I want to begin to transcribe my journal entries before I leave this place on vacation and hopefully it will be for good. I arrived December 3, 2013 from JFK and I only had a feeling of foreboding even dread of coming here, but I have made it through, and there is almost a week and a half before my departure June 25. An experience of sensory deprivation is the only way I can describe how this experience has been for me. It is very hard for a person who has never been in this part of the world to understand. The desert is a place that has to be transcended in order for it to be tolerated. You have to submit yourself to the heat, if anything. Mark Twain said that God is discovered in a place like this because there is absolutely nothing redeeming about the desert and you have to look up to escape the oppression. One of the friends I made here referred to it as an "open-air prison." In the end the smallest infraction committed against his way of doing things was an irritant that became a straw that broke the camel's back.