for a day as surreal as any other except that the food poisoning coursing through my body made me believe I spent the day in bed making tortillas and stripping parts from the trucks that passed our hostel, fashioning these bits of flour and flower and shrapnel into lanterns i laid gently on the bed next to me. When i woke from the fever that day there were no lanterns on my bed but my watchface was smashed from a moment of unconscious flailing when it had met the wall and its end. Who makes up the superstitions we live by? How can the shards of a broken mirror spell years of bad fortune and there is no meaning attached to a watchface stopped in a blank stare? lost time has no meaning.
The desert is a crazy place. It feels like a frontier of finality, how could it not when each plant is surviving on shallow roots under a brutal sun but still surviving with no doubt of tomorrow. we walked along the dusty road and watched the modern cowboy in his natural habitat, chaps flapping and cell phones in hand, sauntering past. i could almost believe that from above it did not look like a grid, like a giant computer chip formulated and formalized in the past 40 years. Almost believe until under an ocotillo here and a coral desert mallow there I spy the seeds of our culture, empty starbucks cups, sprouting as they will on each corner reminding you that civilization is only a triplewhippenocaffskimsoycinnamonventewhatever away - on the rocks, no ice.
The desert is a crazy place. There are slot machines for sale on the side of the road - an arsenal of chance in metal containers lined up and listing drunkenly to the side as if manifesting those that might pull their arm someday in some hope of odds or luck, good or bad as long as it's out of their hands. There are men on the sides of the road, faces grim under broad hat brims, looks as haunted as the hills rolling back into the smog of phoenix who play with different odds than I will ever know. They stand and wait for a truck, van, any vehicle that might promise work in this land of opportunity. They worked to cross that one futile fence from south to north to stand on one side of this fence in this country while not two yards away on the other side lies the pristine shamrock landscape of the true purpose of this land: golf. More people will live on golf courses than in open rural communities in short order if the irrigation holds out. If.
The desert is a crazy place. I can't imagine feeling settled there. I don't often recall my first kiss but the first brush of midwestern air on my face getting off the plane in Milwaukee took me there, all rush and heady and more or less exactly what I wanted, only more or less somehow. I left the window open last night after riding my bike into the sunset through neighborhoods thick with the scent of families grilling dinner and moist leaves finally returning to the earth in soggy heaps of nutrients. The ice on the lake is opening and today was the first day all year I didn't see the fishermen out.
The midwest is a crazy place. Spiders as big as your palm and shaggy as the canines they're named after, men sit in shacks on frozen lakes dreaming of the next bite or the next beer, there is a tortured and soulful tradition whose axis is a casserole dish and whose legacy is the roundfaced norski, at least one per town if not per bar. Who knew a sense of place could grow with such crazy rampant in the ranks, that love could be bound and bounded by these imaginary demarcations that really retain nothing but ourselves and some arbitrary politics of identity. We are supposed to be citizens of the word, and perhaps I am, but more and more I am a girl with glacial remnants instilled in my heart, dreams steeped in prairie grass waving under a north wind, the smell of lake resting heavy on eyelashes, a smile stretched by the four seasons to four times the smile, and an inexplicable need to bake casserole at least once a season.
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