ABC News
Here are some final thoughts about this saga.
1. There is some stupid shit being said out there. “Where’s due process? He was never found guilty.” He shot at cops. He shot at cops using a silencer. What did you really think was going to happen?
Try this. You go out there and start shooting at cops. What do you expect the result to be? If it’s anything other than you on the ground resembling a slice of bloody Swiss cheese, get your fucking head checked.
2. Why is there so many questions about who started the fire? KCAL9/CBS2 reporter Carter Evans who notably was caught in the final gun battle was right there on the scene. He described the officers throwing canisters of what he believed to be tear gas, then the flames immediately started.
I was following events on different channels while scouring Twitter and trying feebly to listen to any police scanners in the area, so maybe the events didn’t come as a shock to me. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department had talked about wanting to burn him out. So they did it.
In my mind it was an intentional blaze set by the sheriff’s department. So what’s unclear about that?
All I know is that it looked an awful like Waco there. Just without the women and children and God and Janet Reno.
3. What the hell happened in this last week? After burning his truck last Thursday, Dorner hid out in a cabin by a golf course. That cabin happened to be about 100 yards away from where the sheriff’s department set up a command post and where they held press conferences.
The story goes that after last weekend a mom and daughter team entered that cabin to do their housekeeping. Dorner tied them up and kept them hostage. For some reason he decided that yesterday was the day to make a run for it stealing their purple Nissan. As he was driving the mountain, he lost control of the vehicle.
Dorner then jacked a white pick up truck. Soon a Department of Fish and Wildlife ranger drove past him, recognized him and got into the first shootout. It was a mini shootout, no one was injured and he fled. The sheriff’s department set up a road block on Highway 38 at Glass Road, about 20 miles away from where Dorner initially holed himself.
It sounds like a pursuit then happened. Dorner came upon the road block, and that’s when that final shootout occurred. Two sheriff’s deputies were shot, one died on the way to the hospital. He hid in that cabin, they burned it to the ground, his body was eventually recovered and his California drivers license was found.
How did the cops not know he was hiding out 100 yards away? It was either a great job by Dorner or a incompetent job by the sheriff’s department. I don’t quite know which one it is yet.
4. What’s the LAPD going to do? So Dorner is dead. The poor cops can now breathe a sigh of relief. But that doesn’t mean the issues Dorner raised which came to life as both the LAPD and the Torrance PD reverted to their shoot-first primal instincts have gone away. It’s still there front and center.
What’s probably more difficult for the LAPD this time around is their indiscriminate shooting has caused mistrust across a broader spectrum of people. It’s not only the black community, the Latin community. This antipathy transcends race and gender.
Mr. Delicious Tacos put it best in his post “The Girls Cried When They Shot Dillinger”,
Cops: learn this lesson. The way you felt about Chris Dorner is the way we feel about you. A heavily armed human nightmare who could pop out of nowhere at any time with a gun in your face and fuck you on some technicality. Sure, Teresa Evans kicked some crazy guy in the head while he was cuffed. So fucking what. It’s against the Code of Conduct, but everything you do every day is technically against the Code of Conduct. Yeah, my brake light is out. So it’s against the law, what isn’t. Yeah, I have a gram of coke on me, so fucking what. It makes me feel happy for once. But suddenly someone can come grab you by the scruff of the neck over some shit we all do and stomp your face into the sidewalk and take away your money and your dreams and your freedom and maybe your life. Quis custodiet ipses custodies.
It was summer 1996 right before my senior year of high school back when my curfew was 10. I spent a Saturday with C who was at a UCLA summer camp. While hanging out in her dorm room and traipsing around Westwood Village, I ended up buying a used copy of Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel at the Wherehouse. “What Do I Have to Do” was played quite a bit on KROQ, and while I thought it was NIN-lite, I couldn’t deny how catchy and good it is.
I got home a bit late, around 10:30, and that was when I had the worst fight with my mom. She had gone to bed early and woke up when I went to the bathroom. Naturally she asked where I was and didn’t believe me when I said where I was or what I was doing. I kept telling her that I was just spending the day with C at UCLA, and she insisted that I wasn’t. I could only imagine what she thought I was doing. I wondered what I did to make her not trust me — I didn’t drink or use drugs; I was a good student in AP classes. At this point I had only started smoking cigarettes for several months. I listened to dark music. I liked to hang out at coffeeshops with my friends. I had horrible self-esteem. I was loud and angry with role models being Howard Stern and Roseanne. I knew I wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t think I was off the rails.
How do you communicate this to a mother with just as bad of a temper as you and who refuses to believe you?
It was getting late, and I wanted to go to bed. My mom didn’t want to end the argument. As a 17-year old, I didn’t know what she wanted from me. I knew I was hiding something big, and I had no intention of ever telling her. But my mom kept yelling at me saying I wasn’t telling the truth. Then I blurted it out.
“I’m gay.”
Fuck. As those words came out, I knew it was a fucking mistake. I knew nothing good was going to come out of this and that this argument was not going to come to an end anytime soon. Predictably, my mom went even more berserk perfecting every melodramatic beat from Korean dramas.
I knew I had to just stand there and take it. Then she said it.
“If you ever bring this up again, I will shoot you and shoot myself.”
Everything blurred after that. I knew I was never going to get my mother’s love, that no one was going to be there for me. It definitely explains the relationship I have with my mom, and it probably explains why I have never been in a relationship or see myself ever being in one.
Since then whenever I listen to Stabbing Westward I think about this night.
All of this to say that I did go see them Friday night as they promoted their re-recording of Wither to celebrate its 30th anniversary along with PIG, Acumen Nation (celebrating the 30th anniversary of Territory=Universe) and 16Volt (celebrating the 30th anniversary of LetDownCrush) as a part of Cold Waves LA. It was a great show of reliving the 90s guitar industrial metal and seeing bands I didn’t get to see back in the day. Hell, PIG even played “Juke Joint Jezebel” which I guess you could call a KMFDM cover even though Raymond Watts was the original featured vocalist.
As I cursed my aching 47-year old feet and back standing for hours at the Pacific Electric, I did think back to that argument 30 years ago and wonder what other climatic moments the people around me had. What traumas are the guy next to me exorcising as he is screaming out the lyrics very much off key?
Around 1 am they finished the set with “Save Yourself,” and the house lights turned up. Sure, I’m still carrying all of that baggage, but at least I got to shake my ass a little and enjoy myself a little, pain be damned.
The only reason I really look forward to my birthday is that I get time off from work and that I usually rent an Airbnb out in the middle of the desert in the Joshua Tree vicinity with a pool, hot tub, and no one around for 5 acres. So here I am in Landers (or a bit away from it really) whose claim to fame was that it was the epicenter of a 7.3 earthquake in 1992 just hours before a separate 6.5 earthquake centered in Big Bear hit on a Sunday morning. Wild stuff.
I arrived here yesterday, and on the way had to stop to get gas. Since this stupid fucking illegal war with Iran has driven gas prices sky high again, I’ve mostly been back on public transit again because, fuck that. There I was at the Arco station jaw agape as the $30 went to $40 and on up until it landed at $72 for 13 gallons of gas. Yes, the “cheap” gas.
I’m going to be spending most of the time in or around the pool trying to finish Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. I’m at around page 604, so I have about 400 more pages to go. I’ll be honest — I have no fucking clue what’s going on in the book. It’s a slow, slow read and demands your attention but not in a painstaking way. It’s a very enjoyable read, but I honestly don’t know how we get from one part to the next. Instead of trying to make sense of it, I’m just riding the wave, going where it’s taking me and try to make sense of it later.
I’ve started working on a couple of things with myself and hope to get better at as I begin my 48th year on this planet: I have started to journal more. It’s the most mundane scatterbrained thing. I hope it doesn’t cause someone’s head to explode when they go through my journals after I’m dead. (How cute. I think I have any importance that people will actually read what I write rather than just dispose it like they should.)
I need to curb my YouTube addiction. I don’t watch tv shows. I don’t watch sports all that much. I don’t use TikTok. I only doomscroll through Facebook at 3 am after I have woken up to take a piss. I am no longer perpetually online. But I will sit down and waste hours upon hours watching YouTube videos. I really need to get that in check.
That’s all I’ve got. Overall, I’m not happy, but I’m not completely depressed. Let’s just call it nonplussed. For someone who feels like a stranger in his own country, I guess that’s about as good as we can hope for.
