Without a doubt, my most Lynchian vision of JC and environs would be the flock of birds that flew into the ground. I see them laid out in V-formation on a sidewalk or a parking lot, little numbered tags attached to them and fluttering in the breeze, military brass standing around, lab-coated underlings roping off the area, taking photos and scribbling on clipboards...

Next to that, there was an occasion when many messed-up kids were sitting on a large porch in the wee, wee small hours of the morning and through the hedge came a skinny, twisted-looking guy on crutches. He was something of a low talker and he kept a distance between us, standing out in the yard, making us strain to hear him. He complained about his sad lot in life and asked if someone couldn't go inside and make him a sandwich. "Just a sandwich." A sandwich seemed to me at that time a lot to ask, involving bread, meat, mustard, mayo, lettice and tomato...Who did this guy think we were, the fucking Kings of Siam? If we had ONE of those ingredients in the house, it was probably mayonnaise, and it was probably twenty years old. We told him so and he didn't believe us. He wanted to go in and see for himself. "I know I could find something to eat, just a sandwich..." He needed a reality check, bad. We told him it was up a lot of stairs, but then that seemed like more information than he really ought to have. The offensive capabilities of those metal, brace-like crutches were occuring to me about that time; they seemed not unlike double-length nightsticks with a hook on the end, and he had TWO of them. The more he kept talking about "JUST a sandwich," the more convinced I became that his economic standards for sustainance were ludicrously higher than mine, and it was starting to piss me off. He was letting us know in no uncertain terms how shitty he thought we were to not even offer him a sandwich, and it was clear that he was really taking advantage of the situation of being around people who, for reasons of their own, were reluctant to call the cops to make him leave. It went on and on in a slow-motion car-wreck kind of way and it became impossible to maintain a sense of how long he'd been there, harrassing us. Finally someone told him that if we had sandwich stuff in the house, we'd be eating sandwiches ourselves at that very moment. With this, he huffed off into the night on his largely unnecessary crutches, leaving us to ask, "Did all that just happen?"

My vote for the two most Lynchian places in town: The Mecca and the Downtown Restaurant...