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Transcript

A Dispatch From The Desert · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We interrupt this program for a special news bullet.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to another dispatch from Ostlantis.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We here at Tales from Ocelantis thought it would be fun or interesting to do something a little bit different now in the off-season time, as we like to call it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Season five is now behind us, and we are busy writing and recording episodes for season six.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you all so much for sticking with us and enjoying the show and contributing and being Patreon supporters and reaching out and letting us know how much you enjoy what we're doing.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It really means a lot to us.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So in lieu of just going uh radio silent during these uh couple of months between seasons, we thought we should keep providing some content, uh some short form stuff in the form of dispatches.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of mine.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in fact, this is kicking off a three-part series of short dispatches from southern New Mexico.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Think of them as firsthand, first-person experience filled notes of my adventures down in Las Cruces.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kicking it off with the first of these three, with something I like to call a dispatch from the desert.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I can't really say I care much for Las Cruces, New Mexico.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lonely little outpost squatting in the desert just a few miles north of El Paso.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a town that tries to pass itself off as a college town, but don't be fooled.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's a cheap trick played by the local tourism board.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: What Las Cruces really is, at its core, is a sleepy retirement village with a university awkwardly attached to its side.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sunburned mirage of ambition, dry and slow.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: The forerunner, my beloved Rhino, is still wrecked from the hit and run.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some faceless bastard turned it into modern art and then vanished into the desert night while I was enjoying my dinner.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about this town that invites misfortune, like it's running on a frequency that attracts bad luck in Bored Cops.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Nights here stretch out like punishment.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've been holed up in a nameless hotel on the edge of town, the kind of place where the ice machine doesn't work and the carpet reeks of despair and broken dreams.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: The air conditioner coughs like an old man, slowly dying.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I sit on the bed with a bottle of whiskey, and I wonder, is this how madness begins?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not with visions or voices, but with the unbearable silence of a town that's given up.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's no real nightlife to speak of.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a handful of bars populated by retirees, truckers, and lonely drifters who've all somehow convinced themselves that the apocalypse has already happened, and this is just what's left.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: At one such establishment, a bar pretending to be a sports lounge, I found myself trapped between the flat glow of the football game and the grating voice of a local MAGA zealot.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The man was bellowing about Halloween decorations being witchcraft while simultaneously bragging about boycotting the NFL ever since Kaepernick started kneeling.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: I took one look at his bloated, sunburned face, twisted in self-righteous ignorance, and there it was, perched proudly atop his head, the red hat, the mark of the beast, made in China.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what can you even say about these people anymore?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The garden variety Christian nationalist, the discount bin fascist who treats ignorance like a sacred sacrament.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: They worship a bloated man child as if he were some divine prophet of their resentment, a sideshow messiah for the perpetually aggrieved.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Their brains are soft from digital slop, bite-sized propaganda clips shoveled into their feeds by cynical grifters and foreign trolls.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can spot them from orbit, even when they're not dressed up like Nazi rodeo clowns, red hats gleaming, t-shirts screaming devotion to their orange slob king, his putrid image airbrushed to look almost human.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's the aura of divine idiocy that really gives them away.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: They stand there, mouths agape and endlessly gawking at nothing in particular through their empty, dimly lit lobotomy eyes, signifying a generation of developmentally undercooked simpletons reared on asbestos, lead paint, and Fox News static.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are the enemies of civilization, and they're too fucking stupid to even realize it.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so here I sit, alone in a cheap hotel room, staring at the stucco walls, the hum of the neon vacancy sign bleeding through the curtains.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: The TV's on mute, the ice has melted, and the desert wind howls like an animal outside.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's no joy here, no movement, no pulse, just that slow creeping dread that maybe the country itself has started to rot from the inside out.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Nah.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Fuck that.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Despair is a luxury we can't afford, goddammit.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not now, not while the jackals are at the door.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because make no mistake, fascism doesn't arrive with jack boots and banners anymore.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: It comes disguised as patriotism, wrapped in the flag, carrying a Bible in one hand and a smartphone full of Joe Rogan fueled conspiracy trash in the other.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So pick a side, Junior.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: The road ahead is long and treacherous, and we're going to need each other now more than ever.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So build community, defend the truth, laugh in the face of these fucking bastards, and hold fast to the people who still know what decency feels like.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because out here in the desert, where the sun cooks your brain and the vultures circle low, the only thing standing between civilization and the abyss is us.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: So keep Trucha me and