Hi folks,
If you don’t want to hear it (whatever I have in mind) but are curious about my video this week, by all means scroll down to the bottom. A while back – on the winter solstice (which was a coincidence, I think) – I captured images of the planet Venus going through some very odd apparent changes…
OK. As mentioned in my last post, I was going to give getting in to Mexico it one more try. I did that yesterday.
A hint as to how it went: According to the Weather Service, right now as I write the temperature outside the rig ‘feels like 23.’ Degrees. In other words, I’m not in Mexico.
Another full day and well over a hundred bucks down the memory hole… You don’t need to hear the details of how it went with the Mexicans but I do have something to say about coming back, i.e., entering the U.S. of A. after three hours outside of it. This was yesterday:
After two hours in the customs/immigration/vehicle line, I’m within 100 yards of the Border, right? Two Customs Officers in black uniforms (were they always black or is that new?) come out to meet me. Me. There are literally hundreds of vehicles in the line (four lanes across) and they see fit to single me out. Officer comes to my window, glances at Gus, asks me where I’m coming from… I explain stuff. He fires questions, rephrasing ones from a minute ago, trying to trip me up. Finally says, OK, seems satisfied with me, and directs me to the right hand lane (the other officer holding up the creeping traffic to let me pass).
Good, I’m thinking. When I get to the booth, they’ll wave me through, since I’ve already gone through the routine. Right.
Different guy, big Latino Officer (LO) at the booth stares at me from behind evil aviator shades; the two who came out and grilled me are no where to be seen. LO asks me the same questions, thumbing through my passport. Directs me to the area where you get searched, tells me to wait ‘in that area and stay inside the vehicle.’ Fuck, OK. I pull over.
A troop of Officers descend on the rig, minus the LO, who disappears into a small hexagonal bunker with heavily tinted windows and which appear to be ready for an RPG fusillade; it has a decidedly panopticonal vibe to it. The Officers open my storage area in the far back. Same questions I’ve already answered, twice. They tell me to get back in the rig. They disperse, having found nothing of note. Meanwhile, the LO, who has my passport, is inside the Panopticon.
Time passes… I’m just sitting there… More time… Over an hour… I begin having distressing thoughts… this sort of delay can’t be good… is my past, my long past, coming back to haunt me?… I mean are they waiting for a CIA swat team to come deal with me?… did they just get really tired and pissed off at the stuff I write?… Whoa, maybe FBI agent John O’Neill himself (who was supposed to have been killed on 9/11/01 but was not and who was an integral part of The 9/11 Op, according to Me) is on the way… if he shows, should I apologize for calling him a psychopath? I keep glancing at the opaque façade of the Panopticon. A computer is in there, I know, probably with my whole sorry ass life and times scrolling down… I wonder briefly if my file still has naked photos of my nutso ex from Costa Rica (I know for a fact they swiped some)…
I start timing this. I figure I’ve been sitting there for an hour and fifteen minutes when an Officer with a sort of friendly face walks by. I hail him and ask what’s going on, adding, semi-humorously, ‘Was it something I did?’
‘No, we’re just waiting for a canine unit,’ the friendly-faced officer says. ‘A dog,’ he adds, in case ‘canine’ wasn’t clear enough. But this is a huge relief. John O’Neill isn’t on the way! The Panopticon now looks like a regular building. My sense of humor surfaces:
‘Well, if a dog is all that’s holding this up, I have one right here we can use.’ I jerk my thumb at Gus, sitting patiently at shotgun.
The Officer doesn’t miss a beat: ‘No, it has to be a trained dog, one of ours.’
I’m tempted to whip out Gus’s Emotional Support Animal credentials but let it slide.
At one hour and thirty minutes into this, the canine unit shows up. Both dog and handler are lean and mean. Black German Shepard, the Officer likewise in black, and bristling with firearms and weird paraphernalia hanging all over him. Hair high and tight, same sort of shades as LO.
Gus perks and whines, her tail swishing. She wants to exchange sniffs.
No way. The Shepard bares his/her teeth. According to the Friendly-Faced Officer (FFO) I have to not only remove Gus from the rig, but put her in a cage over by the (ex)Panopticon. The FFO accompanies us; he has apparently been assigned to Gus and me — he stays with us for the rest of our experience at U.S. Customs, El Paso.
Gus has never been in a cage before. Wasn’t easy getting her in there. It was like when I picked her up at ARF (Animal Rescue Fund) in East Hampton (God bless them). I don’t know how she does it but when Gus really doesn’t want to go somewhere, she lies down, closes her eyes tight like she’s concentrating mightily, and flattens herself onto the ground; it’s like she’s glued there or something. Even more amazing is how she makes herself heavier. At the ARF parking lot, for eample, it took three of us to pick her up and transfer her to the car. She doesn’t bark or whine or say anything but I’m talking stiff as a board. Felt like she weighed three hundred pounds.
So it was like that at U.S. Customs, El Paso. FFO took her rear end, I grabbed her by the front; we grunted and heaved and sort of shoveled her into this cage; the image of a corpse being slid into a drawer at a morgue comes to mind. (Why I couldn’t’ve just held her on the leash while the Canine Unit did its thing is beyond me. When I asked FFO about this, he just shrugged. I would experience that shrug a few more times before we were done. Many more times.)
While the Canine Unit is rifling my home, I strike up a conversation with FFO, first asking him what their dog is capable of sniffing out. ‘Everything,’ he claims, ridiculously.
‘You mean like drugs and bombs,’ I say, trying to narrow down ‘everything.’
‘Absolutely.’
We’re just under two hours into this when the everything-sniffing dog and handler emerge from the rig. The handler says, ‘It’s all yours,’ meaning, I assume, that they are done and didn’t find, well, anything. I ask FFO if I can go.
‘Almost, not yet.’ The FFO is trying to be nice, I sense. ‘Another dog is on the way.’
Another dog?
‘But I thought that dog could sniff out… everything.’ I’m making a helluva good point here, no?
‘The other dog is for fruit.’ Listen: That’s what the guy said. I’m just reporting. Then he adds, ‘And vegetables.’
So we had to wait for the other dog, the fruit/vegetable dog/handler. When they did show up (about 15 minutes later), the difference was striking. I mean the difference in vibes between the drugs/bomb dog/handler and the fruit/vegetable matter dog/handler.
The Fruit Dog Handler was… I’m not trying to be unkind here… a short, rolly-polly lady, probably in her late forties, with a cherubic smile and a sort of waddling gait. Although she too was armed to the teeth, you just sort of wanted to go give her a hug. And her dog, unlike the everything-sniffer, had this goofy grin (like Gus and Honey and… all my dogs have had goofy grins, come to think of it). The Rolly-Polly Lady waved affably at Gus and me as she headed for the rig. Something occurred to me. To FFO:
‘Hey, I told you guys I have fruit and vegetables in the rig, stuff from the States.’
‘I know.’
‘The… the female officer might think I was trying to hide it.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Something else occurs to me. I’m thinking of something from one of Alex Jones’s rants. I really don’t like Jones. In fact, I only listen to him when I’m in the mood to get aggravated. ‘Is it true that when the cops in the U.S. catch an illegal Mexican, say, drunk driving, they just let him go?’
‘Yes.’
I’m somehow astounded. ‘If I get caught drunk driving, I’m put in jail.’
A shrug.
‘What about murder? Do they just let ‘em go?’
FFO shrugs.
‘An illegal commits a crime in the U.S., they just let him go. Don’t even deport him?’
‘Right.’
I look at the line of cars backed up for two miles into Mexico. I look at my rig, which is being rifled for the third or fourth time today.
‘Doesn’t that annoy you?’ I say. ‘I mean given your job and all?’
A shrug. ‘It’s a Presidential Directive.’
I’ve actually heard this from Alex Jones, but Jones goes on and on to the point where I don’t take him seriously.
‘Do we have what amounts to ‘open borders’? No fence or Border Patrol?’
FFO points in the direction of the now-setting sun. ‘There’s no fence or Border Patrol just to the west, for thirty or forty miles. The border is marked by traffic cones.’
‘Anyone can just walk across?’
‘They might need four wheel but they can drive it too.’ There is no irony here. No sense that FFO realizes that something is wrong with this picture.
‘When you started work for Customs, you swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, right?’
‘Yes, I did.’ FFO says this with a bit of pride; there is no defensiveness at all. Me, I just wanted to hear it.
‘According to the Constitution, the President is head of the Executive Branch, which enforces law. He cannot make law or change law.’
A shrug. This distinction, like the irony, is lost on FFO.
‘I don’t understand about the open border,’ I say. Actually, I do understand, but I want to hear it from a boot on the ground, not Alex Jones. ‘So anyone can enter the United States any time they want and bring in anything they want,’ I say, pointing to the west, ‘as long as they take that route, and it’s due to a presidential directive.’
FFO shrugs.
At about this point the Fruit-Sniffing Dog/Rolly-Polly Handler breeze by, having rifled my home. The handler grins, gives a thumbs. I still wouldn’t mind hugging her. Her dog, seeing Gus in the cage, wags and whines, wanting to sniff Gus, say hi, I assume.
‘Can I go now?’ I inquire, letting Gus out of the cage.
‘Almost. Not quite.’ What are in those boxes on the roof?
He’s talking about the wooden boxes I glued to the rig roof. ‘Firewood.’ I also store garbage up there, if I’m outback and have nowhere to dump.
Another officer overhears and says something to FFO. FFO leads me into a building – not the (ex)Panopticon — and tells me to have a seat. He sticks by me. I ask him what’s up?
‘The Officer is checking the firewood.’ I’m in the building out of sight of the rig because they don’t want me to watch while checking the firewood. I’m not kidding.
While the firewood is being checked, Officers come and go. I start up a conversation about photography. I want to know why I can’t take pictures in the Customs area. The notion is just this side of horrifying to all present. (I really want to photograph everyone.) It’s all about Security.
I have an important question to ask FFO; I wait for the hub-bub about photography/security to die down. (Everyone had an opinion, not one of which made sense.) I don’t believe for a minute that the carnival I am in the midst of is based completely on moronic incompetence. I phrase the question carefully:
‘Have you guys here at Customs gotten any directives (I mean from ‘The President’ but don’t say it) about how to treat U.S. citizens crossing the border?’
‘We get directives…’
‘You’re supposed to give us a good going-over, right? I mean like with me.’ Lurking beneath my question is the fact that a division of nuke-toting ISIS suicide lunatics could march un-impeded across the border a few miles to the west of us.
FFO shrugs, meaning Yes but he doesn’t want to blurt it. Might be a breach of security, telling a citizen about Presidential Directives.
Twenty minutes later the wood is checked. I ask if I can go now.
‘Almost. Not quite. You have to drive through the x-ray machine.’
It takes about 15 minutes to get this done. I have to do it twice – the first time I didn’t go at the right speed. So I get a double-zap of ionizing subatomic motherfuckers. Great.
What’s my point? This: All that ‘conspiracy’ stuff about a One World Government is 100% true. Obama & Co. are in the process of erasing our borders and getting us (U.S. citizens) used to the idea that we have no rights; not to privacy nor the right to travel as we please without being harassed by heavily armed people wearing black.
Do whatever you are told, no matter how nonsensical.
Simple as that. If you didn’t much care for my blog, I hope you got something out of Ben Garrison’s cartoon work. I came across them on James tracy’s Memory Hole blog. I highly recommend you subscribe to it!
I know most of you – those who haven’t Unsubscribed to this blog – are already awake. Please stay that way and do your best to wake up your fellows. The above cartoon is sooo true.
That’s it for now. I’ll get back to you in a week.
Allan
What am I gonna do? I mean with my sorry ass life now that Mexico is out. I’m going to make the movie I’ve been threatening to make. Really, actually do it. Always Open. Truckers watch out. I wanna talk to you!
Here’s my video of Venus in the midst of some sort of burp. Please let me know if you have an opinion on what the hell is going on here.
