Journal
Dispatches and speculations from the American roadside.
Sleepless
You can almost taste it, that bright metallic sensation which floods the brain when it decides there will be no sleep tonight.
Nature
We contemplated where waterfalls came from and wondered how saltwater becomes freshwater and vice versa.
Vivid
A world without the color green. A man who repainted all the seashells on the beach.
Forgetting
It was remarkable, this sudden act of forgetting as if we’d left the past four months behind.
Independence
A degraded and muffled Fourth of July. The prospect of celebrating America these days feels like a dark joke.
Toll
Sometimes I dream about tollbooth operators, the half-glimpsed faces with cigarettes on their lips, their left hands forever clutching a quarter and a dime in change.
Spasm
Tonight I sat in front of a fan while premature firecrackers echoed through the streets. I wondered how to live in a nation that’s circling the drain.
Abandon
Maybe I should go live in a tree. Learn the phases of the moon and teach myself to cook with the sun.
Shadow
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.
Belief
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020.
Humid
We had a pleasant June for a while, but the long mean heat of summer is finally here. Beyond this, I’m losing the plot.
Rhythm
And there’s the sound of someone in the street laughing and saying, “How did we get like this?”