Flying Jay in the Golden Empire

I needed to pee so I needed this desert highway button town like a dashboard warning. Sixty seconds lamenting for jackrabbits sniffing honey buns behind graffitied gas stations. Windy protests snagged on fences; fences snagged on dominions; dominions snagged on subjugations—one palm tree, one pine tree, and four hourly hotels with cabled jacuzzi suites—something for someone at every latitude tonight.

Is this an oasis? It tells us it’s so so that we don’t look any further. Someday we’ll inquire with the weather about our need for pistachios and pomegranates. Oil rigs and big rigs. They do so well where we lobby for wells. Seven gas stations waving us in with penny-apart prices, nacho tacos, and neon lottos winking for fivers. Eco, econ, economy—the tyranny of convenience and bladders—twelve times over, and then it’s over…

Where some constipated whistle-stop president stooped and declared it a nice place to take a dump. Where a freeway-long lake once hosted every bird dropping down from the great western flyway, and now 100 inbred twarbling grackles and 100 chichiting starlings crash into two trees, dropping white pudding onto hot black asphalt, desper-ating for a honey bun and a drip of a flying jay’s blue Gatorade. I remember where I was when I learned not everyone wants to leave or be saved. First it was someplace cold & hard that gave the sense of someplace simple & easy. Then it was someplace mild & spoiled that gave the sense of someplace correct & complex. Each time I left for someplace wordless & wide open. For this I give it one more minute & floor it.