After a series of right angles on the country lanes just south of the Salton Sea in search of mudpots, we turned left on the 111 north and dropped by Bombay Beach for the first time in years. Two things: they moved the dart board at the Ski Inn so you are less likely to be killed by a drunk old lady at 11 in the morning when within ten feet of bullseye, and also, there are serious signs of post-apocalyptic gentrification. The burned out mobile home is gone, for one thing, and ancient cars were not lying about in pieces like dinosaur bones after a particularly nasty extinction event. Nor were there fetid pools of water or the bouquet of a million dead tilapia. Art work has appeared, psilocybin inspired cartoons and images splashed on unroofed walls, some quite striking, always a bad sign. Even worse, there was now literary graffiti–“Charles Bukowski Lives”–scrawled across one abandoned home. Lowbrow literary graffiti, but still. And while Michael McClure Lives would have been more appropriate since, well, he does, none of this mattered at the Ski Inn, a perfect desert dive, where we quaffed ice cold beers and listened to the surly old people talking and thinking how soon that will be us, if not already.