Standing inside of what looks like a hollowed out bone, I am staring straight and intently at a cliff swallow nest. Pulling back from me, you could see from the air that this hollowed-out bone looking thing stretches out for miles like a finger across the plain. It is a fault within the San Andreas Fault on the Carrizo Pain. This place looks magic. Less than a mile away, an outcropping of rocks forms a ring for shelter – the only one within miles, imagine huddling natives resting here. At dark, the valley floor is pocked with kit foxes and antelope – whooping and hollering into the dusk. Seeing me now, back in this twisted, white bone of earth, staring into the wall of it. The cliff swallows shrieking at me, scolding me for crouching in front of the nest. The shriek pierces my head, like a needle driven into my brain, its pain, and real pain, as part of something I know is not real. I leave.

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Only later I return, not to the place, but to the sensation. Now its is dark. I smoke the salvia divinorum. I stand up, I stare, and I see the inky blackness. I sit, lotus position, palms up for 15 minutes. For 15 minutes I was staring into inky blackness, into stillness, into collapsing silence, only it on my mind. I had spent years looking for this, for peace, and I find it in a desolate plain surrounding by nocturnal dogs with smoke drooling out my nose.