The Write Stuff?

This is more than I’ve done with this blog, consistently at least, in quite some time. But I’ve told myself that I need to get far, far away from the constant dribbling beat – easy, slow and methodical – of the 15 inch news piece. That shit’s easy for me now – too easy, really. Like putting in my contact lenses, which is done with the ease of the steady hand of habit.

I have next to no followers on this blog. What are there, nine of you? Hi! Wow, one of them is me! Some of you may know that I have intentions of writing a book about my uber-trip of this past summer. I have gotten intimidated over the past few days reading blogs and articles and summaries on Websites about how to get the book writing process off the ground. Most writers, I’ve learned, fail to get their books published for several reasons:

1)    Their story idea is too broad and, therefore, is unmarketable.

2)    Someone didn’t do their homework and, therefore, doesn’t know what they’re writing about.

3)    They just totally suck at writing.

But the sum of Nos. 1, 2 and 3 is usually splashed around somewhere in the book proposal, a dreadful but necessary document that can make or break your chances of getting to be a shitty writer in the first place. Well, not totally. I can do that here.

The book proposal sounds like taking chemotherapy. It really, really, really blows, but you have to do it. Make sure to bend over, too, ‘cause it's going up your ass. In 10 to 60 pages, you map out your entire book, or at least what it is generally going to look like. You describe the chapters, what motivated you to write the book, who your audience will be and how it will be marketed. And you have to answer the most important question of the entire before-you-even-think-about-writing-the-book process: “Why are you the only person in the world who could write this book?”

That’s the dumbest question ever, I think. No one is that important. Someone will always do it better, catchier, flashier and more thorough. There is always a circling hawk out there, waiting up in the thermals for a chance to dive down and sink its 4-inch talons into your lunch. Period.

I think you write the damn thing because something moves you to, because you felt something, because it’s the only way you feel like you can adequately express something powerful and meaningful and important. And that’s that. I just want a platform to say something, not a market plan.

Sueños de una mujer muy buena

Maria stood in a line of women, the sound of popping filling the greenhouse air as they dead-headed marigolds, when the whispers began, which grew into mumbled words and then slid over the palates of flowers so thick with health they looked like orange carpet. 

Maria shouldn’t have talked, they said. She should have kept her damn mouth shut. Everyone knew Jim, the owner, was a bastard, but what was worse, the way he would slide a bit too close to the women or the ICE detention facility in Battle Creek?

Maria had left her trailer that morning for the greenhouse, driving – as always – five miles below the speed limit, her head just poking over the top of the 1995 Dodge Shadow’s steering wheel as cars swooshed past her on Portage Road.  Her time bomb heart pounded in cadence with the sectioned concrete. The fat man’s laugh still hung over her like a saturated sin.

Since arriving in Michigan from a barrio outside Juarez, Maria had been honing a new life for herself, and Lorena and Carlos, her kids. Gone was the needly rain on the corrugated metal roof, the clouds of slow-death blowing over the trash-strewn streets, the slap of her husband’s open hand for reasons he’d never say.              

For cash and no questions, the woman tended to all matter of grown goods. And they all drank daily from the sour cup of anxiety, hoping foolishly that the glass walls of the greenhouse, opaque with millions of dirty droplets, would shield them from Immigración.

            The verbal jabs seemed to weave into the smoky sweet scent that grew after the careful pinch of each shrink-shriveled head. Rage rose in Maria’s gut.

They didn’t know how tight Jim would squeeze her hands to keep her from clawing at his eyes. How hard he’d push her against the edge of the Formica countertop as he’d close in to lick her cheek. His sick laugh as he’d walk out of her trailer and back into his life.

            Or how she would stand at the open door, bawling, the stenchy saliva from Jim’s tongue still stuck to her face, listening to him tell her: “don’t bother telling the police. They’ll never believe you.”

            But after two years of that, she did. And they did believe her.

            Last week, Maria sat in the courtroom with Carlos when the verdict was read. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing in 30 days.

            Unwilling to face prison, Jim soon split town. He left his wife, and their three kids, too. He had the cash and the means. He could build a life somewhere else. Like a snowflake, he’d quietly land on some Wonderbread ‘burg, and begin again.

            Maria saved her tears for the ride home. As she wiped them, they turned the orange on her fingers into a thin paste, which she rubbed into the rusty skin of her cheeks. It rooted quickly and then vanished. 

The next morning, milky light from a still high moon slid through the frayed curtains in the trailer’s one bedroom, where Maria slept with her kids, brightening plumes of dust that kicked-up as she crept silently across the carpet, toward Lorena, now captured by the deepest of dreams.

            She ran her fingers through Lorena’s straight, jet-black hair, laid hard and flat over the quilt Maria had brought from home. Maria laid down next to her, closed her eyes and tried to hitchhike onto the dream that was holding onto Lorena, firm and tight.

Mass Hysteria

I sat through the mass like a good Catholic should. More than most, I suppose, Catholics don’t really enjoy the mass, at least in the sense of deriving great personal pleasure from it. But we know that it’s good for us. We endure it more than embrace it – not unlike going to the dentist.

I entered St. Vincent de Paul five minutes after the start of the service, which is always a slightly embarrassing thing to do, what with all the looks from the parishioners and, possibly, the priest. So I slipped into the last pew to the left of the altar, just behind three screeching Hispanic toddlers, the children of children.

This was place of my baptism, of Fr. Bill, a large, burly man with hands the size of a small octopi, of eye-stinging incense pouring out of a bright brass orb with holes large enough to let loose the burning embers inside and set the whole damn place up in chomping holy spirit flames in seconds. Fr. Bill’s handshake could have turned coal into a diamond on demand, or split an atom, releasing enough energy to light Pontiac’s streets for a few nights, or bend the bars of a tormented man’s personal prison, and then reach in, grab him and pull him back to himself.

But he was also a man of such unearthly calm and kindness and, when speaking to him, one felt as though they were sinking slowly into the floor. He injected a buttery sureness and certainty into the eyes of everyone he came across, an undeniable dose of faith and love that became a part of people, and the people of it, like a benevolent symbiotic spirit-thing. 

I was 8-years-old at the baptism, or was it 9? It was late, for sure. The church likes to get its members in early, when God’s little creatures are soft and screaming, their cute pudgy-pink cheeks belying the fact that their brain is, at that point, nothing but warm marshmallow fluff. A drooling, shitting baby does not tend to protest this application of God’s good grace. They think they are taking a bath anyway and it’s just as well, for their dirty little souls need a thorough cleansing.

Like many things in my formative years, Mike got a bit of a late start on this one. But he managed to put down the bloody marys for one Sunday morning and haul me off to make it official. And it’s a good thing. God forbid that I should have died in some tragic biking accident, or by the evil hand of kid cancer, or by testing too much of Mike’s “patience potion.” There was nearly 10 years of sin clogging my spiritual circulatory system, blocking the efficient movement of the holy spirit throughout this make and model of God’s temple. Life after the baptism would be different, I was told, for if I was to die now, I wouldn’t go straight to hell. Yes, there was a chance for hell, for sure. But it wouldn’t be the express mine shft elevator ride toward white hot, stoked coals of fire and melting skin. One might descend deliberately, a speed along the lines of a walk along the beach at sunset or the gait of a disabled person or the shuffle of a senior citizen after a stroke. That slowly. 

Fr. Bill poured bucket after bucket of God-approved life-water on my head in what seemed like more of a carnival game than an initiation into the church, the first wade into the mystery of the sacraments. Then it was over and all I felt was wet and embarrassed, as the sound of Mike’s late-70s model .35 mm Minolta clicked and clicked and clicked at a time when nothing should have been...clicking. He took pictures of me like some kind of Vietnam-era photojournalist embedded with a backcountry outfit that was in the shit a lot. He knelt, he scampered, he stood on steps and climbed up to the lectern. All the movements could be seen in his polyester gray pants, which pulled and stretched as he contorted his legs into all the positions necessary to capture this moment. And then he started to direct people into the most advantageous pictoral positions – during the baptism – in a show of his personality that I had simply grown accustomed to. If he wasn’t anything, it was bashful. My father could convince anyone to do most anything. He was bold and brash and came off sometimes like a real sonofabitch. Which he was, God love him.

But here I was once more, older, in this sanctuary of old, dark wood and high stained glass windows, the names of the benefactors for each filter of God’s sunshine labeled on a section of glass at the window’s bottom. On a sunny day, like today, the sunlight would shine through the windows’ colored, paper mache glass in blood reds and deep purples and wheat-field yellows onto the worn rows of benches, the comfort of which was like a penance itself, a butt numbing endeavor that should be doled out by priests in the confessional as a punishment after a penitent purges their deepest and most embarrassing thoughts. No wonder we knelt so much.

The priest, a man in his early 40s, spent his time with his mass, like a mother breastfeeding her newborn or a farmer walking his land, reaching down to pick up a clump of earth and breaking it open, letting it slide slowly though his fingers. After the traditional back and forths, after the standing and kneeling and standing again and holding hands, after the time tested words and phrases – seared into the mind and able to be remembered after decades of roaming far from Rome – had been uttered, the priest laid into Stephen Hawking, about how he was anti-God and should be dismissed, shamed, ignored, I lost interest.

All the memories of this place – the hours that were so numerous they turned into weeks, maybe months – began to fade away. It wasn’t just that I’d been away from mass for so long, or that I’d been away from St. Vincent de Paul, on that lonely stretch of Wide Track Drive, by the abandoned office buildings and crack houses, for years. It was that I’d been away from this way of encountering God for so long. And for all the ways that I’d been moved by this faith for nearly a decade of my life, the mass ended with me not wanting to be there anymore.

There were so many times that I had felt truly embraced in that musty place by the spirit of God, of the Lord, of the Great Big Being Up There. And I can suppose one of the things I admire about this faith is that it’s often experienced in visceral ways, ways that you can touch and feel, see and smell.

The feel of the sanctified host on your tongue and how it dissolves and turns into a thick gummy mess of pure gluten, a warmth swelling inside me that I had no other explanation for expect to say that God had planted something in me that he intended on growing for a lifetime.

The sweet burn of the blood in the back of your throat, which, as a kid, feels something like rebellion if the child wasn’t so native to the meaning of it all. But is it even possible for anyone to fully understand how wine actually becomes blood, a process that just so happens to be one of my all time favorite English words, transubstantiation?  

Sitting across from a man, a familiar stranger, and divulging – puking out, really – all of the things that you are ashamed of, a litany that can stretch back days or years or decades, and crying or laughing or contemplating fully your life outside the closing click of the confession room door. And then leaving that place and feeling light and airy, like you just emerged from a tomb and into the light of newness and possibility. Feeling like you are floating on a puffy cloud to somewhere.

The time when I saw Mike – always in the second row – weeping as Betty, an aged woman of deep, dark ebony, sang Ave Maria after the Eucharist, swelling the sanctuary with the heart-spinning, contemplative sounds of that song to the point that I thought the slate sections on the roof might come loose and hurtle down the steep grade to the parking lot below.

Or the time as an “is-he-eating-enough?” skinny altar boy, when the robe hanging off me somehow drifted over the flame of a votive candle, setting my left arm aflame and seriously delaying the start of mass. From that point forward, I was put on crucifix duty, which made Mike proud because I was at the front of the procession every Sunday. He smiled at me every time I walked by him.  

I’d been moved there, that’s for sure. But I knew now that God could – and even should – be found and admired and felt in places and ways that were outside of the tight, rehearsed, fashioned framework of this church, this faith, this tradition. I left the church through the front door, past the priest before he readied himself for the post-mass hand-shakings and “Have a good Sunday’s.” The holy water that I crossed myself with dripped from my brow as I made my way back to the car. I didn’t wipe it off. 

Could not explain better.

Thus, far from wishing to abandon this way, the author seeks only to travel further along it. This journey without maps leads him into rugged mountainous country where there are often mists and storms and where he is more and more alone. Yet at the same time, ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrim as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common. Indeed, the author of this book can say he feels himself much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West, of his own country, who think in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy – who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist. It is not this.

- Thomas Merton.

To touch the nothingness

From the journal entry, 7/12/11, word for word:

Sitting down to a breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, English muffin and OJ. Slept well last night in a decent spot downtown by a title company.

But there was a reason for that beyond the driving and the heat. I was on the road, driving west on 380 from Carrizozo and I told myself that I would climb a mountain. I felt like my mesa experience could be extended, could be heightened, made more challenging and intense – all for the spiritual aspect of it and also for the accomplished feeling I thought I imagined I might have. I drove into a wide valley about 15 miles west of Carrizozo, kinda between there and Socorro. While I was taking pictures of an old abandoned shack, I noticed a strange mountain formation to the north. Of all the volcanic mountains and towers and hills that are in this basin, these were the most odd and unique. They looked like they belonged on the moon, so I called them the Moon Rocks. They looked like three tops of freshly whipped meringue, each one higher than the next, as they lifted north. I decided that I would climb them as far as I could. So I left the shack. There was a county road that lead closer to the Moon Rocks, heading north down a dusty dirt road that had the feel of a mile long rib cage under the Box (the car). Bouncing, jerking, I thought the fucking wheels would fall off. They’ve threatened to before. Cows ahead. Several, including a young bull who was blocking my way, and every time I’d move, he’d get back in my way. I wonder if he was trying to tell me something. I eventually got around the cows, and ended up at the end of the road. Dead End. There was a gate with a heavy gauge wire attached to it that would be slung across it, presumably at night and presumably by the rancher who lived a few miles down the road.

I got out of the Box. To camoflauge myself, I took off my white t-shirt and replaced it with a brown one. I put my camera in my messenger bag. A Nalgene bottle was filled to the top with water, perhaps 34 ounces. I locked the doors and began walking towards the Moon Rocks. The sun was high, about 12:50 p.m. and the walking was fast and swift. I had my knife with me just in case a bull wanted to charge me. All of them in the area I Was in were looking at me, checking me out. Yeah, a four-inch blade and a 1200 pound bull. That would be fair. Over hot dust and crunching grass, flutes of cactus and the pancake cactus with its 2 inch spikes. The air was silent, there was no sound. Then all of a sudden I heard a dull roar behind me. It grew louder and louder until it totally consumed the valley. I thought it might be some kind of wind phenomena against the mountains, as the breeze was picking up. Then I saw two black dots against the large mountain behind me. Fighter jets from White Sands doing evasive maneuvers. Ducking and diving and circling each other in a mock dogfight. Then, just as soon as they’d appeared, they were gone. Exploded to some other place.

I walked on. A jack rabbit – huge ears and powerful hind legs – and lizards that darted in front of me before skating across the sand toward a bush. I practiced opening and closing the knife, should I come across some animal intent on hurting me. Rattlesnake, other snakes, rushing animal – all came to mind. The Moon Rocks seemed to not have gotten a bit closer, and appeared the same as when I left the Box, like no distance had been made. I stopped to snap some pictures. The rocks looked like they had just exploded from the flat desert floor. Intimidating. The sun was getting hotter, my legs were bleeding from the cactus I was walking through. Came to a barbed wire fence. Threw the bag over and hopped up on the third wire, then over. Then another fence. And then another. And, yes, another. Same routine, over and over. I was walking with purpose, my steps were strong and pronounced. I heard the way I scraped the sand and gnarled vegetation below the soles of my feet. I felt like I could have run across the desert.

All of sudden, my eyes caught something out of place, well past the forest of cactus I was waling through. It appeared to be the head of a bull. It was big, I thought, and all alone. But what was it doing out here? It didn’t move. Not one inch. At this point the Box was out of sight, obscured by the slivery heat that bubbled off in the far distance. The ranch house stood far away as well, perhaps four or five miles. Everything is further in the desert than you think. I was far – far – from anything. No people, just the rocks and wind and heat. Primitive elements of the landscape all around me. I took the knife out and walked toward it, my eyes locked on the black thing the whole time, it, about 300 yds away, obscured my cactus and scrub and grass. Then I saw the thing. It was an old, rusted oil or gas tank. Nearby was a cistern of some sort and a 10 ft long section of telephone pole. I sat down and took a slug of water. So thirsty. Took pics of the tank. The Moon rocks were still in the distance, but looked so close. But they never seemed to be getting closer. About 3:00 now. I never thought once of going back. To do so would have amounted to complete failure. The thought never crossed my mind. I was down to maybe 20 oz of water. Foolish. Stupid. Stupid desert virgin in the middle of the 100 degree desert. 20 oz of water. Think about going to a bodega to get a 20 oz bottle of coke. That much water.

The heat was starting to get to me. I was sweating a great deal. Sun sizzled on everything. No shade. Just heat piled on heat. The sweat would evaporate almost as soon as it appeared. Still, I thought I’d be in the mountain in a half hour. 20 oz seemed to be enuf. I got up and I trudged fwd. My breathing was getting heavy and my heart was racing. Elevation, 6000 ft or so feet. Still, I moved fwd. Four antelope crossed past me and then stopped a few hundred feet away. Looking back, they seemed to say: “Go back, son. We live here. You don’t.” They pranced away on 8 foot strides and I moved fwd. After more than two hours, I’d reached the foothills of the rocks. Toward the rocks. Toward them. Panting now. My legs had turned to near mush. But close now. I climbed to the top of a hill to get a better look at them. There appeared to be a clear path to the top peak. All three peaks were connected by a thin ridge that looked very much wide enough to negotiate. The whole formation was the result of volcanic activity here millions of years ago. The top could be reached. IT could, one boulder at a time. But leg thrust was going to be a huge issue. My mouth was full of thick gluey mess. I’d stop every 100 feet or so. And then I’d rest. Heading up the Moon Rocks. Legs getting wobbly, heart exploding in the chest, mind starting to slow.

I was heading up the rock that lead to the first peak, through small rocks that felt like thick quicksand when I walked thru them. Higher now. To one side, a rock fall perhaps 150 feet to the bottom. To the other, a sheer drop to a small valley between the Moon Rocks and another mountain. It was full of large boulders, the size of full size trucks and vans. I climbed, rested, climbed and rested. Dug my fingers into the sharp volcanic boulders, getting a grip. One foot after another. Up and up. My bag felt like 100 pounds. My legs were about to give out, so I stopped on a boulder to sit and rest. I looked out at the expanse that I’d hiked. It seemed to go on forever, ending at the base of mountains 25, 30 miles away. I sat there, thinking about exhaustion, thirst and what I’d just done.

Then I felt a spiritual force begin to descend on me. It swirled in the wind, it danced on the rocks and glistened off the hot desert floor. I took out a picture of my mom that was on my left pocket. I said to her – because she was there, as real as the last time when I saw her face in the casket in the back of St. Vincent’s church in Pontiac or the day before she died, silent, sunbathing in the back of the county health facility, lying in her hospital bed, smiling, accepting that the end had come and she would walk thru the door that had been open for years, toward peace and harmony and a rest from the pain and the frustration. I stood there, overwhelmed by the thickness of the spirit around me and the shroud of absolute solitude that I was caught in. I lost it, the tears came like a downpour. I wanted to go higher, wanted to reach for the top, touch a rock at the pinnacle.

“I can’t go any further, mom. I just can’t,” I said to the wind, to the spirit.

I was disgusted with myself, beyond words, beyond description. I threw all caution to the wind, any peril I would have undertaken to make it to the third peak, where I had intended to place the picture at the top, be one with myself and the rocks and the spirit that was holding me. To just keep climbing, but I could not. This was the end of the climb, the conclusion of this idea. Then a voice came into my ears, as clear as the wind that was buffeting my ears.

“You’ve come far enough,” it said.

The tears came hard and thick, like the raindrops that washed across the Box in the south, like my soul was bleeding. I placed the picture by a boulder and covered it with small rocks to keep it in place. Mom’s HS grad shot. Black and white. Thick hair parted dn the middle. Bright, glistening eyes above high cheek bones and a kind smile that was a window to her spirit and soul. A gift from Kathy, her best friend in HS in Greenville. I knew she gave it to me for a reason. And then I told her.

“Now you can see the million stars at night. You can feel the warm breeze and lie in the hot sun. You can feel the sometime snow of winter and the see the beauty of this valley.”

I felt like I was on another plane, outside myself, my human body, a spiritual place that few get to. I cried a bit more and then I screamed, I SCREAMED into the valley below, which ate the noise and spun it to some other place on the wings of the howling wind. Then the voice told me: “Leave this place now. Please go.”

And so I did. I crawled back down the mountain, looking up at it as I moved, to the top peak that seemed an eternity away. I found a dry creek bed at the bottom of the mountain. But then I climbed out, the way too soft with sand. After 10 min, I looked back at the Moon Rocks. They stood there, defiant. But I knew that I did what I came to do. I never wanted to beat them, only to climb them. And there’s a difference. It wasn’t an exercise to become triumphant, it was an exercise to find out – about many things. I knew that I’d left in a way that I was comfortable with. I left a bit of myself there, and took away a bit more. And even more, I found my mom there, as real as I’d found her in over 20 years. In the loneliest place I’ve ever been, I found her, on the hot, raging winds and the jagged rocks and the expanse of emptiness. I found her.

Now for the second phase. To get back. I wanted water so badly. Like a junkie wants a hit, I wanted water. I had so far to go. So hot, so dusty, so dry. I sucked in the hot air, I sucked in the desert and the rocks and the cactus and the sand. I all entwined me. I shuffled, took my shirt off placed the strap of the bag across my forehead and let it hang around my back. I felt like I was dragging cinder blocks, it felt like I was dragging the world. I stopped to rest and look back at the rocks. Felt like I’d walked forever, but they were in the same place as I’d left them. Kept going. The Box nowhere in sight. Hurled myself over the fences again, over rocks. Feet shuffling hard. Mind turning to soup. Water – for all that’s holy – water. All I could think of. Cold water, icy water, water to sting my teeth and wash dn my throat, coating my stomach in cold. I’d have cut off something from my body for a liter. No joke. I stopped to sip from the Nalgene. Then again. And again. An hour in and I had 4 oz left. I stopped sweating. Skin on fire. Hands swelling. Body boiling, hot to the touch. I stopped to piss. A few drops. The color of amber. No cows. No antelope. The animals were all gone. Alone, shuffling, squatting every 10 min or so. I screamed to the wind: “GET UP KILLIAN, GET THE FUCK UP!” I screamed and yelled but it just took up more energy. It felt hard to talk, to breathe. Fell dn in the sand, horizon approached like molasses in a freezer. Walking in place, walking against hope. Mind weak. Start singing ABBA song. “SOS.” I always loved that song but it came to me randomly. Love the hook in the chorus. The meaning – the SOS – was lost at me at the time.

I found a road, a road I’d wished I found earlier. I took it for awhile in the dir. I thought he Box was in. Aimless, I walked. Toward something, toward nothing. Hoped the road would spit me out close. I sipped some more. Then decided to down the rest. Water, all gone. Watched a few licks of water, a thimbul-full at the bottom, slosh from side to side – the water you cant get to. Walking, pushed by the hot sun behind me now. I felt like lying dn, closing my eyes, getting some strength back. Just a quick nap, a tiny nap. Get more energy, but from where? Screamed again: “GET THE FUCK UP. GET THE FUCK GOING FUCKER!.”

And I did. Horizon. Blank. Telephone line – looked five miles away – knew the Box was under that line. Tired. So tired. Worried I would not make it. Bury me. Then, I saw a glint. The Box! A goal! Something to work toward. Safety, water, not the desert. Set goals to achieve. A bush – 50 yds. A cactus – 75 yds. A small hill – 30 ft. Small steps. And then, in what felt like a miracle, I made it. I saw the green of the paint and the black of the tires and the glistening of the mirrors and the shit piled in back. Just a bit more. Made it to the gate. I’d have thrown a rock thru the fucking window for the gallon of water in there. I would have. Took the knife and carved a hole in the metal. Then I fell in the ground. Got up, got to the car. Downed a gallon of hot water in a minute and wanted to vomit. I laid n the back and fell asleep quickly. Got up after three minutes and felt the acid in my muscles. And then I drove. Dozed. Overcome. Confused and not appreciating all that had happened. Just a blank stare thru the windshield. I drove half comatosed, enclosed on a stretch of road, like a zombie, like I didn’t know how to drive. Took frequent swigs of more hot water. 8 miles to Socorro. Got off road. Hobble into gas station. Stinking, bloody, dusty, dead man walking. Water. Coke. Took piss in the john. Five drops. Dark yellow and painful. Went to burger king and got order of fries. Burned my mouth. Holes in the roof of my mouth. Bored by the heat and the sand. Parked in an abandoned lot and watched people go in and out of the Socorro Springs Brewpub. It started to rain, then lightening crashed all over. It spilt the sky over where I’d been, threatened to tear it in two, I thought. Violent, searing, slicing lightening over the Moon rocks. It cracked and then it poured. The rain flooded the streets of Socorro that night. The lightening knocked out the power several times. It lit up the mountains and made the desert glow for split seconds. It scoured the expanse of nothingness, like it was reacting to something that had been unleashed. It made people run.

But the Moon Rocks, I’m sure, remained.

I went to sleep that night in front of a title company. The back window half dn, I watched in the last few seconds before sleep as lightening laced the sky in bright dryness. My legs on fire, I drifted off to sleep, not knowing what to make of things. Numbness, not me.