i entertain myself pretty good

i'm ready to hit the road again. i've been thinking of bisbee. i need to do more research into abandoned towns along the way. one of my dad's friends took us on an obscure tour of the old west one year when i was in middle school. i'd like to pick his brain now and find out what else he knows about. we drove for what felt like centuries to a spot somewhere east of tombstone, i guess, where the remnants of a tiny town still stood - somewhat. i wish i could remember where we were, but my memory is of nothing but scrub bushes and golden sandy dirt. there was a jail which was made up of two rooms - office and a cell. it was still intact, and it looked like it had become a hangout for creepy locals. someone had drug some large rocks inside and arranged them in a half circle, and there was a dog corpse in there, minus bones...just fluffy fur, and teeth. he better have died of natural causes!

other than that, you could see the foundations of two small homes. i'd like to hit that place with a metal detector.

we were also so lucky to get to see the place where johnny ringo died, and the same oak tree they found him sitting in. it's on private land and the owners had apparently had an assful of lookie-loos and drunken scout parties looking for ringo's grave, so they shut down the boundaries and started cracking down on trespassers. my dad's friend slow (slowie, as big don likes to call him - adorable, if you could see these scary looking dudes) started writing letters - remember a time when no one had the internet?! - to the guy who owned the place and started an acquaintanceship. slow calls himself a "student of the old west," which i love. anyway, he gained permission to access the area, and we drove out. it's a pretty serene place, a stand of oak trees next to a dry creek that probably isn't always dry. there's a lot of controversy regarding whether johnny killed himself or was murdered (yanno, by wyatt earp, not), and i side with murder.

i guess there's a marker there now. when we went, there was nothing but a pile of rocks that johnny was allegedly buried under. i don't know if the body's still there or what. seems like it would have been graverobbed at some point, no?

i particularly enjoy this, "his main claim to fame was shooting an unarmed man named Louis Hancock in an Arizona territory saloon in 1879 for ordering beer after Ringo told him to order whiskey." indeed!

what a world to live in. why are people such pantywaists now? just staying alive is no longer a challenge, and it doesn't take any grit to make your way in the world and have enough to eat. not that i want to live in a lawless sideshow where i can get my ass killed by ordering the wrong drank, but it can't be much worse than the current state of affairs, right? rush limbaugh, twitter, two girls one cup? or using a block of ice as a refrigerator, bathing once a fortnight and dying in childbirth. what's worse? honestly - on the fence about that one.

all this reminds me of tombstone, 1994. oh my god i love this movie. it is so, so cheesy, but val kilmer! and sam elliott. i feel like i've made this post before.

check out that piece of consumptive ass. anyway, the movie's out of control, but i'm into it. historically, highly inaccurate. but who's counting? ~neither~ of wyatt earp's wives were that cute, despite being prostitutes (in a day when being attractive and selling sex: not necessarily found in a pair), nor was big nose kate some kind of sexy espanish siren, john ringo did NOT know latin nor did he kill that many people, and wyatt did not kill him. what else. the gunfight obviously didn't go down that way either. i hate that shit. also weird, boot hill isn't where it was in that day. what the fuck is with transporting cemetaries from one place to another.

one weird event that was sort of truly captured in the film was the accidental shooting of the marshall fred white by curly bill broci0us. he accidentally killed his biff! too sad. i just read that that went down on the site that later became the birdcage theatre. 1. i thought the birdcage was already standing when all this bullshit went down? and 2. no wonder that place is so fucking creepy. and it IS. tombstone is trite as hell and sort of "dirty disney" now, and by that i mean fake & manufactured, yet also still just a shitty small town where you're hard pressed to find a place to eat that doesn't have picnic tables or a bunch of flies on the screen door. anyway, in spite of the lameness, the birdcage is interesting - dark, dusty, chilly and quiet. the creepiest spots to me were the old bedrooms where the gals would take their quarries for the night. it was like all that shit was still in the air, the walls, the floors. come to think of it, i've got some pics from the last time i was there in 05.

that's a weird wyatt earp mannequin. apparently the caretaker finds his hat on the floor below on a lot of mornings.

bullet holes in the stage

a chamber of ill (the illest!) repute. who wouldn't i murder to get those drapes.

curly bill sat in this chair! oh my gadd. they say he was sitting there getting a haircut when they came to apprehend him for shooting fred white.

i love these parts. i think this was around benson.

and the biggest rosebush in the world. tombstone has it all.