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There’s a line on Figure Eight by Elliott Smith, his spirit mentioned previous, that goes “Got a foot in the door, God knows what for”. When first I listened, I thought it just clever songwriting...

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Before it became The Suburbs, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was just a bunch of orange groves. You can still receive lectures from local old-timers about those days, whether they a...

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“It’s a hell of a thing, Mike, a caterpillar.” I didn’t know what he was on about at first, Frank had a way of being gnomic, hinting around ideas in hopes you’d come to conclusions yourself first...

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“It’s okay if you write about this, by the way,” Frank tossed the notion as an afterthought, “no one would believe any of it, Mike, they’d dismiss you as bonkers and only be half-wrong.” He laugh...

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Out past the northeastern exurbs of Los Angeles, past the Nazified city council of Santa Clarita, past the desolation of Palmdale where everyone bought houses thinking the property-speculation bu...

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It took Margaret Nussbaum years to become The Amazing Mitzi, according to Frank Yetti, to reach the modest success she’d attained as a stage mage. She hadn’t started as a slight-of-hand artist al...

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Frank broke with academic orthodoxy on the subject of skin-ape culture in many ways but most importantly on the question of whether humans were anything other than an evolutionary cul-de-sac, fea...

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The Magic Castle is real. Even if you think I’m just some crackpot ranting about sasquatches, go on the internet, look it up. The internet is, after all, the footnotes to everything. The footnote...

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Translated to English, the creature I called Frank asked the group “Focus just on the scents for a moment, what are the background smells?” “Patchouli,” one student said. “Burning sage,” said ano...

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My time spent Los Angeles made me lazy. No, not lazy, not exactly. When I had work and knew what I was supposed to be doing, I worked my ass off, point me in some direction and give me a push, I’...

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“What you might not expect,” the Amazing Mitzi once told the sasquatch called Frank, “is how fake magic is actually magnitudes more difficult than actual magic.” She smiled, gestured with her rig...

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There’s not much need for a calendar in Southern California, certainly not inside the Thirty-Mile Zone. There are only two seasons of any significance in Los Angeles, the season of fires and the ...

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Stupidity is an under-rated characteristic, at least at the beginning of your journey, at least in the entertainment business, especially in Los Angeles. It helps to start off stupidly, stupid as...

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Despite what you’ve been told by Seventies drive-in exploitation schlock cinema, the sasquatch bares no particular sexual proclivity toward humans, let alone toward human women in specific. Consi...

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I’ve been falling asleep in my dreams a lot, as of late. I don’t mean that I’ve been beginning to dream at the start of sleep, I mean that I’ve been having dreams where I fall asleep inside them ...

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Frank’s earliest memory was as a toddler of a mere fourteen, his species’ equivalent of three. His parents went off into the other room to talk to the local healers about his stunted growth, “he ...

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In general, humanity’s most prominent landmarks tend to fall into one of three broad categories: marvels of nature, marvels of engineering and marvels intentionally symbolizing a narrative the d...

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“You’re a miracle, you’re… impossible,” the scientist yelled, but not as a compliment or even a statement of fact, it was an accusation, “I’m only normal. Christ, I’m far less than normal.” I ask...

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Los Angeles has its ghosts, like anywhere, and like anywhere else, most sightings have practical explanation. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of all hauntings are hoax or heating duct, d...

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“It’s like the San Andreas Fault,” the Amazing Mitzi told Frank the Yeti once, describing the way magic worked, “the more movement applied, the more violent the fracture.” Simple tricks don’t ev...

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Hard enough being the last of your kind, that’d be burden enough for Frank, to be certain he was the last sasquatch on Earth, but only being mostly sure, that’s what hit him hardest. To wake up a...

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Just about any Denny’s, there’s generally a claw machine game somewhere near the front of the house. You know, you put in a quarter, these days as much as a dollar and get twenty seconds to posit...

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Mark Twain once said “if you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes” or maybe he didn’t. Maybe someone said it first but because he was famous it was remembered as his alo...

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I asked Frank how he was able to function here, even with the curse making him seen as a person instead of a sasquatch, even knowing his education in human studies. “You took classes about us,” I...

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I went out to L.A. to help or at least that’s what I’d hoped to do. My brother and I lost our father in January, his father-in-law passed in July. I’d house-sat and tended business while Ma was o...

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