History of The Tip

Chapter 13: For your eyes only

Or should it be quote-unquote “Sealane Properties”?

Because a Freedom of Information Act request clearly shows that the company was founded by the CIA as a front for a pilot project to warehouse munitions destined for East Asian anti-Communist insurgents in commercial properties up and down the West Coast. Apparently, the project lasted three years before it dawned on CIA planners that they were putting a goodly amount of their taxpayers at substantial risk, every day. Subsequently, according to the heavily redacted government document, the munitions were hauled away by dead of night in unmarked trucks to a Colorado facility, and no one ever knew the better (until, perhaps, now). A current Sealane executive, when asked to comment, laughed it all off, offering a somewhat weak denial in a fumbling attempt to reassure current tenants: “Ha-ha-ha, those days are long gone, long gone — actually, those days never were. Actually, no comment.”

It’s said by some old-timers at the Adam Grant Building that when the wind isn’t blowing too hard and the sun is out you can still smell the gunpowder.

Like Captain Plumpot-Brambley, the law-skirter who started it all, Sealane, by all appearances, has gone legit. They have also made an earnest, even heroic, effort to redress the wanton and widespread neglect of the Sandoz-Cedalia years. But it has literally taken decades to completely clean up the damages, repair the infrastructure and force out the financially tentative, socially marginal, semi- and fully-criminal enterprises that had effectively taken over the building — stripping it of copper pipe and wire, no less than operating capital — and to finally make the place amenable to well-respected firms like Duncan Channon.

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The phall after the Phall


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Next · Chapter 14
Genesis and true meaning of “just the tip”