I
HATE IT WHEN people come here uninvited. They always make crude comments about my house. It’s my home, not theirs, so why do they care? They laugh at my broken windowpanes, They cross over my splintered threshold and curse when they fall onto the packed earthen floor. So why do they even come? It’s the legend, I guess. These ghoulish tourists want to be frightened. They want to see the spot where the bones were found. They hope to find an overlooked fragment, to gawk at it, fantasize about it, hold the crumbling piece in their hands. They are mostly young people, barely adult, and are curious about their world. They bring red candles and sit on my floor, chanting nonsense. Though that is annoying, it isn’t really terrible. It’s the vandalism that disturbs me. When their chanting brings no results, and the copious amount of alcohol they’ve brought is consumed, they turn to amusing themselves by destruction. Such disrespect, such dishonor to us both! The ones who really disturb me, though, are those
from the realm of paranormal investigators. These people aren’t rude. They are very careful. They are so focused on their FLIR devices, their EVP’s, that they cannot see what is right in front of them. They ignore my home, built with such loving labor, so many glittering dreams. Why are they so interested in my non-corporeal being? It’s my life that is interesting, my life that has meaning. You know what death is? It’s a change, largely unwelcome, that comes to us all. We can’t ignore the laws of nature. What we can do, and try to do, is change ourselves inside. We do it by labor, by loving, by living. Not by dying. People value the strangest things. This expanse of sage and rabbit brush and Joshua trees, the stark volcanic mountains to the west, these form my reality. Speculation has run rampant for years about the reason I chose to prospect in such a bleak and forbidding area. The real reason was simple. I wanted to be far away from my fellow man. You see, I found that many human beings, especially male human beings, were wicked at their core. They were greedy, selfish, and often brutal.
