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"The invisible skull on the desolate hills of every California town opens its jaws of arranged imprisonments and decapitations. But, who listens?"(83)

Taking an abstract concept and abstracting it even further, perhaps this could relate to the 1950's concept of self-deception, where here the people purposefully don't listen to whatever the skull has to say, choosing to believe what makes them feel comfortable and disconnected from the real world in their own little reality. Or perhaps the author is just stringing silly words together again like he tends to.

"What is Mexico? Another fast stop for quasi-Beat U.S. middle-class poets to photograph themselves on a literary burro on their way to a Managuan book fair and a backyard hut experience for $800 so they can come back to their sanded-down desks somewhere overlooking the Bay Area and write a feeble twenty-page stroke of masturbation and distortions?"(89)

The author probably has the tendency to look down on people whom he views as 'wannabe' poets and 'unenlightened' people, as evidenced in prior readings and in this quote. It seems the bad habit of getting on a high horse plagues the narrator, since he is sometimes reminded that he is no better than anyone else for any reason.