Luke's Book

When Luke asked me to write this introduction, he said explicitly that he wasn't looking for a puff piece. So if you happen across any instances of praise in the words that follow, please know that they are products of incident, and don't hesitate to notify the proper authorities.

What Luke did ask me to do was set the scene for 2021, so here goes:

About three hours east of El Paso and an hour north of what my uncles call Old Mexico, in the arid swath of Texas known as the Trans-Pecos, there is a town called Marfa. The city website calls it "a place for those that make art and for those that appreciate it." I know it as the place where everything is closed on Tuesday.

But that's not exactly fair. Every town in Far West Texas shuts down on Tuesday, and that's the least weird thing about the place. There are other examples.

Take, for instance, the grasshopper mouse (genus Onychomys), native to the American Southwest and Mexico. It is nocturnal, carnivorous, and likes to eat scorpions. It gets away with this by being immune to scorpion venom and impervious to pain; in other words, by cheating. When the grasshopper mouse makes a kill, it rears its head back and howls like a wolf, albeit in a somewhat higher register.

Weird.

I didn't know about the art or the mice or the Tuesdays when I moved to Marfa with my (now ex-) girlfriend in the Fall of 2020, but I did know about weirdness. Moving to a new place eight months into a pandemic was weird. Getting there and not being able to go inside half the shops was weird. Not knowing what the lower half of anybody's face looked like was weird.

My first job in Marfa was as a barista at a coffee shop called The Sentinel. Before I knew Luke as Luke, I knew him as the guy with the most annoying drink order in the world (quad-shot Spanish latte, lest he forget his sins). At some point he said something about No Country for Old Men (filmed in the area) and I softened up a bit. By November we were on speaking terms.

I was lucky to meet Luke when I did. Presidio County is bigger than Delaware but home to only 6000 people, about 1700 of whom live in Marfa. Under those conditions, making a friend is less a matter of volition than providence, and hanging over the whole affair is a feeling that the chances of your meeting were so slim as to be effectively nil. Out there, under the light of the Milky Way, the improbability of existence becomes salient.

In 2021, a friend was a nice thing to have. In 2021, a friend was the person you bitched to about rude tourists who were none too happy about Marfa's strict observance of COVID guidelines. In 2021, a friend was the person who kept you sane when you had a third-degree exposure and had to quarantine for two weeks. He was the person who accompanied you on the worst mushroom trip of your life (in Luke's immortal words: "It was so good until it wasn't"), and the person you hunkered down with during the historic winter freeze when the Texas government shut off power to half the state to keep the grid from blowing up.

And if Luke was your friend, a friend was also the person who set the example of perseverance; who reminded you, without saying a word, that no matter how bad things got, there was still work to be done.

In Luke's studio, there's a banner that reads "All work, no luck." Even if you don't buy that, Luke is living proof that it pays to believe it. He understands that only one of those things can be counted on. If you spend enough time with him, this is the lesson you cannot help but absorb.

Since you went to the trouble of buying this book, I'm guessing you didn't need me to tell you that. The work speaks for itself.

In that spirit, I'll let Luke take it from here.