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Dreary hot and humid, a summer day with a vulgar blue sky. I feel the heat permeate me immediately, driving me from full speed into a motionless stall.
The sonoran desert summer is like an alien season on Earth; only strange animals can live, at night, crawling for licks of water and devouring each other.
The city is concrete, beige, and hot; the animals invade our attempts at civility, reminding us of the joke of this settlement.
Itβs scary; I remember the witchβs home, with the crying branches in the desert; the path of dried grasses and lizards, slithering around in the tens or hundreds,
looking for something with their slitted eyes.
A gnawing emptiness comes from the dirt, the sky, but the brightness of the chollaβs green-yellow skeleton melts away the mindβs weariness in the sunset hours
A silky sunset brings on cool night. Long nights; quiet, yet sound travels very quickly. Coyotes cry into your ears from hundreds of yards away, trees rustle and move in the breeze, possessed.
The mind canβt handle the heat. The sun drowns the brain; you lose your water, you become mad, dying, your muscles sicken you.
Why do we like speed here? It allows us to speed through this incredibly thick heat, to quickly navigate the burning concrete,
looking for the next thing to distract us from the suspicion: this nature is not meant for us. We have to force our dominion over it, and we fail.
The superstition mountains are just that; full of superstition. Nooks and cracks filled with ghosts and scorpions waiting to prick flesh.
I remember my friends going their in search of beauty, only to be attacked by a swarm of bees, stuck in a deep deep crack, begging for life as the sun continued its numbing stare.
They came out shocked by the violence which occurs without notice in those mountains.
We blew up bombs and started fires in the desert, in protest to the city and its laws, which seek to contain us but also the desert.
The desert does not care. It can burn away, yet the terrain will maintain its ambiance: underworld of the south. We did not care either; we burned away, in a similar ambiance
the living dead, people who chose to not trust in what people say about time.
I enter the desert in hyper-vigilance: I fear her incredible emptiness. I speed through it in my car, music blasting, a/c blasting, ignoring the brutality of this landscape and my own vehicle.
If a car exploded in the desert, body burned to ash, a soul joined the superstition ghosts, a little cross with a name on it will appear.
It could be from 1872, 2021; they're all twins, like the cacti which multiply like mutant flowers of kinder places
a grasp to mark time in a place that swallows, spits it out, into the empty horizon
To love the desert is to love the Skeleton Woman, La Llorona, Bloody Mary. A wandering woman, above death but below life, conjured up in the mirage of the sweltering sun.
She confirms that there is mystery in this world, yet her full embrace is not for us; it will drag us to a limbo if her arms take us into her being.
