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Out in the vast wasteland called The Southwest there is no sound to be heard but the plaintiff wail of a wind long in tooth and biting fiercely.  What life there is scampers or runs fitfully from hiding place to hiding place, and an ever-present fear of death permeates the very air they breathe.  You’ve never seen so much looking over the shoulder. 

Nothing has changed here for billenia, maybe quintennia, which is longer by two or three.  Trilobites used to frolic in shallows where now there is infinite shoreline, but no ocean.  The alpha predator of this scorchingly sunlit, shadowless beach is the Desert Orca.  Sunburned to an even brick red, sometimes served with rice pilaf and a little lemon, they are lords of the sand. 

Desert sperm whales battle giant desert squids as they have since the before the ocean left the land behind.  You can hear them from miles away.  Sometimes, hungry Orcas mimic the sound of that battle to bring stupid vulture fish circling into the area.  But only if they have to, because vulture fish taste as bad as they sound, which is something like:  “GeeeeeEEEEEeeeYYYoooOOOKKKkkkeeeoookkk!!!!!!! “ 

Desert  Jellyfish swim with Desert Peanutbutterfish, circling the serious Toastfish menacingly.

Somewhere the surface of the sandy sea secretly seethes, so seemingly sound, sacrificing central  symmetry to solemn surrealism, celebrating  cinemascopic celibacy, sloppy cerebral synapse somehow sending several sensuous sirens screaming silently south, some singing slyly, slowly, sadly.  

Treegills park themselves together in a bunch and open up, looking from a distance like a bush, to offer some shade to desperate desert stars, whom they then kill and eat.  Desert stars that survive, as everyone knows, increase in mass until they go chevy nova.  Really big desert stars go bossa nova.  Huge desert stars go supernova and are called The Moon.  That’s what the Indians used to call them, but they all went back to India, so we call them rocks.

And rocks is what the “Prix Halfway Inn” does on Friday night, where we join Tony Barone and Chai Pientowski hustling all takers on the pool table.

They were playing Nine Ball, double on the break, triple on the run.  Twenty bucks on the nine, ten on the five, and a fin on the ace.