Trona: A Piece at a time

A hush fell on the world. It was a depopulated West but food wasn't a problem, electricity not a problem. It had been a hard landing but the dust had settled and there was enough of everything to go around. 

Devoted to collecting the Inheritors hug the desert dry lake and shun the the curationism that had poisoned the Gone world through a disastrous distraction that was global in scale.

Literally the inheritors of the world, they had no illusion about weaponizing nostalgia as it was already demonstrated to be a loaded gun. Loosely aligned across several cadre type organizations, they were the children of dispossessed consumers, rummaging through the middens for Dean Martin's drivers license.

Craft historians were revered and life was now organized by a striving to establish meaning in the accumulation of seemingly worthless and obscure objects organized into opaque hierarchies of value.

Spare parts and salvage, there was now enough of Ground Zero to go around.

[A bit of world building for a game scenario that was being kicked around last February.]

Council of Missing Persons: Mojave Chapter

We are missing you say. Maybe so. Missing or vanished?

The Mojave desert is both thin place and dumping ground. The latter, just look at the suburbanites tenanted upon its arid shores (the tide is long out, but never far away, listen). And the former, the surface of things hide their perforations. Finger-traced and ready to pry open, only a keen and indifferent eye can locate them leaving them untouched until disappearance and a way-in calls.

Advice. Gather your own lost souls, ones not yet willing or able to vanish. Disappearing into one's life remains mysterious and elusive. There is, after all so, so much, and so many things that seek to gain our attention and work our needs.

Questions. Doubtless there is much you want to know of us (and we want to know why the posted portraits are universally so unflattering - Interpol does a much better job). Who are we? Some of us are touched, intuitives if you prefer, and others are secret shoppers. The list is long and its very hard to pin us down despite the piled up saccharine comments and shotgun spray of personal identifying details platformed as flypaper upon our departure. This clumsy display acts as artisanal reclaimed wood to prop up and enliven drooping gossip, yet we remain hidden within the folds of a fantastic listicle.

Found. Yeah, that's agreed, Search & Recovery. But it's only remains, not animal and not really us as the DNA, the bone dust and dental records are all borrowed, passed on and bring no reward.

Many. Yes, there are enough of us to fill Amboy Crater but it's an inebriated rumor that we meet there annually. 

Gone. Do not distress. You're not yourself, they say. Get started and find something of substance, then we'll talk. Some of us have tinnitus as constant companion and may require repeated inquiry.

Our journey is not a quiz. There are only questions, and the answers lie elsewhere, dissolved and dislocated from an effortless causation. The journey is not over for us, just started.

Get yourself started. See you there!