“YOU’RE the guy that writes that blog?” She said. “Didn’t you say the clue-writer was an idiot?”
I didn’t exactly expect to find a reader. Especially one crawling around the same, predictable monolith I was.
“Yeah . . . About that,” I said. “Either I am an idiot, or that loot has evaded 3,500 hypervigilants in the last two days.” I actually said something more like “maybe I’m the idiot,” but I think my pith in the latter carries the implied meaning of the former.
Stupid clues . . . Abject genericism, plaid inferences, a veritable circa-1970’s television test pattern.
Going to my “mind palace” isn’t helping. FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS. And it’s probably within a tenth of a mile from my front door.
I just can’t figure a place other than the one that’s been overtly canvassed by people like me, and inadvertently canvassed by tweekers.
I just don’t know:
Enjoy your careful search in a shell
A tree is not a birch, It’s location will tell
Now, Instead of focusing the search–or narrowing it down to an area I thought sure would have been vetted by the Children of the Corn, it simply confirms these areas and offers very little.
At least it seems to offer very little. Maybe I got played. Maybe I was convinced that the clue-writer was giving up the store, and instead they hid the loot somewhere else completely, and then found all the generic characteristics that the USUAL areas have in common with this suprisingly different place, and went that way.
Either way, congrats to the clue-writer, who’s made me look like an opinionated doofus in retrograde.
Trenton NJ–notoriously handsome 80’s Rock and roll crooner, Jon Bon Jovi, was taken into custody for suspicion of brandishing a “loaded six string” this afternoon.Here’s the problem with thinking you have a cognitive edge on the rest of your neighbors.
You don’t. I knew when I got out here, this place was going to be overrun with 300,000 erstwhile Rain Man stunt doubles, all muttering about owls and stuff. And I was right.
I may as well talk about this. I went to the river’s edge where the old cement bases for the Shasta Dam Conveyor belt once stood. Of course, some guy has to be there drinking a 40 oz. in a bag. I thought he heard me walk up.
I said “Excuse me,” because, you know, I needed to get around him.
He jumps up, swinging because I apparently scared him. Yep. He was plastered. And too drunk to be really dangerous, which is apparently theme near my house these days.
I calmed him down and looked where I needed to.
Ten minutes later, he’s stumbling around like he just came out of anesthesia–and–get this–HE’S TURNING OVER THE GARBAGE CANS LOOKING FOR THE LOOT.
If my theoretical assumptions can’t even outmaneuver the loaded? I give up.
What’s even funnier are the other people with the “hey, I’m just wandering around incognito. I frequently look under benches and power boxes with my hands in my pockets. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”
Sherlock Holmes once said “man as an individual is an insolvable puzzle. But in aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”
And man–is THIS ever true.
So far the only thing I will admit to failing at is the expediency at which I expected some glassy-eyed upright to come lurching out of the woods with an embossed envelope in their hands.
of the sorry sots running around proving my theory is FAR from original.
One year ago today, I hit the “submit” button on my very first blog post, Into the Void. At that moment, I had every intent of posting every day. I did not. I had fits and turns, manic moments of absolute clarity, and giant, silent ebbs—the biblio-blogging equivalent of the 400 year “gap period”between the books of Malachi and Matthew.
Today marks one year. And coincidentally, today marks the greatest traffic flow I have experienced to date.
And I have you to thank.
Thus far, nor reports of the indigent organo-sleuths finding the loot. Maybe the clues ARE some kind of reverse-psychological, rope-a-dope way to play the masses.
All I know is this. I’m stuck at work, and can’t flesh out my own theories, such as they are. I wouldn’t call the “naked revelation of the location via poetic verse” a theory. Trust me, if you know the area, that clue would be like holding a scavenger hunt in Japan, and then using “Town that got cooked up right” as a clue.
Anyway. If I’m wrong, a prolonged, implied Kabuki theater death will take place before you, as I eat MAJOR crow.
But not yet.
Just as I figured. They handed the clue-writing job of to someone with all the haiku subtlety of Jason from Friday the 13th:
Shasta Dam construction is not there,
School, Dancing, Singing if you care
I’m not going to publicly speculate the exact spot. But I WILL say this: I was slightly wrong about its placement in proximity to the river. But this clue, if one has even the SLIGHTEST MODICUM OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE about the area, is the equivalent of giving out GPS Coordinates—AND handing out a GPS locator.
Cue the unemployed to the rallying point. I hope your $450.00 gives you many hours of Grand Theft Auto.
My prediction as to where it is under the Codex tab on this site. Thus far, two people have figured out the password.
UPDATE: ALREADY LOCATED
Second update: bad information. Sorry.
Which 
will give all of the canvassers, lurkers, loiterers, standers, and quasi-homeless-yet-own-an-iphone mountebanks drawing SSI funds a full NINE hours to be running around looking for that loot.
Updates on the clues as they come in.
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| Ron Giesecke on Like Father Like Daughter |
| Ron Giesecke on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Like Father Like Daughter |
| Ron Giesecke on Like Father Like Daughter |
Box Number Seven 