Desert Rats

I love the desert. It's strange, I know. But there's just all that... emptiness. It's a lonely place, beautiful in all it's strangeness, and largely unchanged in the last thousand years. It has cool rock formations. And long straight highways where you can go really, really fast.

The desert attracts odd creatures. Odd human creatures. Societal outcasts, ranchers, serial killers, you name it. And the desert lets them be themselves, and live however they want. There's such an autonomy out there. It's like an unspoken code that if they can stand to live in that remote corner of the world, they can pretty much do whatever they want. No one cares in that dry, empty landscape.

In one of the several odd jobs I had before landing in my current position, I spent all day monitering a waste-bin site (read: dumpster lot) in the middle of the Mojave. Very hot. Very few people. But the ones that did stop by, man, were they worth the wait.

A man and his woman, he in rolled-up overalls sans shirt and she in a bikini, rolled up the lot. About four trash cans, ready to be unloaded, were stuffed in the windowless backseat of their little hatchback. Small talk ensued:

"So you like living out here?"

"Yeah, usually we like to take off all our clothes and chase each other naked through the desert."