The Scissors Aren't For Shearing

I recently moved to Vallejo, California. A place I knew nothing about.

If someone requested a Vallejo fact, I probably would've said, "Vallejo is home to every different kind of Beetle." I would've been completely wrong but not that far off. One thing about Vallejo: things are good aqt existing here. The town is almost perfectly divided down racial lines, half urban, half rural, and home to California's first homosexual mayor. People are too busy living--jobs, mates, meth labs--to stop you from doing the same thing. This collective mindset is ideal for the rise of a black market in the Raley's parking lot. Bootleg DVD's are brandished from the popped trunks of rusted automobiles. Things like this happen in the first decade of the twenty first century.

Pictured above, is a card I made for a local grocery clerk. Something about this town makes grocery clerks come alive...Rick S...Irma...Howard...Lydia...Yours is the siren song of the real America.

There are glints upon Rick S' chest. These shimmerings can be traced to candelas, magnified and refracted, by his bounty of customer service medals. Were they mine I would throw them off the bridge and into the river but they are not. Tokens, handed down by commercial empires as "signifiers of success", arew taken as exactly that. They are not ironic. It is not an insult to dole out food to Vallejellians. Rick S does his job. He does it well. The medals show this.

Also in Vallejo: the Zodiac killer. The Zodiac killer killed many in the 70's and terrified a region. You could call him the worst man of the 1970's. You could also call him the opposite of Rick. S.

The Zodiac is opposite of many things.

I saw the Full House House yesterday. Hoping to find a piece of our childhood, Jeff and I drove for two hours without realizing that we disembarked from the Full House House to find the Full House House. Reminiscing about a popular television is unlike killing canoodling couples.

We drove last night. We left the city behind. To the farmland. The clouds had never met wind before. They sat, stolid & high, waiting for a breeze that would never come. We were lured to the boonies, not by present temptations, but the fleeting touch of the 1970's. Zodiac killed his second and third on this same stretch of road. Primal anger, bustling through his every vein, removed him from humanity and made killing others seem like a right & proper thing to do.

Housing a man like Zodiac isn't in a city like Vallejo's best interests. I only found his territory because the clerk at Raley's told me about it.