I stopped in Needles for a couple hours. No bug-monsters tried to abduct me and lay eggs in my mouth so I guess everything is fine there now. I asked a couple people at a diner if they saw any news about a plastic surgeon that was kidnapping people. One lady said that it sounded kind of familiar. I wonder if that was covered up somehow or if it just wasn’t that interesting. There can’t be enough going on in Needles that that wasn’t in the news.
LLA social media said that the show was still on, so I continued on to Carmel. I crashed in my car for a couple hours and then spent the afternoon walking around the city. It’s a resort town like Needles but instead of catering to health and beauty rich people and rich people wannabes, Carmel is for weirdness. A lot of the houses were designed by artists in the 60s and 70s. There’s no house or street numbers, the artists just gave their houses “names”. Instead of saying “go to 1855 Main Street” you say “go to the House with No Windows”. It’s that kind of place.
Carmel has a law that you need a permit to wear high heels. I think their town motto is “Hey, we want attention!”
A woman, flushed and sweaty but not wearing high heels, came up to me walking a rat asking if I was there for the wrestling. I guess I have that look. She didn’t have the appearance of a wrestling fan to me and I was right. She knew about the show because the entire town knows about it. The city council got grant money to put on a wrestling show to “investigate the human body as a communicative tool in performance art”.
I couldn’t believe it when she said this but I poked around online and found out they got 25 GRAND to put this thing on. There’s nothing about it on the LLA social media but they have to be making bank on this thing because they’re not being charged for the venue and the city is eating all the costs.
What a world. It’s almost enough to distract me from my magical mystery mission.
