What It Takes to Produce Fire, Out There.

They told me of a tribe that lives out there, beyond the reach of electricity or phones, where the limits of society are stretched.

They live in the reservation where lawlessness is the poison that everyone drinks.

They told me of this one time, when a guy shot himself, literally in the foot.

He'd been drinking for hours, and got into a state often referred to as "total inebriation". He was chasing the ghost of former lovers who left track-marks on his wrists as deciduous as the chemical whom he embraced everyday upon waking. The power struggle got to be too much, so one night in a bender of hallucinations he caught the twitching of his right vein in the distance of his vision and he grabbed the first thing he saw, his side arm.

He fired before he discovered to whom the leg belonged, and he spent the night staring out at the desert wishing his rage had a connection, a face, and a destination to rest after venting.

The emptiness called out to him in the middle of the concrete establishment, and not even a full bottle of whiskey could cure him.

He took the truck, and forced his way, via his double-barreled shotgun into the nearest emergency room just outside Santa Fe.

It was daybreak when they helped him, and one hour later when the authorities arrived.

Its one thing to not have insurance, it’s another to not even live in an official country.

He said that the only thing that killed the pain was the understanding of the warden, who showed him pictures of her two lost boys that disappeared four years prior.

I guess everyone hurts, and everyone's cure can be a simple as a bottle and as complicated as an ideology.