Last night I covered my office with maps.
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country.
Seven years ago, C. and I debated how the world would end.
The most compelling piece was an incidental moment rather than any piece of art, which is often the case.
“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all.”
A rant in this Terrible Year of 2023 when algorithms are chewing through the scenery.
It might be more necessary than ever to develop an eye for the timeless.
Killing time at the Vegas airport.
The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind.
Limbering up to flee an algorithmic hallucination while finding solace in a French future from ’82.
If starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger’s?
I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert. By now, I thought I’d be begging for a cloud.
Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing.
My office has three little whiteboards that tell me what to do, and I rely upon them entirely because I’m a nitwit in the morning.
I told myself it was a trick of the light rather than the result of the grey in my beard.
Shuffling through nature’s silence with strangers felt oddly intimate.
I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.
These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky.
Twenty miles west of Barstow, where the desert appears especially endless, I glimpsed the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square.
C. and I play a game whenever we enter a gallery: after spending a few minutes looking at every painting in the room, we guess each other’s favorite.
William Kentridge’s smoldering landscapes look like scenes from a fast-approaching future. Meanwhile, a Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over Montana.
My little tics and anxieties seem to be moving from the vexing to the comic. Perhaps this is one happy side effect of getting older.
Ten years sober today. Proof there’s such a thing as grace.
I don’t mind feeling older. It brings a liberating sense of honesty.
The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film.
Here in Las Vegas, we’re catching the faintest edge of the atmospheric river, a weather event that sounds like something from a fantasy novel.
In the grip of my delirium, I half-watched a lousy Netflix series that can be viewed in any order, which seems like a trial balloon for AI-generated entertainment.
C. and I rang in the new year at the top of Route 93.
My favorite albums this year sounded messier than in years past: scuffed and bruised yet defiant—which sounds like the future.
The unique scent of desert rain has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from the Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods.
Unlike the blank winter grays of the Midwest and East Coast, the clouds over Vegas are well-defined, painterly, and startlingly low.
Las Vegas feels like the future, but I’m also living in the past.
It’s the longest night of the year, and I went for my first Las Vegan run.
Billboards across the panhandle told me to find nirvana, win a free furnace, and invest in crypto.
As we pulled up to our ninth small tan house of the day, “American Woman” rocked the block.
As we consider each room, there is much discussion of orientation.
The Pacific Time Zone is turning me into a morning person, and I do not like it.
There’s something so tranquil about an illuminated palm tree. It’s a science-fictional kind of calm.
Warm Leatherette on repeat as we drive into Vegas.
Heavy art followed by a fingernail moon over the Rockies as we crossed the Continental Divide.
A lone tree becomes exciting. A sign for the National Agro-Defense Facility fires the imagination.
At Cracker Barrel, C. and I discussed Tristan Tzara, Model 500, Basic Channel, and vaporwave over Grandpa’s Country Fried Breakfast.
Making an oldies playlist like it’s 1995 and I’m smoking clove cigarettes while speeding down I-75 to the Packard Plant or Saint Andrew’s Hall.
Overpass graffiti, institutional fuckery, and a solid Joy Division cover.
The strike against nefariousness continues. Mastodon feels wholesome. Veronica Vasicka delivers another top-shelf playlist.
Cold running. Twitter might be dying. The Menu was an okay movie. Digital ghosts.
Five days until we drive into the desert. Illinois and Indiana look like fangs. I should go to bed.
Repetition on a grey November day.
It’s nice to have a new place on the map to romanticize. And William Gibson has nothing on the Catholics.
Good news: Wolf’s Kompaktkiste is still around. Bad news: I’m on strike.
Maybe one day we’ll reach a point when all possible frequencies have been recorded, every combination of words written.
