The Mojave Phone Booth

Just as my generation never knew of the automat except in cultural history books, the current crop of young adults likely has no first-hand experience with public coin-operated telephones. Given that cellphones are ubiquitous, who now would ever need to drive around town looking for [one of the very few extant] coin-op examples on which to make a call? Were it not for Maxwell Smart reruns, Bill & Ted, retro Superman comics, and Dr Who, I doubt anyone younger than 40 would even know that payphones and their booths once existed @ drug stores, bus stations, libraries, and street corners nationwide.

As I prepare for my own relocation to a far-away desert location in coming months, two observations are unavoidable. First, truth really is stranger than fiction. And second, the American Southwest is a very odd place.

the Mojave Phone Booth

the Mojave Phone Booth

Enter the Mojave phone booth.

California instituted a network of what were called ‘policy stations’ after WWII in an attempt to bring infrastructure – in this case, telephone service – to remote parts of the state. A public phone booth was installed in 1948 not far from the Cima Cinder Mine in eastern San Bernadino County. This was done at the behest of one Emerson Ray, owner of the mine, in order to provide payphone service to the (very few) local employees in the area. The phone booth was located at the intersection of two remote dirt roads – 35° 16′ 40” North, 115° 43′ 53” West, to be exact – eight miles from the nearest pavement, and fifteen miles from the nearest numbered road.

At first, the phone inside the booth was a hand-cranked magneto, but that was replaced by a rotary coin-op in the 1960s, and then a touch-tone model in the 1970s.

The only problem? The mine closed.

The phone and booth remained.

In the late 1990s, the nascent Internet took notice of the isolated booth, located inside what had since become the Mojave National Preserve. A hiker from Los Angeles spied a ‘telephone icon’ on his map of the expanse and, in disbelief, decided to visit the site. Yes, there it was. He made note of the phone’s number, and when he got back to LA, wrote an article for an underground paper telling of his adventure and publishing the number. Before long, a reader created a website dedicated to the phone, and soon fans were calling the number. Others went to see the phone and to answer any incoming calls; a reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited and found a man camped there who had been at the site for a month and had answered over 500 incomings, including one from an individual who identified himself as “Sergeant Zeno at the Pentagon.”

The booth, in the middle of nowhere, became covered in graffiti, and detritus of the visitors from all around the world littered the site. Its days were numbered. PacBell removed it on 17 May 2000 at the request of the National Park Service, largely because of vocal environmentalists unhappy with the effects of all of the increased traffic.

PacBell is said to have destroyed the booth. A headstone-like plaque was installed on the empty site, but that was later removed by the park service as well… but not before an eponymous indy rock back, short film (Dead Line), documentary (Mojave Mirage), full-length movie (Mojave Phone Booth), and extensive coverage by National Public Radio guaranteed the phone’s pop-cultural apotheosis.

All is not lost. The phone booth’s number is no longer owned by PacBell, instead having been acquired by a small regional provider. And that number now rings into a conference call, sometimes. The idea is that strangers can once again connect just as when the phone booth was still active. But if there is no one else on the line, it’s often just static.

BTW, the number is (760) 733-9969. And if you get through, ask for Sergeant Zeno.

[Have an idea for a post topic? Want to be considered for a guest-author slot? Or better, perhaps you’d like to become a day-sponsor of this blog, and reach thousands of subscribers and Facebook fans? If so, please contact the Alienist at vadocdoc@outlook.com]

[Copyright 2013 @ The Alienist’s Compendium]

Nasty Little Holes

those horrible lotus seeds

those horrible lotus seeds

Three caveats before I dive into this very strange topic:

First, I own a pet Lesser Sulfur Crested Cockatoo which was rescued from a meth lab outside Gastonia NC (where she was being employed as the proverbial ‘canary in a coalmine.’) As her subspecies is critically endangered in the wild, it’s almost certain that she was hatched here in the U.S. Because of that, Koko has never seen any of the predators that would normally populate her home in East Timor. But she totally ‘loses it’ when one of my family approaches her cage wearing a leopard print blouse. Evolutionarily, Koko knows that such a pattern is bad news, and she reacts quite viscerally to it.

Second, looking back over my medical training and subsequent career, I’ve encountered some fairly disgusting things. Self mutilations? Check. Head traumas? Been there. Major abdominal surgeries? Yup. Autopsies? Yawn. But far and away, the most revolting cases came from… dermatology. To really churn one’s stomach, nothing compares with skin diseases.

Third, I still, to this day, remember a vivid and upsetting dream I experienced as an adolescent. It involved seeing a classmate, nameless, faceless, with her arms bandaged. In the dream, she removed the wrap, and underneath, both of her forearms were covered with deep holes, and inside of each one was an insect. I don’t have any idea what triggered this thought in my subconscious, but the dream occurred years before I had ever heard of the subject matter of today’s post, and it has obviously stayed with me all of these years.

Keeping those observations in mind, I now present you with Trypophobia, the fear of small irregularly shaped cavities (or blisters, fissures, and bumps, from the Greek root trypo, for hole). This may sound like a joke, but to those who are purported to suffer from it, the condition is anything but funny. And from a quick Google search online, there seem to be a lot of folks out there who are afflicted – or at least who talk about it. Which is even more odd given that in my 27+ years of clinical work, I’ve never encountered a single patient who endorsed these symptoms, nor was I ever instructed that the condition may even exist!

Specifically, trypophobes say that certain images are ‘triggers’ that reliably produce gastrointestinal symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, nausea, vomiting) as well as more classically psychogenic ones (e.g., sheer panic, dread, diaphoresis, tachycardia, vertigo).

If you look online, you will see frequent mention of triggers both innocuous and nightmarish:

skin conditions, such as severe athletes foot, chicken pox, measles, and deep cystic acne;

maggots doing their thing;

plants with cystic structures or reproductive pods, such as lotus seed heads, cantaloupes, or pomegranates;

porous coral formations;

soap foam;

the honeycombs of bees;

pancakes with little bubbles in them;

circular shower drains;

popcorn (and bumpy popcorn-finishes on ceilings);

sponges;

gross

gross

weathered sandstone;

gasp!

and pregnant Surinam Toads, the dorsal aspects of which are pockmarked by gestating young under the skin – and then those little buggers squeeze out of holes in mamma’s back when developed.

There are researchers who claim that some people’s repulsion to certain stimuli is an unconscious evolutionary association vis a vis dangerous animals/ organisms or infectious conditions that have ‘the look,’ and from which we’re wired to stay far far away, for our own safety.

Others, however, state that so-called trypophobia is nothing more than conditioned yet over-generalized disgust to possible contaminants and unpleasant images – think rotting corpses – fanned by pop psychology, photoshopping, armchair diagnosis, and the internet.

[sidebar: and we all know that if something is on the internet, it must be true]

Anyone who has read my blog for a length of time will be aware of my jaundiced view of ever-increasing disease categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. That noted, there is a lag-time between identifying a condition and having it gain wide acceptance within the profession (e.g., Seasonal Affective Disorder, about which Scandinavians have known for centuries, but which didn’t make ‘the cut’ in early editions of the DSM).

Will trypophobia also make ‘the cut,’ or instead join the ranks of far more suspect ailments like sex addiction and multiple personalities? I’m not sure yet. Either way, don’t now go to YouTube and look for videos of parasitic bot fly infestations. You have been warned.

[Have an idea for a post topic? Want to be considered for a guest-author slot? Or better, perhaps you’d like to become a day-sponsor of this blog, and reach thousands of subscribers and Facebook fans? If so, please contact the Alienist at vadocdoc@outlook.com]

[Copyright 2013 @ The Alienist’s Compendium]