The West was a wild ride, as usual. I had this picture in my room, from the first house to the second and final one, always there on the wall. A strange painting of a distorted southwest desert-scape filled all over the brims of the hills with little shrubs that looked like sprouts of broccoli and a sky behind with red and blue and a thin light edged to the horizon. That pushed me into a love of the west, the southwest more closely, and all the expanse. Perhaps my desert obsession was a bizarre meme implanted long ago or maybe I feel a likeness in the landscape, a proud mind that this brain of mine is not too cluttered and I like to rest and stay cold and have good things come and go and mysterious places beneath rocks that shimmy out at night under the stars.
Driving out there, through Arizona and New Mexico, and West Texas I thought a great deal about the geography and the past places, the eastern cities packed and noisy with street cars, with smog that make plants seem sad and homeless. I thought about my brief love affair with The Last of the Mohicans and a love affair with a girl in New York, New York and the desert.
The desert at night is not lonely. Not like that melancholic feeling you got when you were a kid, and the friends are sitting beside the lake or whatever nice, starry scattered place and one says he wishes he had a girl with him right now. Because the older you get, you look back and you think that the entire thing was a tragedy: a woman there would chip the fantasy down to nothing and take away that nice serenity and when the woman was gone the same odd melancholy would roll right back in; the situation was hopeless, neither would work, and you might as well retire to whatever guest bed and have a hot dog.
No it was not a loneliness or anything. Nothing really but the sight of the mountains dunked in moonlight, frosted up with the stuff and scattered about in random mounds.
Now I had plenty of time to think. Plenty, hours. And I entertained the vision of indians racing boldly across these places, breaking upon one another in the broad big daylight of the west and the desert: combat better than the forests of Virginia, where killers moved quiet and loose through the crowded branches, pushing out knives towards one another at random in the dark.
Las Vegas was a strange place. Stranger than this particular post. The place is a joke. And if the money flows from your pockets and you laugh at the men and women with skin pulled tight around their faces and you gamble and hire pussy and leave, there is no mystery. But if you don't have the money and the women ask you to move your beer from their private tables, the joke seems to be on you and you feel like a rube with scuffed shoes who doesn't belong. I could only afford one dance at the strip club, but I can't keep her out of mind. I told her I was a writer and real genius and she seemed to believe that. I did not feel dirty because no part of me was exchanged for anything else. I got to say something like that, something Arturo Bandini of Ask the Dust would say, and she was nice. But I hope never to go back. Still, we might go through again. I don't mind. Next time, I'd like to see a magician or an aquarium and then get drunk and get in a fight. That would be nice.
Tulsa awaits in three days. January calls us once more into the crowded east. But fuck it, it's all great. And more songs are coming, violent ones and pretty ones you can cuddle in front of the heater in your car and like. They're coming.
-M. Galactic
