Maul

I’m at the bottom of a ski slope in the middle of a desert. Something's gone badly wrong in this town and everybody knows it. Yesterday a mascot penguin went loco on the slopes. Three punk kids began throwing insults and snowballs, the girl in the suit was ex-military; wrong chick to pick. Penguin suit or not, she messed them up. That’s the kind of pressure we're under here... Days and nights spent in the fluorescence of a shopping mall, the outside becoming steadily more mythic. In Starbucks I see a baby the spitting image of Sinead O'Connor. This town is cracked, a city of a thousand lights, blinking in disbelief, a hole in the sand built on vice and bad karma. When people arrive, she tells me, they land reinvented, they leave their former selves on the luggage belt, a make-believe mass of mirages, living the lives they've always wanted. She looks to the dust and lights a cigarette. I listen to the hum of conditioned air spat back into the night heat, the churn of swallowed, guzzled fuel. Global warming is a concern for others. The planet heats up, and these people are cooling a desert. Earlier today, as I left the flat, I switched off the lights. The most futile of gestures in the land of the desolate.