Joe C.

[mnaz]

Cosmological definition of entropy: "A hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of homogeneity, in which all matter is at a uniform temperature." Like a Big Box theory of culture perhaps, or a vast parking lot ocean, or back roads on Pluto, or vistas like a silent earthquake out in crushing absolute zero. Never heard it coming. Maps are more detailed now in the new West, dotted with late model Jeeps perched over old pioneer death trails, waiting for Vegas sprawl. A hundred-thousand rooms of generic lust. Run the Strip in ten flat; drink it under in ten more.

They found water and trouble soon began; ideally, the desert should have no water. But you can still find the edge of town, the line where it all yields to glow, unlike pastiche labyrinths of people hiding from each other in the trees up north. And venture into the glow, onto the slopes and curves, and you'll find a similar line out on the arc where the great scrub blanket yields to further glow. I wanted a place on the edge yet hooked on the idea of pavement; where random formations of empty stucco and glass march out to contain the glow in a perpetual percussion of construction equipment. The smell of fresh blacktop and five gallon buckets drifts through. Entropy sweeps the West.

Countless miles of buried pipe and cable across desert heat will civilize it. Wires in the earth, through sand, a stone's throw from sand, neatly rippled sand after a big blow. They run dead straight on dimensionless seas to a vanishing point, uncreatively breathtaking, impatient to get their point across to the other side. Service roads. I made better time on them, on wires in the earth, in the sand, until soothing scorched earth pulled me aside, broke the circuit with two shots of boiled bourbon, replaced run with reverie, chased broken rock fire into opulent moon-side warmth, light enough to go look for snakes. Heavenly bodies streaked.

In this long August trudge the universe settled on a temperature, roughly a hundred-ten Fahrenheit, and vista hibernates, though just over the next rise. The swamp cooler rattles and bobbles on bad bearings on the edge, as the edge pushes out in a creeping brown dust cloud of bulldozers and heat-impaired investment, and I hole up on a shrinking sunspot where Joe Campbell's book fell open, consumed in wobbling swamp cooler rhythms and grail legends and all those different trails up the same mountain, and the boundless myth, dust storm to ink. My neighbor called it New Age hooey. This is a company town.

Stay inside for awhile. The vista tried to impersonate me. It was wide open when I was younger, and then some of the roads closed. In time, uncountable ridges ran up on the last one-- cross it only at great risk. So I turned back inward, deeper into outward. Can you go back? I tried to get back to limitless places; how I saw them. Traveled for years. I found farther roads to look back on the first ones. Something missing, naturally. Me, a lazy dime store philosopher taking pot shots at a fickle moon. The case against fidelity: I was never here. Return to a particular place or point on the orbit and here was twinkled space from here, to say nothing of warped cosmos and numberless particles lost to temporal shrift. Orbits shift.

(ruminations/recollections of living in Henderson, Nevada in a tiny studio apartment a few years back)