Nevada is another wildly underrated state -- particularly rural Nevada. If I had to live permanently almost anywhere in the Pacific Time Zone, it'd probably be somewhere along Highway 50... Quietest place I've ever been, by far.

Se metieron dos terneros a la parroquia.

Highway 50 in Nevada -- "the Loneliest Highway" --changed my life. I hitchhiked the whole thing back in 2014. The desolation is incomparable. Nothing comes close. It's like an alien world even by Western standards. Being there without a car, at the mercy of the piddling

I feel for these people. My account is just large enough that I've been able to see the maddening impact of having a large social media audience. It's profoundly unnatural. In former days, few men addressed crowds of 40,000+. No one spoke to crowds of millions ever, and they

It makes perfect sense that both ex-Evangelicals and ex-New-Age secular people would be drawn to a moral system like that of the Eastern Orthodox. It's anti-legal, often vague, kind of 'woo-woo,' and largely lacking in the crystalline clarity of a hierarchical-legal system of

OK, I'll admit it -- With permanent plates, a pre-2008 automobile, and dirt-cheap insurance, cars aren't so bad in America's "emptiest" stretches. This is not, however, the normative use of automobiles in the USA. Yet this "automotive ideal" occupies a place of mythical

𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 I just think a lot of people (not saying this is what you're doing) tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and boil it down to "cars are bad!" when the issue isn't necesarily the car itself, it's cafe regulations and the chicken tax and backup camera laws forcing screens

If Penn Station had to adhere to Draper, UT's parking requirements, the minimum amount of parking needed would be 90,000 parking spaces. If laid out, the parking lot would cover 108 city blocks and would take 27 minutes, or an 11-minute subway ride, to get from end to end.

America seems to need the desert as a "release valve" for citizens who can't function in the brave new world we've built since WWII. In America, you know you can always drop out of life and abscond into the desert if you have to. It's our national alternative to suicide; and

𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 Jeremiah 9:1 Oh, to be in the desert, At an encampment for wayfarers! Oh, to leave my people, To go away from them For they are all adulterers, A band of rogues

I see no reason why I can't go down to Mexico, get a mailing address, and register a USA-illegal Toyota Hilux with Mexican plates. Could drive it right over the border, keep MX plates on it, use it as my daily driver with total impunity in rural areas. Could make a business I

There's no coming back from Slab City. Once you become a "resident," even for just a winter or two, re-integration into normal, non-desert life is unthinkable. You're misfitten forever; always want to go back. Something to be aware of if you're ever tempted to go...

right. It's a cabin in the desert, that's the answer

Perhaps the presently-fashionable topic of "putting down roots" is, at day's end, another product of mass affluence. It really wasn't that long ago that a large percentage of people were simply too poor to stay in their hometowns. If work dried up, they tore up the stakes,

It's interesting to me that during the recovery from the recession of the early 80's, the rate at which people moved house jumped very substantially -- but that right after the 2008 recession, no comparable jump was observed. This is especially interesting, too, because 2008's

When your home is dying, and your family is crumbling, you think about leaving. It's only natural.

The final American frontier wasn't Alaska, nor will it be space. The final American frontier is obscurity. Total obscurity, isolation, illegibility; a maximal degree of mutually unintelligible remoteness from the other. We're all in this frontier right now -- we are logged in.

Cancer is the final humiliation. You are not merely weakened; you are mocked, tortured, reduced to a bald organism in the hospice bed. You are covered in your own shit, screeching, praying your children won't see. You are going to die, but only after marinating in death. Mom is

Rationalist types really be like "hey, sorry your mom is dying an agonizing death from cancer, have you considered seeing if she'd like to be legally euthanized?" Uh, no, I haven't you sick f*cking animals. What is wrong with people?

Marriage is, at bottom, a portable "society of two." After a lifetime of lonesome hunger for a 'tribe', the relief of being married is immense. A year-and-a-half into marriage and I still have not understood it. It is like feasting after a great hunger...