Dumpster Fires Barret Baumgart

Join me as we sink deeper into the Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare and tie it all back to my failed book project about America’s largest nuclear meltdown at the Boeing-owned Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
Part 4 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” (The New York Times) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Here the horseshit really hits the fan…
Erewhon is an absolutely insane name for a health food store headquartered in Southern California.
Southern California was literally settled by the sick and suicidal.
In fact, more people once killed themselves in Southern California than any other location on earth outside of war time.
Hence, if the logic of the fictional dystopian novel Erewhon were applied to early Southern California, you’d have to nuke everything from Montecito down to Tijuana to keep the place clean. As I pointed out in my last rant, the super-hip, psycho expensive, celebrity sprinkled LA-based wellness mecca is literally named after a fictional totalitarian Hell where the helpless and sick are purged from the earth in service of collective perfection.
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Part 3 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” (The New York Times) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Here the horseshit really starts heating up…
Did you know the obscenely overpriced, celebrity obsessed LA-based wellness grocer Erewhon is actually named after a fictional totalitarian Hell where it’s illegal to be sick or unhealthy?
If you’ve followed my last few rants, you may have wondered where the hell all the words were headed. And after hearing three, four, five rambling run-on sentences in a row, you might have reasonably concluded—Nowhere. “Bro, this isn’t going anywhere.” “He’s just riffing around some well-trod TikTok territory.” “…poking fun at some bourgie LA boutique.” “…s**t’s low hanging fruit.”
Indeed, Erewhon is easy critical pickings. No one needs to win a Noble Prize to notice the serious divide between the company’s breezy creed—“If we fill our bodies with the very best that Earth has to offer, we can become our best selves”—and the obvious huckster bunco of a $25 bottle of Ophora ‘Hyper Oxygenated’ water.
Do we really become our best selves by succumbing to such sad scams?
Join me as we sink deeper into the Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare!!!
#health #wellness #food #hell
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Part 2 of the “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” (The New York Times) available on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.
Recently I discussed how I arrived inside Erewhon, Los Angeles’s most expensive health food store, for the first time ever in my life. The traumatic fecal-encrusted episode was somewhat fortuitous insofar as I had been planning to write something about the grocery chain for several weeks. Yet up until that point could not bring myself to Google a single Erewhon location, let alone imagine dipping through its sliding glass doors, to say nothing of coughing over $18 for some crappy Hailey Bieber “Skin Glaze” smoothie, no matter how indispensable it might prove to my research.
Further, a vast and expanding cottage industry of horrific TikTok content had tipped me off to the fact that, in the course of my research, should I find myself hungry and in need of a boost, beyond my basic Bieber smoothie I could absolutely add an espresso shot and muffin to my order and make it out the door for a modest $34. If I wanted any additional refreshment for the road, I could snag a bottle of another sad scam, Ophora Hyper Oxygenated Water, for $25.99.
Needless to say, crunching such numbers, I wasn’t exactly jogging down the street, wallet in hand, jonesing for the closest Erewhon grocer.
I’d figured the Erewhon essay would wind up like everything else I initiated—another project begun with enthusiasm then abruptly abandoned, left to rust out in the rain among the rest of the junk piled in the backyard of my brain…
Join me as we sink deeper into the Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare!!!
#health #wellness #food #hell
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Behold the origins of my dismal errand… to Erewhon.
In an effort to improve my health and not commit suicide, I’ve been exercising more the past few months. It feels good to get out early and hate the thing you’re doing to yourself more than yourself. Sometimes, jogging, you can even imagine you’re going places.
Such was the case in Studio City the other day when, having finally hit some kind of stride, and feeling a little hot headed, I beelined across Ventura Boulevard, faking out a speeding Ferrari before blasting off a red curb, sailing over a boxwood shrub, and—inhaling my first hit of runner’s high in a long time—I planted down firmly on an eight-pound mound of glistening wet canine excrement.
Crap, I thought as the flattened tread of my New Balance went juicing along its oozy lubrications. This isn’t what I wanted…
Enjoy this first installment of the four-part series, “Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare.”
All four chapters of this “singular, hilarious, and groundbreaking study” (The New York Times) are available to read on Substack at Dumpster Fires.
* Joggin’ to Erewhon
* The Privilege of Continuance
* Utopia Means ‘Nowhere’
* A Mortician’s Paradise
Subscribe and listen to Dumpster Fires on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.
Stay tuned for further audio episodes.
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Los Angeles was for years the most murderous city in America. Newspapers called it Los Diablos instead of Los Angeles. “Some think it odd that there has been no violent deaths during the two weeks that we have been here,” an agricultural surveyor wrote home in 1860. “May the Lord watch over me.” Governors in Sacramento completely ignored the region for the first three decades after California joined the union, apparently hoping everyone down south would just hack each other to pieces and disappear.
Unbelievably, the first state-funded institution in Southern California did not open until 1882. It was not an opera house, nor a poor house, or university. It was…
An insane asylum.
Follow me as I take you on a journey from Terminal Island Federal Corrections Institute, past the shipping cranes of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the busiest port complex in the western hemisphere, and onward up the LA River to its radioactive headwaters in the Santa Susana Mountains, home to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the site of the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history.
Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.
Stay tuned for further audio episodes.
Read the original Substack post here.
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