Desert Delerium

The whole global torchlight parade, and it’s accompanying proceedings, came to a harsh and bitter finale when the gorgonzola sized flotilla of super Hadron colliders spontaneously combusted over the peculiatities of particle physics and their properties. Dust clouds, and windstorms, churning up seven hundred foot high plumes of powdered dog shit came marching from the inland dessert, and sprayed us with it’s fumigating black choke.
The Drugs where stale and the honey had bees embedded in it. The children, orphans, were shameless and disciplined. Ruthless in their endeavours. Canadian Jack Daniels and Mexican caguamas, Muy bien, Amigo, I’m rocking to the oldies and sweating on borrowed time. Two more days of this and the tans will push our faces back up the evolutionary chain several hundred more years. Thatt will be that. Bright white teeth, perfectly clean and straight, glowing at us from black Californian faces. We move up river, and get out of the boat here and there for chips, smokes, and drinks. We’re spiraling down the curvature of this globe, through the dusty, unpaved towns, dusty, unkempt bonitas, unpasteurized milks and honey’s, and flotillas of military men with covered faces. Protecting their identity from the dust I presume. At the checkpoints there’s always a mean looking one giving us the evil eye from behind a machine gun and a wall of sandbags. Spawning whales duplicate in the lagoons around here, their babies are stolen by buzzards with thirty foot wingspans, and hung to dry on cartoon cactihundreds of feet above the sun bleached granite boulderfields in the safety of the remote inner plateaus, through which this lone highway stretches, horizon to horizon, winding, twisting, and cracking on a slipstream of salt and broken dreams. Green Angels swoop overhead, twisting their matted feathers with the updrafts waiting for some maniac to get run off the road and left for dead by the screaming banditos that run wild in these parts after sunset.
“promise you will” she says. But my shifty eyes slip southbound, and I pretend I can’t understand what she means. The Deep blue sea of Cortez is in view, and its ultramarine hues collide with the mineral contorions of the dessert like they do in children’s drawings. Headless snakes and crushed bovines line the roads. Lactating dogs dalmations lick the sidewalks of Guerro Negro after we walk on them. Refried beans and earwax. Hugo de Naranja. Tecate caguamas. Carne y champinon pizza familiar. There’s less and less useful information to exchange the further we go. Change has become contant enough that I no longer notice.

The Dessert is hot and it burns with a white heat, And I watch it’s monitor lizards skittering across the Ashphualt like beads of water over a smoking greased frying pan. As the Baja highway 1 bends along the sea of Cortez, little hardscrabble dessert towns pop up, one after the other, nestled between hillsides and small valleys. Full of twisted metal, and reconfigured ship building yards. Rusted, salty, baked steel structures. Mineshafts open up directly off main street in Rosalia. All bets are off on right angles. There are none. Nobody’s out but a kid at a by-the-hour video game booth outside a windowless doorless building. We eat cigarette smoke and chug Gatorade, releasing peanut M&M’s to the crevices of Troy’s Van, and talk about superheroes and Competitive Kraft Dinner cook-off’s. We talk about spiders ad cardio pulmonary resuscitation. Bantha fodder and The Lumps. Jay’s nervous ticks.