Into The Desert (pt 1)

The pineal gland. A small, organic husk of uncertain function and evolutionary origin alleged to lay at the top of the spinal column, just behind the parietal lobe.


I say “alleged” because your average sober-sided, state board-licensed physician is almost obligated to slam the door in your face should you introduce the topic. If you care to make it your life’s quest, you could rack up hundreds of miles and spend months commuting from one sh*tty motel room to another, fighting the bean counters over stale greasy receipts for every single expense line item, and you just might be able to find one freak who won’t immediately set the dogs on you—a freak still technically meeting the statutory requirements to practice medicine. Pending any disciplinary hearings, at any rate.

Should you care to do so, I recommend that you start your search in the American Southwest. California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas. The fifty-mile perimeter around the border between the United States of America and Mexico is as much a mental or spiritual interface as it is a physical buffer. Here the hordes of blissfully fat and happy prefab McMansions of the nouveaux bourgeoisie subtly shading into patches of nervous lookalike ranch houses, gradually yielding to widely-spaced patches of desperate, rusty trailer parks, and ultimately collapsing before sparse collections of widely-spaced indifferent dusty shacks, incoherently scattered in the eerie desert, far from the office parks, shopping malls and factories that serve as the centres of gravity holding the Anglo world in orbit.

That’s where I found MY freak, in a tinny old Winnebago about five miles outside a town called Nogales. I couldn’t give you any more precise description even if I were so inclined, since the weedy dirt path leading to it is not heralded by any interstate exit ramp, not marked by any bright blue sign post, and scarcely distinguished by ruts of regular vehicular traffic. Even the reach of the telecom behemoths does not extend this deep; no towers in range--not enough fat to draw their interest. Your iPhone will register no geographic coordinates here before the keypad chokes on dust and the screen cracks in the 43º heat. That I was able to find Dr. De Selby at all is a tribute to the enduring appeal of filterless cigarettes, American corn whiskey and the inability of a truly exceptional man to conceal himself even in the wilds of such a lonely landscape.