Squid snuggles up to Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett snuggling up with the Carmel Pine Cone.

True Defective…Squid spends Sunday nights holed up in the lair, eating popcorn doused in shrimp-flavored butter, catching up on Squid’s zombie programs (back seasons of The Walking Dead stored up on the DVR) and gearing up for a 9pm viewing of True Detective before going beddie-bye. Squid was especially excited about this second season of the HBO show, because Squid heard rumors early on that the story would focus on corruption and a high-speed rail project—and take place in Monterey County.

But so far this season has focused on a fictional Southern California town called Vinci, and it’s modeled after the real Southern California town of Vernon, which the New York Times in 2011 described as “a bleak, 5.2-square-mile sprawl of warehouses, factories, toxic chemical plants and meat processors that looks like the backdrop for Eraserhead, the David Lynch movie set in an industrial wasteland.”

But Squid got a ray of Monterey hope during last night’s episode, in which the bad guys (all corrupt politicians and businessmen, all involved in prostitution and drugs) came after the good guys (corrupt cops trying to do the right thing) who had stolen documents that would help prove the bad guys are bad. “Some friends of ours had some documents taken from them during a gathering in Monterey,” one of the bad guys intoned. (The gathering, by the way, was one in which women who had been forced into human trafficking were drugged and provided to the bad guys at a party in Monterey.)

Now the journalist side of Squid can only dream about local politicians being caught in those kinds of acts. Sadly, Squid has to settle for boring emails and text messages obtained via a Public Records Act request between Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett and Carmel Pine Cone Publisher Paul Miller.

The PRAs were made by a shadowy figure known as Marshall Duncan. Nobody’s ever seen Duncan, apparently, and nobody’s communicated with him by phone, either. Starting in May, Duncan made a series of what’s been described as “voluminous” records requests for, among other things, correspondence between Miller, Burnett and Pine Cone reporter Mary Schley.

The juiciest things so far, other than Paul Miller telling Burnett he’s been accused of having a crush on the blue-eyed, patrician-looking Packard heir because he praises him one week, then smacks him around the next?

That Burnett, in a 2014 email, became a volunteer ad salesperson for the Pine Cone.

In March 2014, PG&E, which has amassed an impressive track record of accidentally blowing stuff up, accidentally blew up a Guadalupe Street cottage in Carmel. The state Public Utilities Commission slapped PG&E with a $10.8-million fine for, among other things, failing to operate safely; a welding crew working on a steel pipe punctured a plastic pipe inside it, leading to the explosion. Nobody was home at the time of the blast.

On July 30, 2014, Burnett sent an email to PG&E’s Dawn Mathes regarding a public meeting that would be held in August to discuss the blast.

“Have you considered taking out an ad in the Carmel Pine Cone with the full matrix (after we have concluded our review today?) Would be great to get in this week so that the community is aware of the work and can come to the City Council meeting informed,” Burnett wrote Mathes.

And indeed, in the days that followed, PG&E took out a half-page ad, although it didn’t talk about “the matrix;” instead, it advised residents what to do if they smelled gas in their homes.

Speaking of smelling something, Squid wonders why Squid doesn’t get adorable emails from Burnett. Maybe you have to send one to receive one, though. In May 2013, Miller copied Burnett on an email explaining his ongoing feud with the Monterey Herald and its then-editor Royal Calkins, now of the local political blog Monterey Bay Partisan. That prompted Burnett to respond: “I’d rather be in the weekly newspaper business than the daily one.”

Jason! Jason! Over here! Pay attention to me too! Squid has a crush on you too!