Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.
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Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes.
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My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
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If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.
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Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
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Despite its clarity and simplicity, however, the desert wears at the same time, paradoxically, a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting-but waiting for what?
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The sign on the outhouse door which reads, "Attention: Watch out for rattlesnakes, coral snakes, whip snakes, vinegaroons, centipedes, millipedes, ticks, mites, black widows, cone-nosed kissing bugs, solpugids, tarantulas, horned toads, Gila monsters, red ants, fire ants, Jerusalem crickets, chinch bugs and Giant Hairy Desert Scorpions before being seated."
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The desert is a land of surprise, some of them terrible surprises. Terrible as derived from terror.
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Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
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In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
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The sun infact has changed color. Seen from the desert it is a golden glare and sometimes, on the horizon or during a sandstorm red as blood.
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Behind the dust, meanwhile, under the vulture-haunted sky, the desert waits - mesa, butte, canyon, reef, sink escarpment, pinnacle, maze, dry lake, sand dune and barren mountain - untouched by the human mind.
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We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.
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Damp, humid green all over the place- gives the country an unhealthy look. I guess I really am a desert rat. The sound of all these verdant leafy things breathing and sweating and photosynthesizing around me all the time makes me nervous. Trees, I believe (in the ardor of my prejudice), like men, should be well spaced off from one another, not more than one to a square mile. Space and scarcity give us dignity. And liberty. And thereby beauty.
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Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance accross the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.
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Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, [the desert] lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life.

"The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
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Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.
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There are only two kinds of books--good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

"At last the sun touched the skyline, merged with it for a moment in a final explosive blaze of light an heat and sank out of sight
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What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.
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Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
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My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.
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A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
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God is love? Not bloody likely.

"On Women"

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
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I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets--the seventeen who got away.
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Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
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It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.
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Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.
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For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.
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Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
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A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.
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It is time for us men to acknowledge not only that women are vastly superior beings (that's easy) but also that they are--in every way that matters--our *equals*. That's hard.
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In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
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Women who love only women may have a good point.
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Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.
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South of the border: The Hispanics despise the mestizos, the mestizos look with contempt on *Los Indios*, the Indians take it out on their women and dogs.
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We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.
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We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.
~
True, there are no women here (a blessing in disguise?), ...
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When the cities are gone...and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix, Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe freemen and wildwomen on horses, free women and wild men can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom--goddamit! Herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! Banjos! Steel guitars! by the light of the reborn moon!--by God--Yes!