Well if you’re going to paint godforsaken Arizona, you might as well paint the good parts. This is Sedona. It’s a little hideaway on the edge of the mysterious Mogollon Rim, and it has a somewhat pleasant climate, meaning it only gets to say 115 every day for 5 months in the Summer. (unlike PHX where restaurants give you a dollar off your bill for every degree over 115 that it hits that day. local tradition.) Sedona is known for two things, stoned old hippies, and the vortex. Once while I was watching the sky from Flagstaff, an enormous light as large say, the space shuttle, streaked across the sky like a meteor and exploded with a visible fireball 27 miles away in Sedona. Every amateur astronomer in the state (lots of) showed up there the next day with their metal detectors and helicopters, no one ever found a thing. No craters, no burned trees, nothing. (www.sott.net/article/183376-Up… not the incident I’m talking about but apparently an identical one five years later, funny that) It’s a pretty rugged wilderness, but there are no plants so it’s really easy to see long distances, everyone was very disappointed, chief of which was Lowell Observatory, who’s crown jewel contribution to science was demoted to ‘not a planet’ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Pluto in 2005. The hippies heard the explosion, but not much else. Back to the vortex. Everything online will tell you ‘the vortex is an energy emanation’, but that’s not what the Sedona hippies say. The vortex is some trans-dimensional dude that’ll come talk with you if you meditate out in the wilderness, that’s at least what I heard. Scares people and stuff. The entire local economy of Sedona revolves around selling crystals to channel the vortex. It helps that there’s tons of amethyst and quartz in the area. Remember the New Age movement? That was a long time ago, I suppose. I wonder if the hippies are even still alive down in their backwoods hollows, clutching their crystals and hoping for shroom enlightenment to come to them out of the rocks and tell them the mysteries of their souls. It’s not a bad climate to try and commune with nature in. Best in the arid-zone. And here are strange things in those back canyons.

When you go: eat at the restaurant at the end of the universe: www.elrinconrestaurant.com/

in lovely Tlaquepaque which everyone in AZ knows how to pronounce. www.tlaq.com/gallery/the-groun…



CHATEAU GRIEF PATREON



And the link to the trigger-happy telepath.