Nobody Wants This - Why Don't They Listen?

Day 768.

I am now in Silver City, New Mexico, alone.
I really could not be further away from everything that I know. 
The town is small. 
There’s no one walking on the streets. 
The cars are giant trucks. 
My hotel is reminiscent of a horror movie. 
I am so far away in spirit and physicality from any comfort.

This afternoon I drove in through the scenery of epic movies. In movies, it is merely the backdrop, but in real life, it is the star.

As I sit in this restaurant, I am closer to what I know, but I am hollow. 
My grief creeps across me. 
Of course it does.

There are no distractions, and maybe that’s the point of this trip - to be alone with my grief, and somehow make friends with it, rather than fear it, which in truth, I do.

I am at 6,000 feet. 
Men wear cowboy hats over their silver hair with swollen, silver-buckled beer bellies. 

He’s a timeless vision, puffing on his cigar outside the restaurant window, he could be from any decade.
And so I went out to smoke with him, in the spirit of Luke and my former self.

He works in the copper mines and he doesn’t like all the hate in today’s world. 
His appearance did not forewarn me of his liberal views. Maybe there is hope in the message of lukelove. 

My afternoon was spent at my Apache guide’s house.
Joe lives in a trailer surrounded by the straw-colored grass of this terrain.

We talked of the land, how the grass was not designed to be heavily grazed and can be easily poached to nothing in a matter of months of grazing, never to return. I can see how easily the early settlers misunderstood this terrain with their European eyes.

We spoke of politics, especially as New Mexico has just elected American Native women to Congress. The Native Americans are a matriarchal society that was eaten away by the white man insisting on signing treaties only with their men. 

They smoked sweet-smelling pot and I learned much as we sipped our beer. More lukelove.

Oh Luke, how you should be here in person, you, larger than life, in body, in self. 

Nobody wants this greed, this hate that causes so much pain. More than ever I feel that if I approach this correctly, we can make a change. 

This work, this hope is, I feel, at this moment, the only thing that can absorb my pain and turn it into good use.

All this hope just as Dsuvia (a 3-millimeter tablet of sufentanil) passes the FDA approval less than a month ago no - why? And now in the hands of a nation of physicians who are not adequately educated in pain medication guided by the pharmaceutical company sales pitch. Nothing changes, nothing learned.

Fucking marvelous!