ON NAVAJO SHAPESHIFTING HIGHWAYS

Took Highway 191, the Navajo Code Talkers Highway, to Twin Rocks. Just had to stay at the Kokopelli Inn, in Bluff, Utah, and have Navajo tacos at the Twin Rocks Cafe. The family seated across from us had soup, stew and chile that they scooped up with fry bread. Most of the customers and employees were Navajo.

Bluff is quite the Diné (what the Navajo call themselves) town.

The Southeast corner of Utah is more Navajo than Mormon.

The Kokopelli Inn is run by Navajo women. The young woman who checked up in told us about the Bluff Arts Festival, that was going on that weekend, and gave me brochure.

There was a DVD on sale in the lobby: Skinwalkers: Witches of Navajo Country. I bought a copy. A server at Twin Rocks Cafe had a Navajo Wolfman T-shirt, based on a local petroglyph. A few decades ago skinwalkers were a taboo subject, and it was even hard to get people to talk about them. This is another century, a new world.

The next morning it was 30 degrees in Bluff. Being from Phoenix, it was so long since we’d been cold, it felt good.

We headed home through Monument Valley. The wide-open spaces of the big rez became Daliesque vistas where a woman pulled a rickshaw down an endless highway . . . Hopi . . . the Painted Desert . . . abandoned structures along the roads, the new ruins decorated with fresh murals . . .

In a week we had visited so many different landscapes, different environments, different worlds . . . I wondered what world we were coming back to.

CHICANONAUTICA WHERE THERE BE MONSTERS

Chicanonautica links to a piece wrote for the blog of the publisher of American Monsters Part Two, over at La Bloga.

It's about weird, wonderful Aztlán:

And the weird creatures that live there:

And they're really weird:

And my story is also about a sexy luchadora:

MARTIAN ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS OF UTAH

After an all-American breakfast at Rustler’s Restaurant, we took off for Escalante where a dinosaur skull, cowboy and Indian stuff, and even a picture of Trump was on display.

Then we went down Highway 12. Wow!

Otherworldly, even for Utah. More Martian than Mars, at least to science fiction imaginations.

Capitol Reef National Park was incredible. The Grand Wash is a grand hike. Also it was a twisty, but more or less a straight line, so we couldn’t get lost. We were blown away and we had only seen part of this erosion-sculpture wonderland.

We stood at the Capitol Reef Inn & Cafe again. Their mural had been touched up since we were last there. I took photos. They also added cool jazz to the mix of mostly New Age music they played in the cafe.

It was more New Age-y, like Sedona, only without the plastic commercialism, not as Mormon as other parts of Utah. “Signs of woo-woo are creeping in there,” Emily commented.

They had an interesting take on huevos rancheros.

Onto Route 95, we headed toward Natural Bridges National Monument. Cherchez le funk! Greedheads be damned! Look at those fantastic rocks!

I got an idea for a song: “Smashed Bugs on the Windshield” to the tune of “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

I mentioned Mars, Emily told me that the creation of a magnetic field would be an important factor in humans trying to live here. Earth’s magnetic field makes it livable. Mars may be too small.

I made note of all for my Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars novel.

These are the sort of ideas that come up while passing through this landscape. Psychedelic geology. It would probably be a great place to drop acid, though hallucinations would be redundant. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually we saw ayahuasca or datura (it grows all over) retreats open up.

Note for Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin: Have the founder of the tech company Zapoid hiding out at such a retreat.

And then, there it was: Hanksville, and Carl’s Critter Garden with its incredible metal art. We stopped and took a lot of pictures, and put money in the donation box. We also met the guys who own the place. Carl the sculptor died over forty years ago, which explains all the Sixties countercultural references.

Everything had been touched up recently. Good to know that this old-fashioned roadside attraction has a future.

Paco Cohen needs to run into a similar place on Mars. Roadside Attractions of Mars . . . a great title.

There I go, scifi-izing again.

Beyond the Hog Spring Recreation Area, and the Dirty Devil River, at the Natural Bridge National Monument, cryptobiotic soil looked like miniature alien cities.

The fantastic is all over the place here, radiating from deep in the Earth.

CHICANONAUTICA REMEMBERS EL ESPEJO

Chicanonautica reviews El Espejo/The Mirror at La Bloga.

It's a book from 1969:

And Mexican-American:

Or should we say Chicano?

Not to mention literature:

LOST IN PRAIRIE DOG FAIRYLAND

We pit-stopped at the Maverick gas station. FIRST STEP TO ADVENTURE, according to their signs. They also had murals of cartoony versions of the local landscape all over the place, even in the bathrooms. A sign on the cash register warned: VAPING UNREGULATED THC IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

There was no parking at Zion National Park. My Lifetime Senior Pass got us in, but we couldn’t stop. Not only were all the spaces around the park filled, but the spaces in the park were filled, too. People staying in the town outside could take a shuttle bus in if they wanted to hike, but we were stuck on the crowded road, only able to stop briefly at a few overlooks.

We were stuck in a a traffic jam, behind German motorcyclists, being fed into tunnels, getting slap-happy and eating Lorna Doones amid the natural beauty and road construction.

Later we went to Coral Pink Sand Dunes, hiked the Martian landscape with yellow plants, and the delicate footprints of tiny, unseen creatures. You have to remind yourself what planet you’re on.

And since we were last there, shiny, new St. George-type dystopian hotels had popped up in and around Kanab. The dastardly neosprawl threatened the funky tributes to the mythic/Hollywood Wild West.

I took more pictures of the murals at the Glaziers Market (part of one I later found out is based on a painting “The Holdup” by Charles M. Russell). And once again, the Lone Ranger watched over us at the Aikens Lodge.

We had Outlaw Burgers at Houston’s Trail’s End, where holsters--with guns--decorated the back wall. Even though a sign warned PLEASED DO NOT TOUCH, an employee told me I could strap one on for a selfie if I wanted. I passed. A Chicano brandishing a six-shooter in a restaurant full of white people, in Utah . . . I didn’t want to risk it.

The next morning, we found that all the restaurants in Kanab with “breakfast” on their signs and menus were still closed at 8 a.m. So we drove past the mountains gnawed on by the oil and natural gas industry, while huge ravens patrolled overhead.

Across the road from a sign announcing buffalo, elk, and alligator jerky, we finally found the Thunderbird Restaurant, “Home of the Ho-Made Pies.” Their Utah-style breakfast burritos were more like wraps, and had lots of potatoes.

On the way to Bryce Canyon National Park, turkey grazed in the fields, and we passed another Galaxy Diner that had a statue of Betty Boop in front of it. In other fields, bison grazed.

Finally, in Bryce, we were hiking amid the hoodoo fairy castles along a trail aptly named the Fairyland Canyon Trail. We were so dazzled that we got lost. Luckily, we were rescued by a nice couple who had Sixties rock playing on their car’s satellite radio. They had gotten lost the day before.

There were PRAIRIE DOG CROSSING SIGNS. I even saw a prairie dog cross.

At the end of the day we settled into a charming, pre-fab log cabin at a motel in Torrey, across the street from Rustler’s Restaurant. A young woman with an Eastern European accent brought us steaks. Muy Americano.

CHICANONAUTICA, CUCA, AND THE MONSTERS OF AZTLÁN

Read an excerpt from my latest story in Chicanonautica, at LaBloga.

It's in American Monsters Part 2:

And features monsters of Aztlán:

And a masked wrestler:

That's a female masked wrestler:

AMERICAN MONSTERS PART TWO LAUNCHED

It's launch day for American Monsters Part Two, edited by Margét Helgadóttir. It's part of the Fox Spirit Books of Monsters series. This volume covers North America, Canada, USA, Mexico, the Caribbean Islands.

There are stories by Cory Doctorow, Tobias S. Buckell, Federico Schaffler, Lewis Shiner, and many others.

Oh yeah, one of those others is me.

My contribution is “Cuca,” in which a female masked wrestler has a life-changing experience in a nexus of monsters in Aztlán (AKA, the Southwest).

Join the monster fest now!

CHICANONAUTICA SHOWS A SCENE FROM A NOVEL-IN-PROGRESS

Read a scene from Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin in Chicanonautica, over a La Bloga.

I'm trying to finish it:

It's got Indians:

A funny Chicano:

And a space capsule:

ST. GEORGE AND THE DYSTOPIAN MARS COLONY

Soon we were in Utah, approaching St. George through a valley and town named Hurricane, where velociraptor lawn statues were for sale.. There was no ocean, but the rocky peaks for miles around were strewn about as if they had been tossed around by a hurricane. Some landscapes make poets of us all.

There were also the usual Mormonlandia sights: farmland, cattle, little towns. As we got closer to St. George more and more of the buildings looked brand new, and pre-fab. New freeways were under construction. By the time we reached St. George it looked like a freshly-printed Mars Colony patterned after California’s urban sprawl. All the usual corporate franchises that you would find anywhere in America were present. You could parachute consumers from across the USA there and they would find themselves surrounded by the familiar.

Dystopia was in the air. I kept expecting to see Philip K. Dick’s ghost wandering the streets. I made a note to put a town like St. George in my Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars novel.

We didn’t want to eat at any of the franchises, so we ended up cruising the tangle of shiny, new streets that spewed from the freeways like asphalt spaghetti. The town was like a cancer growing out of the ancient Mormon, utopian core--though now the cancer had grown larger than the original organism.

It’s the Trumpian dream in action: Let the post-modern robber barons run amok. Maybe they can convert the entire planet into liquid assets. Then they can go off in snazzy spaceships to launch a program of galactic liquefaction. We don’t need no stinking aliens. We are the invaders. We are the menace.

In the older, Mormon section we found an artesian pizza joint, called Riggatti’s.

After dark, the hotel seemed like a spaceship deep in the void.

At 7 a.m. the next morning (daylight saving time) it was still dark. The full moon rose over the Barsoomian rockscape of Hollywood’s Wild West, now being carved up to make room for the brave, new post-urban sprawl. 

In the complimentary breakfast room a little brown employee materialized when I was frozen in confusion over the Kafkaesque coffee machine. Another hotel guest,an old guy with a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap and a white Fu Manchu moustache that curled halfway down his chest.

I had trouble finding the elevator that seemed to be an afterthought in the cramped hallways where I found the dystopian snack machine. First it appeared only to have snacks, but wait! The entire front opens like a refrigerator, revealing drinks. I would have never figured it out, but another guest who did was so excited he ran out into the hall to tell me.

Welcome to America, the Land of Do-It-Yourself Dystopias.

As we negotiated the tangle of throbbing, young freeways, I realized that St. George was not only the gateway to Salt Lake City, and the National Parks, but Las Vegas. That’s why all the hotels.

Emily said,“Next time we’re staying in Hurricane.”

CHICANONAUTICA GETS OLDER

Over at La Bloga, Chicanonautia  is about getting older.

Some call me the Father of Chicano Science Fiction:

I've also been called me a cyberpunk:

And I'm getting old:

Better get back to work: