Springtime in Minnesota. The prairie thaws. The butter sculptures melt. Prince cuts the backside out of his pants. And Bigfoot comes out. “I’m 110% convinced that it exists,” says Bob Olson, a co-founder of the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Society. “There’s just too much evidence, too many people’s emotions showing when they recount their stories. One lady cries when she recounts her story of how this thing stood up and looked at her. She felt it looked into her soul.”

Disillusioning news from the latest look at the calorie quotient of this fine nation’s chain-restaurant meals: A Bob Evans menu item that goes by the name “Cinnamon Cream Stacked and Stuffed Hotcakes” — it’s a pair of pancakes “stuffed with our very own sweet cinnamon chips and drizzled in our rich cinnamon cream sauce,” says the homestyle restaurant chain’s menu, which somehow neglects to mention the whipped cream — is high in calories and fat, according to the chain-restaurant crusaders at the Center for Science In The Public Interest. (1,380 calories; 27 grams saturated fat; 7 grams trans fat. Just in case you were wondering.) The rest of the somewhat unfortunately named “XTreme Eating 2010” list isn’t as desserty, but reading it did give me a stomachache, so, point for health?

Mega-shock! New York goooobernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo has picked a mayor of one of them there upstate cities as his running mate, in an appeal to the 8 million or so New York residents not residing in New York City, Westchester or Long Island. Running with Rochester’s top cop turned mayor should go some way in keeping people from thinking of him as just a big-city, party machine-friendly, slick-haired, Clinton-loving, overly ethnic operator.

by Sady Doyle

It was summer, friends, when I was punched in the face by a complete stranger in Times Square. Summer, when a nice middle-aged lady from whom I apparently stole a much-coveted seat on the N train called me a “wretched little bitch” under her breath for several stops. Summer, when a man stole a cab from my mother and I responded, after a failed attempt to point out that we had been the ones to flag it and open its door (“well, I put my bags in it, so,” is what this man said), by taking his Bed, Bath & Beyond shopping bags and tossing them back out onto the sidewalk! Summer, when I ended a call with my then-boyfriend by throwing my cell phone into the path of a city bus! Summer when I first joined Tumblr, and hoo boy, THAT. (Ask me about my opinions on prostitution! No, go on. ASK ME, MOTHERFUCKER.) It is summer, inevitably, when I hone my talents for bad behavior and taking major stands on minor issues, and put them to use in making people want to smack me harder than they have ever wanted to smack another person in their lives. And now, for me, the Fights of Summer have already begun.

Summer is the season of rage. Summer in New York City, particularly, is a disaster; it’s in summer when the whole project of New York starts to seem untenable, when the flaws in the design become apparent. Like: Really? You’re going to stick that many people where? And on top of each other? In apartments that are how small, again? And charge them how much for the experience?

The city is hot; the city is crowded; the city is constructed, for some God-awful reason, in such a way that streets become icy wind tunnels in winter and in summer prohibit the passing of even the mildest breeze. The city continually forces people into very close contact with each other, which is unfortunate, given that some time around July they all start to smell like hot dogs. The claustrophobic nature of the city — even when you’re not in a building, you’re surrounded by buildings; even when you’re alone, you’re surrounded by people — conflicts, by its very nature, with the expansive energy of summer, the restlessness fueled by sun and heat and frequently beer. That energy has nowhere to go, and, crucially, nowhere to cool itself off. Public pools are a catastrophe; the beaches are packed; the largest area of green space is Central Park, a peaceful and historic natural preserve known for being built over the razed homes of forcibly evicted black people and immigrants (YUP) and its high concentration of old dudes who can’t see why they would want to keep their shirts on. Also, horse feces.

Summer in New York, I would argue, is a class issue. Granted, I would argue this primarily because I cannot really afford air conditioning. However, there are other factors at play! For example, there is some significance to the fact that the wealthy have an entire series of alternate towns, at the other end of Long Island, dedicated to the practice of getting the hell away from it. They know how bad it is; the rest of us, with our Governor’s Island trips and city biking expeditions and Staten Island Ferry parties (HOW TO THROW A STATEN ISLAND FERRY PARTY: Get on the Staten Island Ferry. Buy some beer. Then run to see if you can claim a spot at the end of the boat, by the railing; it’s really pretty, actually, at night) are just fooling ourselves. For inevitably, under the pressure of heat and noise and far too many crowds of people taking up far too much valuable space near the Staten Island Ferry railing, we turn to the poor man’s entertainment: Fighting.

Murders peak during summer in New York. Saturdays, in particular, are very murdery; according to a 2009 New York Times article, more than two people are straight-up killed, on average, on Saturdays during summer. The urge to kill correlates more or less directly to the weather, too; there are more murders when it’s hotter and sunnier, and fewer when it’s cooler or raining. Granted, the real story of New York is how often people manage not to shoot each other in the face; two dead New Yorkers, out of more than eight million, is not a very large number. (Unless you’ve just been shot in the face, in which case it must seem like ONE TOO MANY.) I will readily admit that I myself have never murdered anyone. Nor have I been murdered; though that, really, just seems like luck, for it is inevitably during summer that I get into the most vicious, theatrical and bonkers fights of my life.

I started my first one of the season the Saturday before last, at a party some friends and I had planned for ladies what talk feminism on the Internet. We invited some ladies! Ladies invited other ladies! The whole lady situation got rapidly and severely out of control! Now, I don’t know if you enjoy the sight of ladies fighting with each other — the gentlemen seem to have developed quite a body of cinematic work around the subject — but if you do, I have some suggestions for how to make it happen. My suggestions are: Get a bunch of women who share opinions for a living into the same room. Give them all a bunch of liquor. And then, around 3 a.m., when time and tequila have eliminated all but the hardiest, get someone to mention Sarah Palin.

I might have been the one who mentioned her! I fucked up, clearly! I do recall saying that some left-wing folks had been sexist in regard to her, and this other woman (whose name I honestly cannot remember; thank God) said that it didn’t matter because Sarah Palin was so awful, and I said that it did matter because sexism was also awful, and then she interrupted me in the middle of a sentence to say something unkind about my tone and/or person — smug, sarcastic, hysterical, and unfunny, I believe, were her conclusions — and that, my friends, is when things got ugly.

Oh, the shouting! Oh, the insults! Oh, the many and various accusations, most of which, in recollection, make no sense whatsoever! I said she had internalized misogyny and cared more about protecting liberal party lines than about human decency; she said I had internalized classism and behaved “like a character from the movie Mean Girls;” I made fun of her for the Mean Girls reference, which didn’t help, and at some point, long after the conversation had transcended the bounds of sense-making, she said that she wanted to talk about how terrible I was with my boyfriend, at which point I got out my phone and started yelling, “Let’s call him! Let’s call everyone I’ve ever fucked! Let’s ask them how much I hate poor people!” And I would have called them, too (“So, we dated from December of 2007 to February of 2010. During that time, to the best of your recollection, how many hobos did I set on fire for kicks? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S FOUR IN THE MORNING. THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE DID NOT WORK OUT”) but then I started crying, and the whole thing just went completely off the rails.

As I stood up and walked outside for a cigarette, at this point visibly sobbing, she called out, “I look forward to reading about this on wherever it is you blog.”

Done and done, Madam! For the phenomenon of Summer Fighting must be addressed, before it claims another life and/or perfectly decent party.

The thing about Summer Fights is, nobody knows exactly how or why they happen. Most of the time, it is for no decent reason; or, rather, for only one reason, which is that we are just in the mood to fight. A summer fight is, in its purest form, the outward expression of a free-floating, peeved, trapped energy that can find no other outlet; a way of making the problems seem like they come from outside of oneself, from one specific source, rather than from the condition of being human in a mildly unpleasant world. It’s hot, you’re disgusting, everyone smells like hot dogs, and then you’ve thrown your phone under a bus. Or called someone a bitch for getting a seat on the subway. Or accused a fellow feminist blogger of sexism. OR SOMETHING. It doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is that you yelled. For about five seconds, it seemed like the most reasonable course of action. And now, there are the consequences. So, you know, whoops.

Sure, we can blame it on the heat — you stood in front of the fan too long, the air conditioning in the subway car was broken, you were my roommate and you purposefully bought an air conditioner and then hid it inside your bedroom where I could not benefit from its cooling powers and I only found out about it when I had to pay the bill — but what Summer Fights actually show is how quickly the social contract breaks down under the slightest bit of pressure. How readily, given one tiny bit of added unpleasantness or stress in our lives, we turn on each other. How hard it is for people to live around other people; how eager we all are to find something, or someone, to blame.

And while murders may spike, in New York specifically, during summer, people in general also kill each other slightly more often around Christmas — another time of enforced socialization, another time when we come face to face with our fellow human beings more often than usual and realize that there are some we cannot stand. People are social by design; we can’t survive without each other. However, we also can’t survive with each other, unless we’re able to maintain some necessary distance. It’s like that one U2 song, if that one U2 song had lyrics that went, “see the stone set in your eyes / see the thorn twist in your side / because I stuck it there / and you have a stupid face / and you never do the dishes / I hope you suffer.”

Here, I suppose, is where I tell you how to deal with it. And my answer is: I have no idea. I myself am the survivor of countless self-improvement campaigns that have, thus far, only succeeded in making me slightly less likely to destroy my own property for the sake of making a point. I myself am terrible. But, here’s the thing: So are you. We are all awful — selfish, greedy, inconsiderate, thoughtless, mean — at least some of the time. We’re all people, and we behave as such. People do things that offend you; people inconvenience or hurt you; people find you insufferable, frequently, and given sufficient provocation they will write something to that effect on wherever it is they blog. Such is the human condition. It’s just that, most of the time, we get to avoid it. We get to convince ourselves and each other that our faults are few and minor, that our fights are rare exceptions in a pattern of otherwise commendable behavior, that what we really are — what no one understands about us, what they should understand about us, what they would like us if only they understood — is nice.

But none of you are nice. I’ve read your Internet comments! I know! What you are is trapped in a social contract that has been hammered out over the last few millennia to help people co-exist without shooting each other. We still do shoot each other! And bomb each other, and discriminate against each other in our places of employment, and call each other names in YouTube comment sections. But we have rules, and manners, and religious or political philosophies of compassion and non-violence, and a sector of the population specially equipped with guns and handcuffs to haul us away if we are insufficiently persuaded by these things to keep our inherent lack of niceness within bounds. I’d recommend that you stick to the rules, basically, to the extent that you can manage it. Also: Recognize that there will come a time when you simply will not want to. Summer fights are painful, and humiliating, and leave us all feeling like assholes. In this way, they are a means of enlightenment. They help us to realize who we really are.

Sady Doyle is the honcho of Tiger Beatdown. She’s really hot right now.

Photo by break.things on Flickr.

by Harper Lee

From time to time, we offer free editorial space to common folk with something to say. Today a famous author discusses her reasons for remaining silent for so many years.

I know there’s all sorts of excitement about the 50th anniversary of my only book, To Kill a Mockingbird. And I understand that with all of these celebrations there will once again be plenty of attention paid to the fact that I’m a private person who has refused to give an interview for many years. I have, over that time, made peace with the whole thing. You learn to, after a while.

A few years back, when they brought out a new edition of Mockingbird with what was billed as a “new introduction by the author” I was a little put off. First of all, it wasn’t anything new, and in any case I’m not a fan of Introductions. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble. Or at least that’s what I believe, anyway; those so-and-sos at HarperCollins must have disagreed with me, because they ran an old letter of mine and claimed it as such. I learned right then that it doesn’t much matter. It’s a book for young people, who will take to it their own way. They always see new things in it. And the way they relate it to their lives now is really quite incredible.

The whole experience got me thinking: Why not end my silence? I know it’s put about in the press that the reason I don’t do interviews anymore is because I’ve been unhappy in the past with the way I’ve been misquoted. And that is partly true. But I’ve also been holding back a terrible secret all these years that I feared would somehow come up with some sharp reporter and cause me terrible shame. But what the hell. I’m an old lady now. I’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about. So here it goes.

I, Harper Lee, am a squirter.

That’s right: When I have an orgasm a small amount of liquid shoots out of my vagina. (Although, good heavens, it’s been years since I’ve had one of those.) Anyway, yes, for a long time I lived in fear that the truth would be revealed, but you know what? I wrote one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. More children have read my book, and have been deeply moved by it and forced to confront their own prejudices and those of their family, than any other work of art that I can think of. So when I get off I shoot a little. Big deal. Men do it all the time. I don’t know what I have to feel bad about.

Whew! What a relief it has been to get that off my delicate Southern bosom. All you squirters out there, listen up: Be proud of who you are and what you have achieved. I wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m sure you’ve done something just as worthy in your own field. Do not let crippling shame keep you quiet for as long as I have done. You are someone important. I appreciate your patience in my taking so long to talk about this. I feel completely liberated now.

Also, all of you who think Truman Capote really wrote my book? Suck my squirt.

Love,
Harper

Harper Lee is the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, which turns 50 this year.

Once when a bunch of us were tripping on mushrooms, two of my friends got into discussion about which type of dog was best. One of them was asserting the superiority of golden retrievers, like the one his family had had when he was a kid, over all other breeds when a look of self-reflective horror came over his face. “Wait a minute,” he said, “does that make me a racist?” We all agreed that yes, it definitely did. But times change! And this past weekend, a blow was struck for equality when two brave dogs, Otis and Diesel, took the stage at an American Kennel Club sponsored dog show at the Mattaponi Kennel Club in Northern Virginia.

Otis (that’s him on the left in the photo) and Diesel, you see, are not golden retrievers or collies, or any other pure breed dog. They are mutts.

As Discovery reports: “Finally, after 125 years of its existence, the American Kennel Club is letting mutts, or ‘All Americans,’ compete in AKC shows in their own category. The ‘All American’ dogs won’t be judged on breed standards, but instead on agility, rally and obedience.”

Otis finished third in the rally competition Sunday. Suck it, racists!

Today the ultrasmooth R&B; singer-songwriter Ne-Yo released his new single “Beautiful Monster,” and it’s pretty good — produced by his longtime collaborators Stargate, it’s reminiscent of his earlier hit “Closer,” only with icier keyboards and a more paranoid outlook. But of course one commenter had to opine that the song was “very Lady Gaga,” presumably because it is an uptempo track that uses synthesizers and has the word “monster” in its title. This stray comment from someone named “rambo244” would be funny if this “Gaga already did it”-ism didn’t seem to happen with recent output by 99% of pop stars; it would be even funnier if Stefani Germanotta, who I will freely admit has been the marquee name on a few good-to-great tracks, wasn’t well-versed in the act of borrowing from her contemporaries and predecessors. In the spirit of educating people who apparently only started paying attention to pop when singles from The Fame started getting airplay on U.S. radio, here is a brief list of things that, despite many stans’ assertion to the contrary, GaGa cannot yell “first” about.

10. Setting things on fire in videos.
9. Bisexuality.
8. Egregious product placement.
7. Name-dropping big-name designers of the moment.
6. “Outrageous” videos that warrant opening and closing credits.
5. The willful marriage of high and low art.
4. Use of the word “monster” in the title of a pop song.
3. 4/4 time.
2. Not wearing pants.
1. Sex.

by John Murray

Last week Mexican president Felipe Calderon spent two days visiting Barack Obama at the White House. In the weeks leading up to the summit, which was punctuated by a state dinner on Wednesday, there was much in the press about issues the two presidents had to discuss, including the Mexican government’s negative reaction to the new Arizona immigration bill and the need to improve trade relations and get more Mexican trucks on the roads in the US. But no issue was expected to be more pressing than the question of security. With over 24,000 dead in the past 3 years and growing international concern that Mexico could be on the road to becoming a failed state, strategically combating the drug cartels and helping Mexico establish control over its more lawless territories was unavoidably going to be the main focus of the short meeting.

A great deal happened in Mexico during the week leading up to the meeting between the two heads of state, and it effectively made the focus on security even more pressing.

For one thing, the biggest story directly associated with Juarez (besides the usual scores of murders) was the NPR report on the Army’s collusion with the Sinaloa cartel, a situation discussed here previously and one that has been an open secret in Mexico for quite some time. NPR is the first news organization to blow the story wide open in the American media, undertaking a four-month investigation and uncovering statistics on arrests, federal court depositions and interviews with citizens that all pointed to heavy corruption within the Army involving the one-sided pursuit of the Juarez cartel. The story spread quickly, with reductive headlines in some places declaring that the Mexican government “supports” the Sinaloa cartel.

It’s very important to realize that the problem here isn’t an isolated instance of corruption or cut-and-dry conspiracy. The Army has long been associated with drug trafficking, having been accused of collecting bribes in exchange for providing protection, facilitating drug transport throughout the country and over the border and, not uncommonly, committing murder. Some even call the Army a cartel in its own right, in the sense that they are involved in the transport of drugs and profit from it in the same way that an outwardly criminal cartel does.

But it’s not as if the Sinaloans are the first group to ever successfully corrupt Army personnel. There’s a long tradition of paying off the Mexican authorities to help support the drug trade. Drug trafficking generates $35–50 billion a year, depending on how you add. With those kinds of earnings, there has always been plenty to go into operational overhead, a necessary expense. Ultimately, drug trafficking could never be as successful as it is, in Mexico or the US, without a high degree of corruption and assistance from official powers-especially during a government crackdown. The Army is a fertile field for corruption. A Mexican Army private makes $533 a month on average. Federales don’t make much more. Drug money, on the other hand, is so prolific that it finds it way everywhere. It’s laundered through businesses, it’s out in the street and it certainly finds its way into the pockets of the authorities. There’s more than enough to go around, and the Army, which sees and knows this, seeks its take as well. It’s just the nature of the sums we’re dealing with. When it’s said that drug money has infected the Mexican economy, it’s true. It’s made it’s way into every level of the society, and that’s the danger of it.

In addition, it was the Army’s charge in Juarez to fight the drug traffickers in order to bring about an end to the violence gripping the city. As we’ve discussed before, the unspoken truth is that stamping out the drug trade in Juarez or Mexico really isn’t realistically possible. This is due mainly to the sheer volume of cash it generates for Mexico and the basic laws of supply and demand. But the Army still has to do its job.

The Sinaloa cartel is the oldest and best organized cartel in Mexico. The Juarez cartel hasn’t been the same since the late 90’s. If the Sinaloans, known for their persistence, can convince the Army that the local cartel is on the way out, and backs that up with the right cash payments, then the Army has plenty of reason to selectively pursue the Juarez cartel. It makes perfect sense. One side has to win, and the faster the weaker side is eliminated, the faster the violence ends. Then things can go back to ‘normal’, with everybody silently profiting form the drug trade.

In a follow-up interview to the original story, NPR’s John Burnett felt the need to clarify the point:

CONAN: And in your stories, you’ve described a battle taking place between two factions fighting for control over the border city of Ciudad Juarez, La Linea and the Sinaloa cartel.

BURNETT: That’s right. Let me also just add something to your intro to our conversation here. What we’ve been reporting this week is that elements of the Mexican army appear to be compromised in this fight against the cartels. We’re really not saying that the army as a monolithic institution is completely committed to one side.

There’s no official position of the Army in the war between the cartels. It’s all about convenience and going with the tide. By focusing on dismantling the smaller, weaker cartels now, the government can get things under control and deal with the bigger fish later, which in this case happens to be the Sinaloans. The Sinaloans, for their part, have played on this beautifully. In fact, it was probably much better for the Sinaloans in the end to have the Army replace the local and state police in Juarez as the arbiters of the law, because it cleared out the old guard that had been on the payroll of La Linea and the Juarez cartel for so long.

It always comes back to money in this war, greed and money. Instead of focusing on the sensationalist shock of the headlines we’d do better to examine the enormous divide between rich and poor, the ridiculously low minimum wage and the lack of infrastructure in many areas that are huge contributors to the strength of gangs and the the desperation that leads people to these things. But these problems are systemic and far harder to talk about.

So while that story dominated the press in the US, the Mexican press reported on a worrisome string of events that crescendoed with the kidnapping of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a former Mexican senator and presidential candidate and prominent official in Calderon’s PAN party.

It began last Thursday, when federal forces acting under the supervision of the office of the attorney general staged a raid of 7 homes in Culiacan, the capitol of Sinaloa state. While the intention of the raids remains unclear, 7 luxury vehicles, boxes full of jewelry and computer equipment were seized. More notably, they arrested Griselda Lopez Perez, ex-wife of fugitive Sinaloa boss Chapo Guzman. Lopez Perez, who was found in one of the homes, was questioned, but only held for about four hours before she was released. The New York Times later reported that Calderon played a direct role in arranging her speedy release, fearing reprisal attacks if she was held on to for too long. These kinds of fears are not unfounded, as they have happened in numerous instances during the past few years. It was a strange event, as family members of drug dealers generally aren’t targeted by the government without substantial reason.

The story still hung in the air the next day, when rumors began to surface that Mexican Navy special forces had arrested one of the biggest players in the Sinaloa cartel, Ignacio “El Nacho” Coronel Villareal, early Friday morning in Guadalajara. Coronel is considered to be the third ‘leader’ of the Sinaloa cartel, after Chapo Guzman and Mayo Zambada. He controls the plaza of Guadalajara, the home of the original modern Mexican drug cartel of which he and Guzman were a part. He is known to be a ruthless leader who has held tight command of his city throughout the years, despite rifts in the Sinaloa federation and pressure from other cartels. He’s also known as the “The Ice King” for his proficiency in the production of methamphetamine, organizing huge buys of precursor chemicals from Asia to manufacture the drug in the remote areas in central and western Mexico.

Nacho’s arrest under any circumstances would be a huge blow to the Sinaloans and a huge victory for the government, and the story quickly spread. What makes it even more interesting is that Coronel is Chapo’s brother-in-law, as is said to have married Coronel’s daughter Emma a few years ago. But after 24 hours there was still no acknowledgment of the arrest from the Navy or any other government agency. This is extremely strange, because in past instances the government has been very quick to offer up the names of the traffickers it captures, such as the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in 2008, the death of his brother Arturo at the hands of the Navy in December of 2009 and the arrest of Teodoro “El Teo” Garcia Simental in January. Unlike those instances, the report went unconfirmed for most of the week.

There was still no word on the Coronel rumor when a worker found the car of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos abandoned on his ranch in central Mexico early Saturday morning. The authorities were alerted, and within a few hours it was determined that Fernandez de Cevallos was missing and in all likelihood had been kidnapped, due to the presence of blood and other signs of violence at the scene

“Don Diego” has always been a polarizing figure in Mexican politics, but he is an extremely high profile one. His kidnapping represents a major departure from normal operations for drug cartel violence. Threats against politicians and local officials are all too common, but no one of Don Diego’s stature has been made a target during the past few years of the fight. There are really only two cartels that could be behind such a brazen act: the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel. In light of the events of the past week, just about everyone is looking at the Sinaloans.

The strange series of events raises a lot of questions. Could the Fernandez de Cevallos kidnapping have been retaliation for the arrest of Griselda Lopez Perez, or the arrest of Nacho Coronel? As the week wore on, there was still no acknowledgment from the government on whether they had Coronel in custody or not. The fact that the rumor remained a rumor led many to speculate that the government may be setting up an exchange of Coronel for Fernandez de Cevallos, adding fuel to the sentiment that the two events were directly related.

It took the Navy almost an entire week to even respond to reports; they finally issued a statement denying that they ever had Coronel in their custody. The announcement did little to quell suspicion, and some sources report that the Navy is bluffing, lending even more credence to the exchange theory. There has been no request for ransom, and with every day that passes it seems more like the kidnapping was a grab for a bargaining chip in a political battle.

The fact that it happened right before Calderon’s trip to Washington has had a direct political impact as well, intended or not. How can he argue the case that Mexico is making progress in the war on drugs when this is front page news? The confusion behind the incident doesn’t help either, as it makes the state and government look bumbling and disorganized and susceptible to any kind of attack. It also brings up memories of Colombia, where kidnappings and attacks on high-level politicians were commonplace in the late 80s and early 90s. This won’t do much to help the fear of Mexico becoming a failed state, and again will force security to the forefront of issues involving Mexican-American relations, leaving all the other important issues to be passed over.

It’s impossible to guess how this will play out, but if the Sinaloans do turn out to be responsible, it will certainly change the perception that the government is on their side in this fight. It’s an important reminder that any alliances or partnerships forged through corruption are merely out of convenience, and that there are no “sides” in a war with a constantly shifting battlefield of players. The Mexican government may have to confront the Sinaloa cartel head on a little sooner than they wanted to.

Previously: Terror In The Valley

John Murray is a lover of obscurity. He lives and writes in Arizona.

Strange doings in the cellular would of Bulgaria, where the phone number 0888 888 888-I hesitate to even type those digits, such is the terrifying history of that sequence-has been suspended “after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years.” (If you guessed the Daily Mail pat yourself on the back.) Anyway, there is more.

The first owner, Vladimir Grashnov — the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel, which issued the number — died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48.

Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning.

The jinxed number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss Konstantin Dimitrov.

He was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a trip to inspect his £500million drug-smuggling empire.

The number then went to a crooked businessman, who was-wait for it-”gunned down outside an Indian restaurant in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia in 2005, after taking over the jinxed line.”

And that’s it. One can certainly argue coincidence in this case, or one can suggest that if 2 out of 3 of the numbers’ owners were engaged in risky criminal behavior, it is not exactly shocking that they came to untimely ends. (It should also be noted that Bulgaria has Europe’s third highest death rate.) But where’s the fun in that? Spooky cell phone will kill anyone who has its number! It’s a lot sexier than non-haunted cell phones, which will also kill you but will take much longer because the tumors need time to form.

I worked at my father’s industrial safety-equipment business on an assembly line manufacturing safety glasses. While the job was as monotonous as you might imagine, particularly for a high school student trying to enjoy summer vacation-try screwing 10,000 eyeglass temples onto half as many frames with an electric screwdriver and you’ll get the idea-it introduced me to a visceral tedium I would later understand to be a foundation of modern life. It also taught me to relate to the other freaks and social misfits my father tended to hire. It was not uncommon for the guys in the shipping department (wearing welding helmets) to launch rubber-band attacks against the assembly-line crew. (I’m not sure why more workplaces don’t have this now: it really breaks up the day!)

This job was also my primary exposure to the aural tedium of album-oriented-rock radio (in Pittsburgh, best represented by the timeless WDVE). To repeatedly hear the same bands — The Who, The Stones, Sabbath, Zep, Rush, Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd — was the aesthetic corollary to the assembly line, and had I not experienced it first-hand, I never would have understood the appeal of such an extreme, much less the desire to destroy it.

But during my first college summer, in 1987, I rented a house for the summer on Long Beach Island (a barrier island about halfway down the New Jersey coast) with a group of buddies from high school. The house, a bungalow in Ship Bottom, cost $5000 for the season, which split eight ways — we had two and sometimes three kids per bedroom, because why not? — meant that we could expect to make more than enough money to pay for the house and have a nice chunk leftover for the ensuing school year.

My first job at the beach was at an upscale deli and restaurant in Harvey Cedars called The Seaport, or, as I later heard my fellow employees refer to it, The Sea Scum. I wore a green apron and spent an eternity each day taking orders from well-heeled vacationers, who I quickly learned were very particular about their lunchmeats and cheeses (and potato salads and coleslaws and pickles). I overcame my terror of the circular slicing machine, despite my sense that losing a finger was inevitable (and possibly desirable). I got yelled at for not knowing that a “regular” coffee included cream, or in any case wasn’t black, which is how I initially served it.

When there were no customers, the boss made us sweep the floor, polish the glass cabinets, and otherwise stay busy, which struck me as only slightly less barbaric than say, breaking rocks in a Siberian gulag. Regrettably, there were no rubber-band wars at this job, and not even a radio, to break up the hours. I started at seven in the morning and got off at four in the afternoon, with a one-hour lunch break, which I spent at the end of the street, wondering what the point of life was if it meant working for so many hours, even if you were at the beach, with the sound of the waves breaking just over the dunes. Was I spoiled? Undoubtedly.

Back at the house things were mostly a lot more fun. As you might expect from a group of 19-year-old kids who straddled the nerd/jock/brain axes (think cross-county running team) and who were living completely on our own for the first time, we amused ourselves in many different ways: we played poker and hearts, we made fun of U2 (“Joshua Tree” was big that summer) by singing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the fake British accents of the Spinal Tap guys faux-harmonizing “Since My Baby Left Me” at Elvis’s gravesite; we hatched business plans involving tie-dyed shirts and a pair of “mountain roller blades” (see photograph); we spent hours recording a message on the answering machine designed to simulate a real person: “Hello?….Oh, I’m not sure, let me check (insert noise of person checking)…I’m sorry, he’s not here can I take a message? BEEEEEEEP.” A bunch of us bought used surfboards and were surprised to learn that surfing is a lot harder than it looks, even for those of us who grew up body surfing. Perhaps more inevitably, some of us started smoking weed ALL THE TIME, we met other kids on the island and went to parties, where drinking and hooking up ensued (as well as more genuine summer romances).

I remained aloof to the prospect of girls that summer-and for the moment, drinking and smoking-because I was deeeeeep in the closet. In retrospect, it was probably possible to maintain this charade because my friends, while all non-homosexuals, tended to be a little gay (in the elementary school sense of the term, as you’ve probably ascertained from the above) or at least quirky, in comparison to those we were meeting, and thus they did not pressure me to commit to anything beyond the usual bloated talk. To put in possibly dated pop-culture terms, it was “’Sixteen Candles’ (specifically the dweebs, although a slightly older and less exaggerated version of Anthony Michael Hall and his friends) meets ‘Jersey Shore.’” Regarding which, confession: I’ve never seen “Jersey Shore.”

I quit the Sea Scum the second I got my first paycheck, because in the meantime my friend Taylor got hired as a short-order cook at a bar about two-thirds of the way toward the southern end of the island. As luck had it, they needed someone else and I was more than available, so Taylor and I ran the kitchen, splitting the shifts, seven nights from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. Working in a bar, or at least this bar — whose clientele seemed to consist mostly of vacationing, exceedingly drunk, rowdy, white middle-aged cops — was undoubtedly a stretch for me, given that 1) I had never drunk more than a few sips of beer in my life (a high percentage of my family were alcoholics, and I was paranoid about joining their ranks), and 2) thanks to my private boarding school and college education, I exuded the kind of naïve, pampered and judgmental aura of privilege that set off the bullshit meters of many who were fortunate or misfortunate enough to meet me. I remember how the owner, a short, stocky Italian guy, often seemed to regard me with a bemused, skeptical expression, as though wondering exactly what planet I was from, and what possible circumstances had contrived to bring us together.

In fairness to my younger self, I worked hard to learn the ropes and was not completely without skill. My job, after the (scantily clad) cocktail waitresses or (beefy) bartenders (and in some cases, woofy, although that’s something I couldn’t even begin to acknowledge at the time) took the order and handed me the slip, was to cook and then serve the food. This meant getting the all-important tip, to the cumulative tune of $100-$120 on a good night. The menu was alarmingly diverse for a one-man operation: we had pizza, subs, grilled sandwiches (the house specialty was a Reuben), fried shrimp, raw oysters on the half shell, and French fries. As we all know from watching “Top Chef,” all dishes take different amounts of time to prepare, but should ideally be served at the same time, so the trick was to stagger everything accordingly, which could get complicated once you were dealing with three or four orders at once. Especially at the beginning, I often turned around and saw smoke billowing out of the pizza oven or flipped over a Reuben to find it coated in something resembling asphalt, which meant starting over after discreetly burying the burned evidence deep in the garbage can, lest the owner get wind of what had happened and take you out back to the parking lot and strangle you with one of his thick gold chains.

Most of my encounters with the patrons were pleasant and efficient, but occasionally there were mishaps. Sometimes there were delays and I would not be able to serve the food all at once, and so I brought it out in stages (with a free side of profuse apologies). Once I set down a pizza on a table so that it caught the edge of a cigarette ashtray, which to everyone’s horror slowly flipped through the air and landed upside-down on the pie. Occasionally I ran into real assholes. “You know what I like about you?” said one as I brought an order to his table-not even late, if I remember correctly.

I shook my head. “No, what?”

“Nothing!” he said, to laughs all around.

I just shrugged and put down the food. I didn’t care, because I knew that odds were his girlfriend would slide me an extra-large tip, even if it meant coming back to the kitchen to give it to me. This happened enough so that it was a rule.

As the weeks wore on, I developed a sense of loyalty toward not only my boss, but the rest of the staff; after closing, we almost always sat around comparing notes about the shittiest and best moments of the night, along with various escapades of the bartenders, who sometimes slipped away for a few minutes to the empty apartment upstairs to get a blowjob from one of the lady customers, or the cocktail waitresses, who could occasionally be prodded to climb up on the bar and shake it for the drooling men below. There was a camaraderie to these nights that for me was enhanced by my first experiences getting a little (or a lot) wasted, a pleasure I no longer wanted to deny myself, given that the beers were free and, frankly, tasted great at the end of a long shift. I also wanted to belong.

On weekends, there was a house cover band featuring a 6′ 3″ 350-pound singer-guitar player who snorted impressive amounts of coke between sets in the kitchen and who always threatened to kill me if I didn’t cook something for him FAST. (I believed him.) Mostly they played a lot of “oldies” — “Under the Boardwalk,” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and other such shit — along with some classic rock. They always ended the night with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” This quickly lost any appeal for me, particularly since the guitarist was such a mountainous ogre, although the audience loved ever second. The drummer was much nicer to me, and his signature number (he only sang a few) was a version of “Can’t Find My Home,” a song from the classic-rock pantheon I still kind of love (with apologies to the indie-rock snob I would later become), mostly for the sweet, effortless yearning of Stevie Winwood’s young falsetto.

Some nights (or by the time we got out, wee hours of the morning), we went up to the beach and sat in the dunes, where I learned to drink even more, most often from a shared bottle, and to smoke joints that were passed around. Under the stars, we divulged our dreams about a future that did involve working at a bar (even the “old” bartenders, in their mid-twenties, shared this ideal) and the uncertainty about how to get there. Or maybe I didn’t really divulge much of anything beyond the vaguest aspirations, given that I was already on a path that made working at a bar highly improbable, at least as a career, and thankfully by this point I had developed enough tact not to mention this. I don’t think I was smug — or at least I hope I wasn’t — knowing what I know now, that my fate, of course, was to join the ranks of the white-collar world who stare at a computer screen eight-plus hours a day. Not that I’m complaining.

I remember driving home, tired, drunk and high, with the car stereo on full blast. For me, it was the summer of “New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü. A college friend had introduced me to the band earlier that year, and I was making my way back through their records. The first few times I heard “New Day Rising,” I wasn’t even sure I liked it: the music seemed too harsh and chaotic, more punk and dissonant than the fuzzed-out pop of “Flip Your Wig” and “Candy Apple Grey,” which I already loved. But now that I was working in the “real world,” even for just a summer, the bleak intensity of Bob Mould, punctuated by the more jangly, sporadic joy of Grant Hart (e.g., “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” and “Books about UFOs”) started to make sense. There was something about driving up the empty highway in the black morning with the words “new day rising” screaming through my head that perfectly captured the ambiguous quality of making money in such a beautiful, desolate place. In a few hours, depending on the tides, I would get up to go surfing with my friends, notwithstanding that the waves were not very good in July and August and the certainty that the salt water would brutally sting my bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes as I straddled the board, facing the rising sun.

Probably the most famous song on “New Day Rising” is “Celebrated Summer,” which perfectly encapsulates the transition the band made from thrashing hardcore to a more melodic style. In the lyrics, Bob Mould describes “getting drunk out on the beach or playing in a band/getting out of school [and] getting out of hand” and asks (perhaps rhetorically, perhaps not) if this was “your celebrated summer.” At the time, I would have answered yes: I could feel myself changing, and if the future seemed uncertain, I felt unduly confident about my place in it. But almost twenty-five years later, I’m not so sure. Summer now strikes me as a time marked less by the flailing exuberance of youth (spring!) than a maturation that almost always coincides with a kind of disenchantment for what so much of life has to offer. The sheen of novelty has worn off; it’s a season for middle age. At forty-two, I have little choice but to look back as much as forward, when perhaps the oppressive torpor of life makes me crave the relief that can only come with the fall. This is my celebrated summer.

Matthew Gallaway is a writer who lives in Washington Heights. His first novel, ‘The Metropolis Case’ is available for preorder. Yes it is true!