I have invented a new kind of meditation, which I didn’t invent. It is called Desert Driving Practice. It is about the realization of your place in the universe—the tiny size of your beautiful spark of agency. See, I’m used to driving in Los Angeles, where perhaps too much agency is required. There is at least one maniac per day, in LA, who is trying to impale you upon your steering column, or at least behaving as if that were their intention. Awareness shrinks to a stressed-out little electric cocoon, roughly the size of your ribcage.
But under the freely given endless blue sky, on a small road through the desert sand, you are an orderly process behind the wheel, one of many, choicelessly elapsing. You don’t drift off so much as drift in. You are the car, as much as you are anything else. Like a bubble rising through a carbonated drink, your movement is a consequence, not a choice. You are not separate from the pavement.
Except for the other night when I got my car stuck. I’d gone to the gas station to get disgusting monkfruit-sweetened healthy coffee drinks. Consumer choice isn’t as much of a thing out there. You can either pick diet Red Bull, or “healthy” coffee with extra “protein.” I missed my turn, in the darkness. Google told me to loop around on a side road that was all soft sand. I didn’t see the “road not maintained” sign until I was immobile.
I called for a tow. It took about an hour. As I waited, it occurred to me that, out there in the further reaches of Landers, there is a significant tweaker population, one of whom might come upon me in my isolated defenselessness. During the day, you can see them on the main roads, as golden in color as the surrounding terrain. Also, one of the local pizza places has a whiteboard outside that currently reads, “half of my little town is on drugs, but it’s okay, I still love you, at least you wave, happy little crackheads,” and I will comment on that no further.
The tow showed up. The whole world is held together by these nice burly dudes in beards from the middle of nowhere, named Craig or Brad. They could’ve condescended to me, a city guy with insufficient respect for the geography. But they just said it happens and took care of me. I was home in an hour.
I got in bed and fell into a trance, as I do every night here. You are in some trance state near-constantly in the high desert. There is nothing to pull you away from the raw sensation of your lonely footfalls. The silence is like God interviewing you for a position you forgot you applied for. It’s clear, out here, how much of your life is costume. Career—what’s that? Subculture—what could that possibly mean? Here, it’s clear that you are a different variety of sand. It can be sand in fun colors, arranged in comical curves. You might feel bad that you’re not fancy-shaped dust, or you might strive for a different kind of coarseness. But it is all sediment, and, like other granules, it will be one day blown away.
> The silence is like God interviewing you for a position you forgot you applied for. It’s clear, out here, how much of your life is costume. Career—what’s that? Subculture—what could that possibly mean? Here, it’s clear that you are a different variety of sand.
Beautiful.
Sasha Chapin, the anti-King of Arrakis.