Water became more saline as it approached the Salton Sea. It was a lake with no outlet and no input either, other than what was diverted into the lake inadvertently or slyly advertently from irrigation waters. After our visit, we skimmed Google search results for ‘salton sea,’ ‘salton sea salinity,’ ‘salton sea salinity agriculture,’ ‘agricultural runoff salinity’ and so on; I couldn’t understand where the salt came from, whether this was a residue of industrial agriculture or a more ancient residue from past sea floors. Salinity was insidious. The example sentence the dictionary provided for “insidious” concerned sexually transmitted diseases: they too proceeded in gradual, subtle ways, but resulted in harmful effects. John Waters, who narrated a documentary about the Salton Sea ten years ago, lived in Provincetown, which sat at the end of my two hour drive down the arm of Cape Cod. I didn't end up there by accident, because it was not on the way to any other place. As the sea evaporated, its influence became atmospheric. I dreamt about a sleep hotel, like a spa with all its facilities devoted to indulgent environments and technologies for repose. After the Salton Sea evaporated some years from now, clouds of dust and “rotten egg smell” kicked off the dried lake floor and traveled to cities and nearby resort towns. Closer to the flat, a kind of grass grew out of the salt bloom. I lay on that queer grass. Tired, not exhausted. But tiredness can generate its new genres as well. As the reservoir became more saline from the particulates which were carried by currents of agriculture and water reapportioning agreements laid out in a 2003, it became uninhabitable to birds and fish and unsavory to humans. Players are what there were in this landscape, with its rules based on flexibility and creativity. Different players now than those of the waterfront resort town developments of the 1950s and 1960s—the exemplar then the waterskier, and now the member of the board of the San Diego County Water Authority. If you liked to exhaust a set and I liked to list, we may have enjoyed opening an expanse. If you liked to be trapped and I was holding a charged space, we might have enjoyed a slow release. If you liked to recede and I enjoyed disappearance we may have found mutual solace in a wide landscape. If you valued communicativity in excess of sensibility and I liked edges we may have enjoyed deconstructing a landscape. I didn’t go to the limit. I might or might not have kept at hand a stone I picked up from the wash but that doesn’t mean it was not a record. A record gets released. Going tired through this weather was one way to slip under the imperative of always-on ludic engagement. Increased salination and decreased water levels made the lake unsavory. The development of the figurative sense of ‘undermine’ was coterminous with that of its literal sense—and both dated several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. Of course now both valences are colored by the regularity of industrial mining. Dry lake beds often held deposits of minerals that couldn’t be undermined, both literally or figuratively. Roadside signage in the town of Trona, California, adjacent to Searles Dry Lake, claimed that during the lake’s mining in the early 20th century, surface deposits of Borax would continually replenish every five years. Borax mining at Searles Dry Lake ceased in 1996, belying whatever claims of unlimited value could be made on behalf of such replenishment. I needed a relatively flat surface to sleep on. Geology notwithstanding I mean that in a figurative sense too. Some days later, we read in our tent and fell asleep. A flat and cold surface. In the morning you shifted your weight and it snowed. Our condensed breath had risen and crystallized cold on the tent’s ceiling. Now it released. Algae, bacteria, and virus populations spiked in the Salton Sea as the current trends of increased salination and decreased water levels continued—organisms which, as the nonprofit Pacific Institute pointed out in a 2014 report on the predicted costs of human inaction at the Salton Sea, “[provided] no value to birds or people,” that is, to the more charismatic actors and victims of an environment. One blob’s toxic cloud of rotten egg smell was another’s Salton Sea booming beachfront circa 1960. Charisma was no longer in fashion as a learned skill or worked-at rhetorical fitness but remained operable and ubiquitous as a mode of grace. “Presentness is grace,” wrote Michael Fried. Grace is ambient. That’s not what Fried meant. Ambience was a mood, but also a physical atmosphere—that which was present in the air whether we noticed or not. According to some models of their spread to far-off forests, mushroom spores were omnipresent too—released in such quantity they formed a part of the substance of the air. The spores then began their reproductive transformation into fruiting bodies wherever local conditions slanted just right. I was thinking of these spores as a release, eventually received, regardless of my consent. Collecting samples meant following a system with set bounds. Samples of mushroom spores were kept in folded envelopes in the collections of herbariums. With proper credentials, you could receive the original specimen in its folded envelope. The cigarette beetle was a common pest of such collections. After emerging from eggs, larvae fed for a month or two on consumable material at hand—in an herbarium, the samples of dried plant materials. The beatles however were not especially keen on eating plants that had reproduced with spores: mosses, ferns. After pupation, the beatles lived for several more weeks. During this stage, they did not eat. Not having prescribed a systematic approach to our samples, we received what we did ambiently. The force that caused chemical reactions was called affinity. If you understood this voice as a channel and I this channel as an interface we may have enjoyed that song. The formulation I was more familiar with involved solids melting and becoming liquids: all that was solid melts and so on. There’s a certain amount of energy that cannot be used to perform work. For instance, the energy in a system that can’t cause a slippage from solid to liquid. “Gotta have it, turning time around,” said Lou Reed.  If you liked this wind and I liked its shape we may have stayed here in this wash. I held rocks and then dropped them again in the queer wash.That was unmethodical but not careless. We were informed by the rest stop signage that salt from Searles Lake in Trona enhanced oil production in peacetime. Borate was pulled from the lake bed and put into products designed to hold things, like a Pyrex container. PYROBAR, another borate product produced from the resources of the lake bed had no water molecules bound up in it, which made it resistant to fire but not strong. I didn’t care to be strong either. Back online, I watched the videos of water cake. It purported to be a cake but it was a translucent blob, a half-sphere plop bobbing on its plate. I stayed in bed the day after my birthday, the remainder of the water cake from the night before stored in a Pyrex container in the fridge. Pyrex is the most concentrated borate product. Another product of the lake bed was the sample of water we gathered from a muddy puddle a few miles from Trona. While Trona’s founding myth is of the nearby lake bed’s inexhaustibility (belied now by the economic downturn evident in the town’s shuttered houses), the Salton Sea’s founding myth is of contingency and temporality, with the sea’s origin literally an accident of a breached dam.  So while the management of Searles dry lake bed has been passed down and shifted through a series of owners and interests all operating under the same industrial facade, the management of Salton Sea has erratically jerked from agriculture to recreation to resource, awkwardly prototyping the Silicon Valley value of flexibility between work and play. We were not far here from that valley. With no physical inputs and outputs, virtual channels are carved and claimed for the Salton Sea: The 2003 agreement between players in the Imperial Valley set aside an amount of water each year to be redirected to the cities where certain players live. Where certain gamers live. Over the 75 years of the agreement, the redirected water will amount to 4,888,500,000,000 gallons of water, which according to some questionable calculations I’ve performed, is about 86% of the volume of all the oil we’ve used on earth since 1870.  If you liked to imagine that you were a solid and I was getting warm, we could have enjoyed a particular kind of erosion. I left the soft salt crystals that I collected at the edge of the lake bed. Logistically, they were too large to carry back on the plane, and their tentative crystalline structure would have disassembled. I left the soft salt crystals that had collected themselves at the edge of the lake bed. If you had not enjoyed distinguishability and I did not notice you we may have enjoyed our not finding each other. If you liked to deflect and I liked to deflect, we might have enjoyed taking slightly different paths. We took separate planes back, fossil fuels expended but not exhausted. I was surprised to learn that the oil reserves we drew on were concentrated due to a long duration where plants died and died but there were no bacteria yet born with the capacity to break them down. I imagined the plants as prehistoric plastics. I imagined that you were a solid. (They imagined that they were a solid?) “The logic of an image disassembles when no attempt is made to hide the interface,” wrote Alexander Galloway in a book we began in the cold desert. Months later, we lay hidden in the dune grass behind Provincetown and read aloud again. I was absorbed and only in the evening realized the sunburn that had bloomed. A sunburn takes water out of me I imagine. Another kind of release, that water going wherever it does. A release doesn’t just go, but comes back. Arrival’s overrated. Circulation isn’t.