the beautiful narcotic place I reside

Somewhere out in the Mojave, a couple hundred miles from Los Angeles and a couple dozen miles from nowhere (or, more specifically, Twentynine Palms), is a little place called Wonder Valley, and at its heart lies a desert-shitkicker honky tonk called the Palms. Make the trip one weekend, say, a weekend in mid-October, through the yucca and Joshua trees, and there it is...looming out of the dusty blue desert gloom, its buffalo sign lit next to the beat collection of trailers and lawn furniture and twisted chain-link. Maybe you'll see a couple German-accented brothers who, though they don't speak German, live in an unhitched 18-wheeler trailer filled with living and/or dead desert arachnids, wax phalluses, and other generally acid-induced paraphernelia. You'll sit around the raging fire, eating fried chicken and beans washed down with pitchers of Pabst. You can peruse the stacks of rotting paperbacks from the Marine base, custom puff-painted t-shirts, and surprisingly well-kept cowboy boots while debating the merits of pissing into the sagebrush rather than waiting in line for the bathroom (the locals advocate it, but you have to watch out for the scorpions and sidewinders). And maybe, just maybe, you'll meet Laurie, the self-professed "nicest woman in Wonder Valley," and her tiny dog Lillybelle. What she misses in reputation (just ask anyone in the Valley), she makes up for in elocution. Ever wonder what it's like cooking at a desert pitstop motel while supporting a daughter at Berkeley? Or owning three cabins, plus your own house, and decorating them in what might be called "Southwest Psychedelic?" Laurie will let you in on the secrets of life in the Mojave unincorporated areas.
Oh, yes, then there's the Hawks. I See Hawks in L.A., channeling Gram Parsons and Touchdown Jesus for over an hour on a Saturday night, as the wah and twang wafts over the sand and under the full-ish moon. Paul Lacques does Crazy Horse and Slash proud, and ex-cons gyrate and shimmy with the developmentally-disabled, shuffling across the dusty parquet. Paul Marshall takes it back to roots, his George Jones awoken by a Strawberry Alarm Clock. From cowpunchers in painted Wranglers to a Michael Stipe-hipped portrait of androgyny, they all kick their heels and swing to Rob Waller's beery croon. Even the hipsters, out from Los Angeles and points west, loosen their girl jeans to tap their toes in time.
So go East, young man, to find your lost West, east to Wonder Valley. Maybe it was never really there, only a dream in your imagined memories of a home on the range. But for one night, the sands, wind, mountains, music, moon and sky come together, there in Wonder Valley, and around the fire, hearts and Hawks explode in the soul of America. Come on back, now, some time...the Valley'll be waiting for you.