“Cuervo”- There was a period of my life in which it felt fitting that I sleep in a truck outside of a mud hut in the desert where Cuervo lived. For lunch we foraged dandelion greens from an old field while he told me about the snake man who lived with hundreds of snakes in a trailer nearby. Cuervo is deeply interested in esoteric spirituality perhaps as a respite from his past and a framework for the future. Keeping fit by jumping rope in the parking lot of an abandoned store, doing pull-ups on a tree, crunches to the sounds of oldies always playing on his portable radio, he does it all in a kilt and gators to protect from the snakes. He powered a TV with pirated wifi into his mud hut with walls several feet deep, where inside we’d watch documentaries from the hammock while making sourdough pancakes over the wood burning stove. Riding his mules through the desert along the railroad tracks to the nearby hot spring, Cuervo sings to the radio under the pink sunset before the hot spring bath after a long day of making mud and chopping wood. Driving down the desert dirt road where he lives, you could easily fly past without noticing his sanctuary under the shade of a desert willow, and he likes it that way.