Desert Dan was a loner. His motto was,“I don,'t bother you so, you don't bother me,OK?” He did bother everyone but not the way he thought. He lived way out in the desert in a three-room shack. He mostly thought he was at least half crazy. If he knew more people, he’d think he was all the way crazy. He made a little money selling cactus. It was illegal, but Dan didn’t have any problem with that. His customers didn't have any scruples at all. The only one stupid enough not to have a story when the state cops pulled him over was Judge Wilbur Makeaday. He said he found it alongside the road.

“Okay, tell it to a judge. He'll nail you for contempt.”

“I am the judge. I said I found it by the road. Who am I going to believe, you or me?”

Desert Dan liked living alone. That was good; no one wanted to live with him. No one even wanted to live near him. His own sister didn't want him visiting her. She tried to train her Pit Bull to attack him. She used one of the stinking shirts she had stolen from Desert Dan to help train the dog. The dog took a sniff of the shirt, then ran out the door and hid behind the garage until it thought it was safe to go back inside.

Desert Dan was out one day messing with his junk when he got bitten by a rattler. Yow! That hurt! Dan knew it was a rattler, and he knew he was in deep trouble. The truck wasn't running, and he didn't have a phone to call 91- something.

He managed to make it back to the shack and flop into bed. It hurt to stand, and it hurt to lie down. He decided to lie down anyway. Falling from the bed would be better than falling from standing and passing out. He’d been bitten on the buttock. The next morning, the bitten buttock had swollen to five times its normal size. This would have made using the outhouse very uncomfortable, although the swelling might keep him from falling in. He had fallen into the outhouse a couple of times before. It was a soft landing, unlike falling off the sand dune. Dan was too sick to make it to the outhouse, so he had to stay in bed. This made his bed uncomfortable and gave it an unpleasant aroma. It smelled bad, though not as bad as falling into the pigpen, but that was just the way it was.

Soon enough, Desert Dan started to hallucinate. He was in a church waiting for the bride to walk down the aisle. The maid-of-honor came down first. Wow! There’s a looker! Now comes the bride, all dressed in white with a veil covering her face. The minister went through the whole ceremony. Then he told Dan he could kiss the bride. Dan lifted the veil, and the bride was a kangaroo. Even at that, it beat his first wife ten ways to hell.

Desert Dan fell out of bed. Not from the hallucination. He fell from being lopsided with one buttock now ten times the size of the other. Every time he rolled over, he just kept coming back to the same position. OK, didn’t matter what position you’re in when you die. Heck, by the time anyone finds him, the critters would have been at him, and he’d be a mess anyway.

The mess is what motivated him. He didn’t mind smelling bad. That was his usual state. Smelling like a manure pile was too much even for Dan. He crawled out to the well. He managed to pull himself up and get a bucket of water. He cleaned up enough so that he smelled like a goat. That would have to do. Smelling like a goat, he could handle.

Desert Dan needed to eat something. He tried some jerky but didn’t have the strength to chew it. Didn’t have the strength to bite a chunk off. He was desperately hungry. He bit off some chewing tobacco and swallowed it. Then he brought it back up. He found some old biscuits in the cupboard. He picked off the green stuff and ate it. It stayed eaten. Good.

He slept deeply that night. He slept so deeply that when he woke up, he wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive. Then his butt reminded him. He was alive. So far. He had thought when he got bitten that if he could cut the wound and suck out the venom, he’d stand a chance. Dan figured out the cutting part, but couldn't work out the sucking part. No matter how he twisted and turned, he couldn’t do it. Well, heck, maybe he’d bleed to death before the venom killed him.

All these years in the desert, and he’d never been bitten. He’s killed a lot of rattlers in his time, and it looked like they finally got him. Payback is hell, they say. Thinking about that, Dan wondered if that’s where he’d end up. Hope the kangaroo is there instead of his first wife. She left him for what she called a “better offer.” No big trick there. Dan did have to wonder what kind of standards that guy had. None, Dan figured.

His second wife left him because she wanted more than a shack in the desert with a crazy man. She did leave him a note saying that she was sorry, but the marriage was a mistake. She wrote ten pages of apology. She may as well have saved her time since Dan couldn’t read. They met in a bar. They dated for a week of drinking. They were drunk when Dan took her to the shack. Then the booze ran out. Then she did.

A few days after being bitten, Dan noticed two interesting things. One, the right buttock was getting bigger. Two, he was still alive. Heck, maybe he’d beat the odds. Maybe he was dead and didn’t know it. Maybe you can’t tell when you’re dead until people start saying how natural you look. Yeah, folks always look natural except for being in a coffin. Only a vampire looks normal in a coffin. Desert Dan was positive he wasn’t a vampire. Pretty sure at least.

One morning, he woke up feeling no pain. He was weak and a little wobbly but alive. He slowly made his way outside. He got some water and went to where the snake bit him. He thought if it was still there, he’d kill the thing. When he got there, he saw the snake lying there sunning itself. Dan started sneaking up on it. The snake never moved. Dan looked at it and then poked it. He wanted that snake to see what was coming. The snake never moved. That snake was dead.

Holy Cow! The snake bites Desert Dan on the butt, and the it dies. “Well, Dan thought, that was one piss poor snake.”

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand. Milton Friedman

The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation. Walter Elliot

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest. James Lovelock

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out. Ross Perot

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority. Edward Young

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. Albert Camus

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet. Hope Jahren

Yet the wonder of it all is that, while engaged in a seemingly endless struggle, the Israelis have managed to turn a desert into a garden. George Ball