Month: August 2023

by Travis Mateer

I’m going to just paste some stuff from the book-in-progress to save myself the time of re-phrasing what I’ve already written. This portion is edited, though, because not all the cards I’m holding can be made public yet.

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I began the day parking near Ladybird Lake, strapped on my Rollerblades, and proceeded to roll through the hot Texas air already flirting with triple digits.

I got near the water and saw a work crew with City Water taking a break. I also needed a break, so I stopped and struck up a conversation. The man I talked to had worked for the city for 15 years, but he hadn’t heard of the series of deaths associated under either the “Smiley Face” label, or the “Roofie Killer” label. He had heard of a serial killer suspected of operating along the Colorado river, and showed me a link.

The more interesting story he shared with me involved his daughter and a nut who fixated on her after seeing her at a local drum circle. This obsession resulted in this guy firing shots at her car (which just happened back in Missoula, on the Northside of town), which you would think might interest cops to, you know, maybe arrest him or something. Nope. Despite a literal bullet lodged in his daughter’s car, it wasn’t until continued threats were directed at the entire drum circle that police finally did something, and it wasn’t much.

“They should just tell us up front they won’t do anything, so we can take care of it ourselves,” the guy said. Yep, vigilantism is brewing here in Austin as well, not surprising. “We defunded the police here,” he added, “which doesn’t help”. Yep.

I asked for directions to food locations, and he gave me the general direction to go, which is good, because I was an idiot and didn’t bring water. When I found a convenience store, the graffiti required documenting, but only AFTER I got my water. Then I rolled on.

Right next to the convenience store I saw a funeral home. Perfect, I thought, and rolled up to the door. It was locked, so I start dialing the number when the door opened. I ended up spending nearly 15 minutes talking to a VERY nice funeral home operator, which was a different experience than talking to the assholes running the ONE option for funeral homes in Missoula during the bullshit with Rebekah Barsotti’s body getting cremated AGAINST her mother’s wishes.

In Travis County (yes, Travis County, next door to Williamson County, of course), the medical examiner is SEPARATE from the Sheriff’s Office, but that is not the case in every county in Texas. Smaller counties, in terms of population, have less resources, so may combine coroner duties with a Sheriff’s Office.

We talked about the corruption potential of these various frameworks and both of us agreed it can ALL be easily corrupted, and probably has been. The oversight in Texas, at the state level, is, get this, the Texas Rangers. Fantastic. 

The funeral home guy was so nice and helpful, he even gave me a suggestion of looking into the Texas Civil Liberties Union, because they sometimes take cases in other states. He was familiar with a case they took in New York.

I had lunch downtown and the server was from Costa Rica, so she didn’t know anything about Smiley Face stuff. She asked me if I had been to Costa Rica, and I said yes, with my wife who soon won’t be my wife anymore. It was one of my favorite trips, which makes me incredibly sad now to think about.

Like most of our trips back then, there were plenty of nights I drank too much wine, and one night, in Jaco, I got held up and my money taken after TOO MUCH white wine at the hostel we were staying at. I remember getting loud, obnoxious, and naked in the pool later that night, upset my attempt to get weed failed so miserably, when what I SHOULD have been thinking is thank GOD the knife the guy was poking me with didn’t break my skin. 

Drinking alcohol compromised Sean’s safety, and drinking alcohol has apparently compromised the safety of those young men who haven gone missing in different places across the country, then showed up dead in water.

I have a strong suspicion bartenders, or those associated with 6^th street bars, are involved. My walk up and down this stretch of BARS BARS BARS everywhere not only creeped me out, there were literal bar-barkers standing outside bars as hired staff trying to get customers to enter their establishments, like the Chupacabra.

*

Here are some more pics from my walk around downtown Austin. I now have a theory I’m mulling over regarding the function of these deaths. Stay tuned.

If you would like to help support my travel-writing project, you can use Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or the donation button at my about page.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

Well, Austin, after just a few ups and downs on your 6th Street, I think it’s clear. You have a Satanism problem.

It’s cool, this whole fucking country has a Satanism problem, but people can get hung up on terminology. Is it Lucifer, Baphomet, Pan, Abraxas, or some other dark entity the psychopaths venerate as SUPREME psychopath? Does it matter?

I’m going to do my best to not die in this land of death-worship as I continue to piece together the death of Sean Stevenson, which is why I left a message with the Executive Director of the Pov earlier this week (you have my number, Jill)

How many men were in the men’s dorm on January 3rd, 2020? This would be BEFORE check-in, meaning they had a reason to be in the men’s dorm.

When I worked at the Poverello Center–where Sean Stevenson was assaulted by supposedly just ONE person (who is also now dead) on January 3rd, 2020–the reasons to be in the dorm before check-in were either you had work the next day, or you had medical bed-rest, and the latter required the approval of Partnership Health staff.

I left my job in 2016, so maybe things changed. I know the policies around substance abuse and substance USE were different when Sean Stevenson was ONE of those men allowed to be in the men’s dorm before check-in.

I have SO MANY other questions now after hearing some shit, and after seeing some shit, so let me suggest something to the OTHER people getting my emails: this doesn’t stay quiet forever.

Let’s say you’re Detective Mitch Lang interviewing Johnny Lee Perry, the scrawny tweaker who is ALSO conveniently dead.

Before Johnny Lee Perry got shot in the back by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, he was accused of doing a MAGICAL rear-neck chokehold. Why was it magical? Let me explain.

With the insights gleaned from Rollerblading in Dallas, where a bullet ALSO did MAGICAL things that no REGULAR bullet could do, I now understand that Johnny Lee Perry possessed magical powers, like Oswald, and that’s clearly the only explanation.

I know what you’re thinking–this is ridiculous, Travis! Well, if Johnny Lee Perry was a normal person, that may be true, but what if Johnny channeled the powers of a SPIDER MONKEY with his rear-neck chokehold?

Don’t look at me like that, Spider Monkey! It wasn’t ME who used this proper noun as a verb to describe how Johnny Lee Perry could have, like, SPIDER-MONKEYED his way into a dominant position over a man significantly larger than him.

I’m writing this late, so I can’t recall which badge deployed this creative theory that a meth-smoking, vodka-drinking 29 year old black man from Oakland could do the damage I saw in the autopsy images with a chokehold, but it might have been this guy:

Tomorrow I will NOT have a Voodoo Donut as I take in the psycho-killer sights, like maybe Lady Bird Lake? Would that bring a SMILE to the faces of these psychopaths?

Did you know that LOTS of cops like to stand around at 6th and Trinity in Austin? I was too shy to take a picture, or even ask them about the potential of an operational cell of a well-organized death cult playing ritualistic death games under their noses because, well, you’re probably astute enough to finish that thought for me.

Meanwhile, back in Missoula, I see a darling local headline that, after reading the article, has me re-reading the headline.

From the link:

On Aug. 21, Missoula police responded to Providence St. Patrick Hospital’s emergency department for a man with a gunshot wound. The injured man was shot at least once, possibly twice on his right arm, according to charging documents.

He told officers he had been at a downtown Missoula bar when a verbal fight between two men and him ensued. He drove a friend home and was allegedly followed by the men he was fighting with.

Near Pullman Street and the Northside cemetery, he turned his car around and drove at the two men from the bar who were allegedly following him. According to charging documents, the suspect car stopped in the street, and the witness saw the two men exit. One man pulled out what the witness described as an AR-15 rifle from the trunk.

The witness then drove his car into the suspect vehicle. As he was driving away, the witness reported his car was shot at by the man with the AR-15. According to charging documents, one round went through the back of his vehicle and struck him. His friend was uninjured.

Cool, the friend was uninjured! It’s nice to read stories with happy endings, isn’t it?

If you’d like to help out a struggling writer on his better-than-Jack’s road trip, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to do that, while the donation button at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

The distance from Missoula to Waco, Texas, is 1,733 miles. Along the way I’ve stopped at plenty of bookstores and I’ve found some excellent books, but the book I’m most excited about is the one I’m writing as I go.

Jack Kerouac and his fellow beatniks were cultural agents of a force they didn’t understand. My road trip is nothing like the east/west blasts of manic frenzy Kerouac made famous. Instead it’s a loop of inquiry and reflection of a country that’s truly lost it’s shit.

I’m writing this on a phone in a tent, but my tent living is by choice, and I’m on someone’s property by invitation. Back in Missoula, the PROGRESSIVE leadership wilted again and kicked the urban camping ordinance vote to November.

November? Will that be, like, AFTER the elections? How subtle.

While Missoula does that, I’m seeing documents and listening to audio files and wondering how the pieces can be assembled for the maximum exposure of this utter rot that sits just beneath the surface of my town and so many other towns in this twilight of America.

My book will be better than Jack’s because his exuberance and need to hedonistically gobble up the American landscape was adolescent and has, in part, led us here to a place where any cultural cohesion keeping these states together is quickly disappearing.

I’m going to wrap this short post up without the usual requests for support because the time is getting late and I need to get back on that American road.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

Yes, that is Dallas, and yes, I transported myself from my Airbnb on Rollerblades to Dealey Plaza, where some crazy people think an occult ritual took place.

If you’re curious about this take on an American classic, may I suggest the William Ramsey episode that posted the day before I arrived in Dallas? Because it’s all about something those crazies call the “killing of the king” ritual. Check it out.

What else happened in Dallas? I expanded my understanding of what is said to have happened to Sean Stevenson on January 3rd, 2020, inside the homeless shelter where I used to work in Missoula, Montana. That is all I will say right now.

Tomorrow I’ll be going a little further south, then west, eventually. When I can’t go west any further, I’ll start going north. That’s my plan, anyway, so stay tuned, and feel free to throw any increments of that funny money to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or you can use that donation button at my about page.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

I’m writing this Road Review in a hotel room in the part of Tulsa historically known as Black Wall Street. Why is that?

On August 8th, 11 days before I left Missoula, I wrote about HBO’s adaptation of The Watchmen, which centers its narrative in Tulsa. I find it absolutely fascinating to be physically here, in person, and to then see the CITY police in Tulsa collaborating with the SHERIFF’s office to be VERY aggressive in their Friday night patrolling of drunk drivers.

This image doesn’t look like much, but it’s a DUI check-point, and the police/Sheriff operation was VERY busy on Friday night running their targets through field sobriety tests and impounding vehicles. I asked the guy at the front desk of my hotel about it later, and he said law enforcement hadn’t done a DUI check in awhile, but it was posted in the local paper.

Before Tulsa, I spent several days at the Sheraton in downtown Denver. How was my stay? Well, I ended up getting the $50 dollar a day self-parking cost waived due to them being fucking idiots and over-booking the entire parking garage, leaving me in parking hell two days in a row.

Part of that hell entailed me watching as a truck backed into a concrete beam, seriously damaging it. Does that look like a STRUCTURAL beam?

While I enjoyed using the exercise equipment, and the ability to binge-watch both seasons of Yellowjackets on Showtime, nearly $400 bucks a night was a little dumb to be spending on a hotel that was such a dumpster fire, they created a DIESEL FIRE on the morning I checked out.

No, seriously, here’s the local news story about how the over-filling of a boiler with diesel fuel led to black smoke belching from the roof of the hotel. Cool!

After Colorado I spent one night in Kansas, in Hays. Ugh. Next up, I’m heading to Dallas where I’ll spend the next few days checking things out, like book stores, coffee shops, and the spot a president was assassinated in 1963.

Will I be meeting some special people soon? Yes, I think I will be. But much of that will be for the book, which grows and grows.

Now, this post is supposed to have the links of the week, so here they are:

Dispatch From The Road: It’s Different, But It’s The Same (August 21st, 2023)

Meanwhile, Back In Missoula, City Council Has Bigger Problems Than Technology (August 22nd, 2023)

Why I Went To Empower Field After United Way In Denver (August 23rd, 2023)

Synchronicities Swim In A Soup Of Culture, But Who Makes The Culture? (August 24th, 2023)

Cleaning Abandoned Urban Camping Sites Plus The Doom Loop Walking Tour (August 25th, 2023)

And here is the ways to support my work: Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF); the donation button at my about page.

Thanks for reading!