an argument with his wife. Last night's call was about dignity. The gentleman was a 74 year old cancer patient who had just signed up for hospice help. He was on morphine and had asked his wife when he would get his next treatment. She told him that it would be 15 minutes and she went back to clipping coupons. Then she heard the shot. I guess he was tired of waiting.

When we arrived the first thing I noticed was that except for the gaping hole in his head, our complainant was immaculate. There was no nursing home smell, and the house spoke of a lifetime of care. The walls bore evidence of better days, and I couldn't help but note the proud smiles that gazed down at me from old photographs. Yet it was the single item on his dresser that said the most. Dated August 8, of this year, a card was propped open so that our old gentlemen could still read it. Happy Anniversary, 50 years. The oxygen tank stood like silent sentry beside the bed, a necessary, but unwelcome visitor. A partially filled urine container whispered a reminder of the cruel injustices that come with aging. His room told a story, but a bit of gentle probing yielded even more.

I offered to call someone for his wife, but she said that even though she had a daughter, she didn't want her to see him like this, and so she patiently waited until we were through. The bullet blew a gigantic hole through his fragile temple and went out the back to lodge in the pillow behind him. The blood spray on his hand left little doubt that he had fired the gun he still clutched.

Although hidden in the dark, on a trip back through his front yard for my camera, I discovered three of the largest lemon trees I had ever seen. Lemons as large as grapefruits dragged against the branches. Later, a talk with his wife revealed that our gentleman had smuggled the seeds for these trees back from a trip to Mexico. She told me the story, and then grimaced and begged forgiveness when she realized that she'd just spilled the beans, or in this case, the lemons, to the police. Despite the somber circumstances, I had to laugh at her. This earned me a smile.

Every time I walk into someone's home, it speaks for them. This home spoke of a life well lived, with love, care, and dignity.


My next call was to the jail to process a suspect in a high profile aggravated sexual assault case. We had to take DNA cheek swabs and hair samples. This is where your suspect stands naked on a sheet of white butcher paper and you inform him that either he can pluck the samples or you will. This is more effective if you're holding a pair of pliers. The samples must be taken from 5 different spots on the scalp and groin. Lovely mental picture....... And this guy was a real winner. Fortunately, no one had bothered to tell him that he was staring at a life sentence, so he wasn't too much of a problem. Just nasty, and stupid. A class A nitwit...... such a stark contrast from our first call. I wonder what his home looks like.

Guns and More Guns

Yesterday I went to the Glendale Gun Show. I am not what anyone would call a "gun nut." I don't own any guns, although there was a time when I did. But, I don't have any tattoos either and sometimes I go to tattoo shows. Then again, I find some tattoos kind of sexy. There is nothing sexy about guns. People who think there is, well, they scare me.

There were some scary people at the Glendale Gun Show. But mostly there were a lot of misguided regular folk like my kindly neighbors. The kind of people who think that if they have a gun in their house, they are going to be safer. They think this in defiance of every single statistic that shows they are way more likely to shoot a fellow family member, or the meter reader, or the UPS guy than they are to actually blow away a bad guy trying to break in and do them any harm.

There is that famous slogan: "When guns are banned, only criminals will have guns." It sounds okay at first, but the fact is that criminals kill and wound a whole lot more innocent people with their guns than the other way around. And "innocent" people kill and wound a whole lot more other innocent people with their guns than they do criminals.

I'm sorry, but people without a very specific reason to, and the training to back it up - like, for instance, "a well regulated Militia", as stipulated in the Second Amendment to the Constitution - should not be allowed to own guns. In most "civilized" nations, they aren't. There would be a whole lot fewer dead spouses, children, parents, meter readers and UPS dudes if there were fewer guns in the hands of the public. Cops, just trying to do their job, would be safer. This is particularly true of handguns.

Okay, so in a rural area let people own rifles - not, however, assault rifles. They might need to take out a marauding bear or something, or even fell a buck to fill the freezer with venison. (There oughta be a law though that makes them eat what they kill.)

But pistols just plain make it too plain easy to kill the wrong person. They should be banned for possession by the general public. The ones that are already out there ought to be confiscated.

There was a target for sale at the gun show.


If I'm ever the hostage in this situation, I'm going to feel a whole lot better about it if there's a highly trained cop with a gun trained on the bad guy, than my sweet, well-intentioned, shaky-handed but well-armed neighbors.

As a matter of fact, I worry about where my neighbor's bullets are going to end up if they ever wake up in the middle of the night scared and decide to start shooting. Luckily my bedroom is at the opposite end of my house from theirs. I'm hoping the walls in between will prevent any mistakes.

Most gunshows also have a lot of other stuff for sale. Russian nesting dolls, for some inexplicable reason, seem to be popular; as are a great many little geegaws and doodads. My friend who went with me bought a telescoping, stainless steel dentist's mirror. The guy who sold it to him for two bucks cautioned him, with a wink, to not use it for the purpose of peeking up women's skirts.

There was a table selling an astounding array of right wing bumperstickers. Those people do seem to be afraid of an awful lot of different things. And for "Christians" they don't seem very charitable toward anyone who isn't white, straight, christian and American. It was horrifying to see how many of the bumperstickers longed for the "good old days" of the Confederacy. There were black people in attendance. Some of them were buying guns. Some of them were probably christians. Wonder what they made of that? I was pleased to see that, at least in the time I was there, no one seemed to be buying any of the bumperstickers.

There was some good stuff too. I bought several different types of jerky. I imagine the elk jerky was the product of a hunter with a gun. I don't suppose the beef jerky was. I also bought, I couldn't resist, "The Official Axis of Evil Currency Collection." It was a bargain at twelve bucks. (It came with a bonus Taliban-era Afghani and a current Iraqi Dinar, but they aren't so impressive looking.) Here it is:



SILENT? GUNS
So now the guns in Lebanon are supposedly silent. What's been accomplished?
1. The stablilizing, relatively peaceful, increasingly democratic country of Lebanon has been pulverized yet again and set back many years in its development.
2. The democratic, independent government of Lebanon has been severely weakened.
3. Hezbollah has been made to look heroic to people all over the Muslim world and has been strengthened politically in Lebanon.
4. Syria, which had mostly been booted out of Lebanon, has probably regained a great deal of influence.
5. Iran, through Hezbollah, has probably gained more influence in Lebanon and more allies throughout the Middle East.
6. A largely peace loving population that was increasingly showing signs of a willingness to live and let live with Israel has been radicalized. (Having your neighborhood flattened and your children killed will do that to you.)
7. Well over a thousand Lebanese - more than 90 percent of them non-combatants, the majority of them children - have been killed; and over a hundred Israelis.
8. The kidnapped Israeli soldiers haven't been returned. Even if they had, was all the carnage worth it?
9. Gaza has also been pulverized - although that doesn't seem to be getting much attention. That's strengthened the radicals in Hamas and undermined the moderates in the Palestinian authority.
10. Israel is less, not more, secure than it was before because it is now surrounded by people who are even more pissed off and determined to destroy it than they were before, and they're living in less stable places with governments that are less able to function diplomatically or control militant groups within their borders.

What is there to be said about Israel? Can anyone say: Their own worst enemy. (And, of course, the U.S. is happy to assist in Israel's self-destructive actions and policies.)