At what point does a walk become a hike? C. and I often ponder this when we find ourselves on a dirt path or crossing a parking lot. We’ve decided it requires a bit of an incline and enough time to demand a granola bar.

We have interesting discussions when we wander into nature. If dehydration became life-threatening, would you rather drink your own urine or someone else’s? The car was still in sight when this question came up. Or if starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger’s? This inspired some lively debate. On the one hand, we know where we’ve been and what we’re made of, but God only knows the ingredients of a stranger. Then again, consuming oneself has an ouroboros quality that feels demonic.

A few years ago, our friends dragged us on a hike through a New Hampshire forest, and they moved with terrifying urgency. We sat down at the first scenic viewpoint and let them continue crashing through the trees so they could exorcise their ghosts and satisfy whatever hunger was pushing them onwards.

But now that we’re in the desert, we want to engage with the scenery beyond the windshield. So we drove ten minutes to Red Rock Canyon and suddenly we found ourselves hiking. We leapt across creeks, shimmied up ledges, and at one point, we clung to the sheer face of an action-movie boulder over a canyon that plunged into the center of the earth. I can’t believe the government allows its citizens to risk their lives like this.

At first, I hated everything about it, this scrabbling across the rocks like an animal. Everyone else wore grippy shoes and backpacks stuffed with equipment I couldn’t even guess at, and as I scrambled after C., who was weirdly talented at hopping from rock to rock, I was convinced I was about to become a local news item. When we finally reached the summit, we were rewarded with a view of Vegas that reinforced my theory that this city is a mirage. Then I needed to sit down as a bout of vertigo took hold.

On the way back down, I moved more confidently. That sheer drop into the center of the earth was actually only four or five feet, and I felt surprisingly good and accomplished. Like I’d satisfied a hunger I never knew I had.

Saturday night in Death Valley was wild. Ninety-mile-per-hour curves and a thirty-degree temperature shift as C. and I dropped out of the Spring Mountains, hooked a left at the opera house, and motored toward Zabriskie Point, where the wind tore us to pieces. Fifty-mile-per-hour gusts blew the lifeforce from our bodies as we surveyed the dramatic rocks of Red Cathedral and teetered back to the car. 

We looped around for fifty miles, hunting for some famous sand dunes, but we couldn’t find the damned things. But Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing. The area spans over three million acres, and it is a zone that can only be understood by extreme measurements: elevation, wind speed, precipitation, and temperature.

Maybe we’ll find the dunes next time, we said as we dropped down into Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. Next time. Maybe even next weekend because it’s only eighty miles from our place. Later that night, a friend in New Orleans called while I waited in a Vegas parking lot for some Singapore mei fun.

“What’s in Death Valley?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “And everything.”

Tim Hecker – In Death Valley

Konoyo | Kranky, 2018 | Bandcamp

Las Vegas is 2100 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains. The highest peak is 11,000 feet. Right now, snow covers most of the ranges, which I did not expect when I moved to the desert. But I should look at the mountains instead of the news. The New York Times has a story about “the power of instant pudding mix” next to horrific photos from an endless war.

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. The dust doesn’t shake lose until noon. I also have a large plant I’m trying my best not to kill.

Yesterday I ignored my whiteboard and watched the profoundly unnecessary mid-2010s remakes of Total Recall and Robocop. It must have taken a heroic effort to destroy all the joy that made the original versions so iconic. (It’s called “Robocop,” for fuck’s sake, how can you not make it fun?) Even the winks at classic moments such as the Two Weeks Lady or “I’d buy that for a dollar” were delivered with furrowed brows among grayscale scenery. Now granted, Paul Verhoeven is a uniquely bonkers director, but the gulf between his 20th-century sci-fi camp and these glum 21st-century remakes might be the clearest example of the condition that has infected so much contemporary television and film, in which grinding ponderousness is mistaken for prestige entertainment. I hope the darling of the moment, The Last of Us, marks the vanishing point for these dour fantasies, and we can make robots and zombies fun again.

Another vanishing point: I know I’ve reached a tough spot with writing when I find myself dithering over whether to use a serif or sans-serif font for my blog. I cannot overstate how much this decision pains me. It is philosophical, perhaps ethical, and certainly reflects a point of view.

Sans-serif makes good sense on screens. Dull typefaces like Arial and Source Sans have become the invisible carrier waves of email, Wikipedia, and search results; they are Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet of the digital age, and I feel obligated to embrace this future. Serifs, however, are willfully defiant of the pixel, reaching instead back to the days of chiseling letters into stone. This emphasis on the manual rather than the mechanical gives serif text a sense of warmth and ease. So I’ve switched my stylesheet to serifs because I could use some of that. Although by the time you read this, I may have changed it back again.

Now I should return to my whiteboards, which are admonishing me to finish revising the last sixty-eight pages of my manuscript—and to do it with pen and paper so I don’t wind up in typographic cul-de-sacs or lost in stories about instant pudding mix.

It’s cold in Vegas, and strange material is falling from the sky, a plasticky hybrid of snow and hail called graupel that takes a long time to melt. Meanwhile, I’ve humbled myself and purchased a pair of reading glasses.

I’d been frowning at fine print in the kitchen for nearly a year. Lists of ingredients and legal clauses would swim before me, just beyond the bounds of legibility, and I told myself it was a trick of the light rather than the result of the grey in my beard.

A few months ago, I was waiting for C. at the superstore when I pulled a pair of reading glasses from a rack by the register, and I was astonished by how much sharper my immediate world became. How else was I needlessly suffering? But I did not buy the glasses due to a potent mixture of denial and pride. There was nothing wrong with squinting. I was probably just going through a phase.

Yesterday, I finally purchased a pair of ugly reading glasses for six dollars, and I gritted my jaw and held my breath as I swiped them at the self-checkout station, bracing for a dramatic leap into middle age. Now I need to wear them.

On Flamingo Avenue, a stranger told me a fable about a traveler who climbed a mountain to ask a wise monk the secret to happiness. “Do not argue with fools,” said the monk. The traveler said he disagreed. The monk smiled and said okay.

And on the subject of foolishness and aging, here’s a thirty-year-old staple from my youth transformed into a glacial blur on the new compilation from the top-shelf Ecstatic imprint. I keep waiting for the beat to drop, but it never comes.

Yesterday C. and I took a break from our screens and drove into the Valley of Fire, a surreal stretch of geology an hour northeast of Vegas. From the passenger seat, C. told me this was where they filmed Total Recall, and our journey became a pilgrimage to a time when entertainment was fun and science fiction still felt far away.

Towers of red rock loomed over us like a beautiful threat. It was the first warm day of the season, and the trail was crowded. Shuffling through nature’s silence with strangers felt oddly intimate. Voices carry. Every lover’s whisper and family squabble. Every count to three for the camera. We spread ourselves across a sheet of red sandstone, two dozen clumps of humanity from all corners of the world, each searching for an untouched vista that felt like the movies.

Back in the parking lot, I admired a man slouched in a lawn chair on top of a battered Winnebago. He wore mirrorshades, had a gnarly beard, and smiled down upon us like someone who might cheerfully tell you the end of days were nigh. He seemed to have his priorities straight, like he’d made peace with something I was only beginning to grasp, and I thought about him while I drove home to check my inbox.

Nature is noisy tonight. The wind is howling with 70-mile-per-hour gusts, and the temperature is crashing. Flights have been grounded, and several roads are closed due to blowing dust. But I like to think that man in mirrorshades is still on top of his Winnebago, untouched and unruffled, the unmoved mover at the center of the storm.

Meanwhile, Erika of Ectomorph has delivered a much-awaited second album that functions as a perfect soundtrack for a midnight desert storm. Highly recommended.

Erika – Desert Red

Anevite Void | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2023 | Bandcamp

An old friend from Boston visited the other day, and we sped into Death Valley to see the desert, stopping by the old opera house before we looped back to the city. The appearance of Vegas is always a shock to the system: so much electricity where there shouldn’t be.

In the evening, we hit the Strip because my friend wanted to gamble. The only game he wanted to play was the coin pusher, those old arcade machines with a metal arm that nudges a pile of coins toward the edge. Coin pushers aren’t a big draw in Vegas. As we scrolled past the roulette and blackjack tables, the atmosphere shifted from scented lobbies and luxury malls to cigarette smoke and stained carpet, and the themes became increasingly blunt. Beneath the eye of the Luxor’s pyramid, plastic pharaohs gazed down upon us, and I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.

We found a bank of coin pushers in the Fun Dungeon of Excalibur, a casino that feels like getting kidnapped at a Renaissance fair while on dirty hallucinogenics. My friend diligently plugged tokens into the machine, where they joined a delicate web of coins so close to falling over the edge that I held my breath. Here was suspense and possibility in its most concrete form. Eventually, the coins fell, and my friend collected a small payout of tickets that could be traded for candy, which he gave to a small boy and his father.

Metaphors and lessons abound.

These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky. Yesterday they shot down “an octagonal structure with strings” over Lake Huron. It’s a delightful story, even though it’s probably a trial run for something more sinister.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas is a city of suddenness and extremes. The other day, C. and I raced along a blank desert parkway that felt like driving across a blank sheet of paper. Then we hit a glossy miracle mile to run some errands. IKEA, Home Depot, and Target: the reassuring cadence of living in the sprawl. At Barnes & Noble, a man hollered into his telephone about how they had no right to make him take a DNA test.

As we inched eastwards across the city, we took random turns just to see what was there, and soon we were lost in a maze of service drives, scrapyards, and sun-battered strip clubs beneath ancient billboards of fading flesh and thongs. We hooked a left on Deliveries Only Road and landed the car in the parking structure for the Bellagio, mainly to take advantage of the free parking for Nevada residents, partially to check out the casino’s elaborate diorama for the Year of the Rabbit.

We wandered the corridors of an airport-sized replica of a Mediterranean villa until we collided with a three-story Chinese god of wealth who lorded over a network of plastic bridges and artificial rivers with dancing fish and rabbits. Digital fireworks exploded across the walls, and I admired how so many pieces of space and time had collided here in the most plastic way imaginable.

I caught the same thrill the other day at a Szechuan joint when a man loudly proclaimed that Moscow has more airports than Los Angeles over the vocoded chorus of “California Love.” Or this morning at the Korean market as Hank Williams moaned on the PA system while we hunted for a tin of panang curry.

I could not sleep last night in Los Angeles. The hotel room had turned humid, and when I stepped outside, the weather was worse. Heavy clouds and fog covered the sky as dawn broke. Bouts of insomnia used to torture me, but I’m getting better at sleepless nights. I read. I write. I walk. I’ve learned to relax because I’ve discovered I can still function without sleep, even though the day burns brighter at the edges.

Los Angeles looked like a prestige dystopia as we inched towards Interstate 15 early on a Sunday morning. In the wake of record-breaking rain, electric green vines and weeds spilled down walls of damp concrete, and a heavy fog draped itself across eight lanes of traffic and swallowed the vehicles a few yards ahead. After we crossed the San Gabriel Mountains, patches of sunlight broke through the dark grey swirl, and soon we were speeding northeast to Vegas under a brilliant blue sky.

Twelve miles east of Barstow, where the desert appears especially endless, I glimpsed the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. Dammit, I thought, maybe I can’t function without sleep after all.

We hit the brakes and followed a dusty road past the gigantic fiberglass ice cream sundae that marks Eddie World, the largest gas station in California. A mile later, there was a handmade sign for Liberty Sculpture Park, a 36-acre patch of desert purchased by the artist Chen Weiming as “a memorial ground for victims of communism.”

Gigantic sculptures dotted the horizon: Xi Jinping’s bloodied head, thirty feet high with COVID-19 spike protein for hair—and theories that the Chinese government had torched its first iteration. A recreation of the Goddess of Democracy stared down Interstate 15, a hundred yards away from the number 64 sculpted in steel, 6.4 meters tall, to commemorate the date of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, which is 6400 miles away. And there was the Tank Man, staring down a Soviet-style T-54 tank in the blankness of the Mojave desert.

Perhaps the American desert is a canvas large enough to contain scenes from all corners. But I’m beginning to think something else is at work in this landscape that functions like memory, how it distills history and fantasy into visions that refer back to the ancients who believed this hallucinatory space spoke the language of faith and horror.

California was a shocking green as C. and I drove into Los Angeles, the hills almost alpine while we navigated ten lanes of bumper-to-bumper.

Last night we visited a friend in the Coachella Valley who studies water for a living. Water leads to fire, he said. The heavy rains that battered California last month are generating more grass which will die over the summer and provide more fuel for fires. We nodded quietly over our drinks, grateful for our yard of sand in Nevada.

At the Broad Museum, we dug the William Kentridge exhibit, whose smoldering landscapes looked like scenes from a fast-approaching future.

Kentridge’s sketches and films meld the surreal with the political but, above all, they offer a reminder of the value of art as performance, a mode of play rather than a clinical intellectual exercise. The charcoal smudges, the streaks of erasure, the jittery handheld camera—at what point does imperfection accumulate into a distinct aesthetic? In Kentridge’s hands, the stray marks that my perfectionist brain would consider an error become a vital style, ripe with mystery and teeth.

Messiness will be a crucial tool in the footrace against artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, a Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over Montana. In our hotel room, C. and I caught a few minutes of the Pentagon’s press briefing, where a taciturn general studded with brass said the word balloon in every sentence. It was delightful. Can we shoot it down? asked the reporters. Where is the balloon now? “The public can look up in the sky and see where the balloon is,” the general said.

The Chinese spy balloon has become part of the weather report as it drifts across Kansas and Missouri. Perhaps this is a weird echo of the mood that swept America in 1957 when Russia launched Sputnik.

I spent my birthday speeding through the Mojave with C., and it was the best celebration I could ask for. Time and space get wobbly in the desert. I think I’m puttering along, but the speedometer says 98. Hundred-mile distances collapse, yet the interesting scenery on the horizon never seems to draw closer.

Thirty minutes southwest of Vegas, my heart leapt when I saw I had no signal. It’s so rare to find myself out of range, unreachable, and I savored the sensation. (It rarely occurs to me that I can turn my telephone off.) We zipped along the two-lane ribbons that carved up Bristol Lake, a dried-up landscape of mud, gypsum, and pyramidal mounds that looked ritualistic and alien. (Bristol Lake has 2.3 stars on Google.)

An hour later, a familiar thrum moved through my belly, and my hand twitched, wanting to check my phone. But I was still out of range. What was I missing? I imagined all the messages and demands piling up, all the possible emergencies. I felt negligent, as if I’d abandoned my post.

When we reached Twentynine Palms, I checked my messages in a Denny’s parking lot: a birthday wish from a friend, a spam message for better financing, and an email alerting me to the release of a new album. I joined C. in a red pleather booth, ordered a Grand Slamwich, and marveled at the rot in my brain.

My little tics and anxieties seem to be moving from the vexing to the comic. Perhaps this is a happy side effect of getting older.