June 14, 2007
Woke up at four. Alone. Farted. No one here to offend (not that Kathy would ever be offended by such goofiness as this).

Went into the office early and lined Meghan out on my last-minute additions to the Big Dry Wash Fight. I found a photo in my studio archives yesterday of a large group of Apache Scouts, and Lt. Thomas Cruse (allegedly) taken in a studio in El Paso, Texas in October of 1880. They are returning from the Victorio Campaign and are posing with their weapons for the camera. An excellent photo and it applies to Big Dry Wash because no doubt many of the White Mountain Apaches in the photo were at Big Dry Wash. And, of course, Thomas Cruse won the Medal of Honor at the latter fight. So I brought it into the office to scan and include in the piece.

Here's a great photo of Dr. Sam Palmer on location, in period costume with accurate weaponery:



Also, while I was looking for something else (a binder of transparencies) I found a binder of photos from 1987, which includes this photo of the Glenns and my family fishing at Blue Ridge Reservoir. I remember at the time thinking to myself, "The Battle of Big Dry Wash was supposed to have happened around here somewhere, I wonder where it happened?" And, the answer is, right above that ridge behind Deena, Tommy, Bill, Emily and John Glenn:



Dropped everything off and sped back to the house to meet an eighth grade film class that wanted to interview me in the cave that Cave Creek is named for. In the old days, I would have just taken them across the creek and filmed, but I have twice as many neighbors now and I need to make courtesy calls to inform them all of the project. Even at that, I still got an earful from one neighbor after we taped, asking me if I cleared it with a certain Creeker. I said no, and was told she will not be happy. She was evidently even upset at The Land Trust going over there and they are the group that saved the cave!

Ironically, what I talked about on camera was the insidious "Last Man In Syndrome" that plagues Arizona. Everyone loves the desert, moves in from from somewhere else and then invariably demands that no one else be let in. This has been going on for a long time. In the late 1980s I had a bee infestation in my studio. They had come through a rotting vega and had a hive going in the ceiling right above my computer. Coming down through the air vent they began to seek out succor between my toes and other apendages.

I called Bill "The Bee Keeper" who lives down the creek and he came up to my place with a fogger. As he stood on a step ladder and stuck his head up into the airduck, he casually said, "You know, we hated the people who built this house?" And I said, trying not to look at the crack of his ass, which was at eye level, "Well, Bill, we built this house."

"I know," he said with some finality. Ha. Last Man In. I'm here, now nobody else. I mean it!

More Sopranos Ending Opinion
"It is not a gender or testosteron issue. Both Linda and I thought the ending was brilliant, the tension so thick the last six or seven minutes that you could cut it with a fork. This was a series, after all, called the Sopranos, not Tony Soprano. He was the common thread in a story about a mobster and a family man. Some people think the ending represented him being shot in the diner. I think it was just an ending of life goes on, for good or for bad and that eventually we all are who we are—nothing more, nothing less—and probably won't change much from what is really inside of us."
Charlie Waters

Someone in The Arizona Republic said, "David Chase pulled off the ultimate whack job. He killed the audience, and we never saw it coming." That's pretty clever, and when you back it up with the foreshadowing in the first show of this season when Bobby said to Tony, "You won't see it coming, all you see is black." Now that is pretty incredible, and backs up your point.

By the way I loved the Vegas episode where Tony comes out to your town. Cutting from the illegal garbage dumping in New Jersey and A.J.'s classroom where the teacher is talking about mindless consumerism and the accumulation of things, and then it cuts to big, fat Tony lying by the pool at Maxim, or Caesars. Just brilliant.

I still hated the ending.

And, finally, here's the page of sketches that wouldn't load yesterday:



"I'm ready to take another stab at it."
— O. J. Simpson, who is allegedly considering remarrying