Month: June 2004

Just woke up from a post-work nap, and now I’m pretty groggy and don’t feel like doing anything, but don’t exactly feel like going back to bed, either.

I met with the Fox News people today, which was a pretty weird situation. It was a cameraman guy and a woman producer. They showed up at about noon, and I quickly shuffled them into one of our nice meeting rooms, which is a fringe benefit of working in a SoHo dotcom lair. I had two letters from Gadahn, plus a bunch of assorted fliers and artwork, and the copy of Xenocide in which his stuff appeared. The camera guy had one of those huge TV camera rigs and tripod, so he set stuff up so he could tape stuff to a black piece of posterboard sitting on the whiteboard’s marker tray, and take shots of the stuff. I don’t entirely know what he was doing, but it took a while for each shot. Maybe he was zooming in and out, I don’t know. I also don’t know the specs of the camera, but it was digital and video and obviously not just a little DV toy you pick up at Best Buy to tape your kids’ birthday parties. She said they would dump the tape to some direct satellite system that would zap it to the LA office, where the guy primarily writing the article was located.

While the cameraman did his thing, I talked to the producer, mostly just more repeating of the stories and little details. She seemed younger than me, red hair and very cute, more like the English major type than some kind of TV anchorwoman you’d see on the news. I felt really nervous about the whole thing and wished I had more to chat about, especially because I didn’t want to seem like some bizarro Satanist metal dude or whatever. After they got the paper stuff pulled in, we both sat down and she asked me a handful of questions on video, just the basic stuff like how I started the zine, how I met Adam, and so on. I had to wear a wireless mic, which was odd, and I also spent the whole thing oddly uncomfortable, knowing that I’d look like a dork on video. I also had a vague fear in the back of my mind that if my likeness ever showed up on TV, I’d end up with molotov cocktails thrown through my apartment window from nutbag jihad fundamentalists, or angry heavy metal fans. Finally, they taped a b-roll image of me sitting at the desk, shuffling through the papers, which seemed kind of silly. The whole thing took about an hour, and the people were very nice. She told me she’d get in touch when anything became of the report, but I’m also hoping the reel gets shelved away in a vault somewhere and forgotten.

I’ve been very vaguely thinking about trips west again, to see the property and maybe get some work done. I get two or three emails a year from people who have also bought land out in the San Luis Valley, and when I do, it rekindles the thoughts of getting some money together to get a well dug, maybe set up a wind-powered water pump and a shitload of garden hose and sprinklers, and plant a few dozen saplings so there are more real trees there by the time I get around to building a place. I have no idea how much getting a well drilled costs, probably thousands of dollars, and I don’t know how they will ever get a drilling rig out there, since the access road is dirt and is about as soft and fluffy as a good angelfood cake, which isn’t conducive to heavy trucks. Speaking of, I was just digging around (pun intended) ebay motors and saw an old D6 cat dozer with a busted block but still running for a grand. It would probably cost more like five grand once you got one in good shape and hauled it out to the property, but that would make one hell of a toy. I’d have a 40-acre sandbox with a really nice shovel. I could improve the hell out of that road, and then dig some kind of giant underground catacomb.

Or maybe not. Anyway, I heard about a place in Albuquerque that rents out VW campers, the newer Westfalia Vanagon ones. It would be a lot of fun to rent one out, drive up to the property, hang out there for a week, and maybe plant some trees or do some other digging around. I could also maybe buy one of those little metal sheds at the WalMart in Alamosa, drag it out there, and have a building to hide my ammunition cachegardening tools.

Man, this Indian food TV dinner I made tastes like garbage. I need to go find something else to eat.