Interstate Scenes

A series of very short semi-fictions, speculations, and broadcasts from the American roadside.

Armies in the Static

I scrolled through the vicious ecclesiastics and berserkers of talk radio, an endless opera of fear masquerading as fury.

Gulf

You could find her near the pump island at the gas station, singing broken torch songs for anyone who might listen.

My Grandfather’s Lamp

One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a long sword.

Scenes from America’s Taj Mahal

A line from Voltaire comes to mind: “If hawks have always had the same character, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?”

Artificial Skies

There’s the sensation of a premonition realized, of standing in the future while my brain lights up with aerodynamic phrases like Spaceship Earth and Biosphere.

Holy Day

The end of Daylight Savings Time is my favorite holiday because it creates more night.

Lama Sabachthani

A brief note on seeing Barnett Newman’s portrait of “the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without end.”

Mono No Aware

Ghosts in the machine, glitches in the sublime, and rain-streaked neon. Watching Blade Runner 2049 felt like returning to church.

An Ode to the Tollbooth Operator

A brief excerpt from Riot and Devotion.

Pantheon

I gazed up at the oculus while families and lovers whipped me around as they snapped their self-portraits.

We Need New Gods

A soundtrack for mourning the death of reason.

Saturday Night

Half-past midnight on the edge of the Salton Sea. “Everything is a mystery and I’m just a small part of it,” she said. “Maybe that’s all I need to know.”

The Stellar Sphere

It seems a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names of the lights overhead.

Between the Stories

My thoughts keep returning to one particular line in The Handmaids Tale: “The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.”

Choral Drift

Soundtrack for leaving Iceland: the choral drift of Popol Vuh which sounds like glaciers, mist, and devotion at 35,000 feet.

Some Excessive Humiliation

Meanwhile the president’s seething need for adulation continues to blow through the nation’s skull like a playground shriek that will never end.

Ubiquity and Lunacy

A powerful meditation from Andrew Sullivan on the nature of freedom and the psychic beating that comes with living in Trumpland.

She said, “Looking at this makes my heart black.”

The next day a woman with a stern ponytail told us the mural was horrible, that it was not art and, to be clear, she absolutely hated it.

Kōbō Abe meditates on the reasons the mind craves routine: “It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”

Hymns for the End of the World

Slow-motion strings and liturgical drones from Athens, Greece.

Atlas Minor