The Narrative Image

  Photo Credit: Kip The light from another morning begins gently assaulting my eyelids, so my comatose body instinctively begins to burrow like a worm, forcing my face into a loose amalgam of swaddled-up fleeces and t-shirts - the makeshift pillow I build every night (because I forgot my pillow). My liver has never really had to metabolize alcohol on a regular basis, so feeling ambushed, it grudgingly does its work to restore what passes as my typical chemical balance, asking only that I be still and unconscious. A sort of peripheral consciousness jury-rigged by my ears informs me that Kip and Rico are rooting around in their vehicles for implements of destruction, lug nut wrenches, jack handles, hammers, and pry bars, anything that might steal a geode from the grasp of its mother. My liver is not the only organ of mine that is being taxed. Evidently, a significant portion of my neurons were slaughtered near the end of yesterday and synaptic first responders are desperately trying ...

In our last episode, after appreciating the subtle nuances of Kip’s latest margarita recipe, we were treated to the intermittent unveiling of the Milky Way as patchwork clouds streamed over us to the West. Cows, emboldened by the cover of darkness, venture out to the dry lake’s terminal puddle where the last delicate grasses rise from drying mud.  Minds, free from the constraints of day to day routines, become free to ponder the day’s events and images — to decipher messages preserved in stone for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We are by no means the first to sit comforted by our campfire in this shallow basin. Doubtless, others sat before us, watching the universe display its bright jewels. Here, perhaps before a more convincing lake, those others noted the arrivals and departures of skittish deer and elusive big-horn sheep — not today’s tame cows that pulverize sensitive shorelines with great bovine hooves and trample into the mud a generous portion of...