This was the antichrist, I thought. Yes, this man was what the end of civilization looked like. June 15, 2024
Sometimes the sunlight filters through the plate glass windows at Target in a way that feels like church. June 2, 2024
In Greek mythology, dreams were black-winged demons that entered our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods. May 5, 2024
We stood by the window and watched the howling dark, even though this isn’t what you should do in a tornado. May 1, 2024
I’ve been trying to loosen up: fast collages, illegible notes in the middle of the night, and the inky smudges of a left-hander. April 22, 2024
A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping. April 8, 2024
There is beauty in repetition, the steady accretion that comes with committing to one thing day after day. April 4, 2024
As I left New York City, the driver played Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” several times and never said a word. February 27, 2024
An inauspicious flight number. The sound of the door closing. The metal roar of the engines. February 24, 2024
As the world becomes increasingly incomprehensible, I’m learning to find pleasure in the ultramundane and routine. February 17, 2024
Polar horror is one of my favorite genres: the temporal dislocation of permanent night, the vertigo of being at the very top—or bottom—of the world. February 8, 2024
Eleven years sober and another year older. Spent ten hours wandering through galleries with C., which is my favorite thing to do on this planet. February 2, 2024
There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock. January 24, 2024
We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin. January 2, 2024
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons in the 1850s, who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land. September 4, 2023
"Virga" is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain. September 3, 2023
Each year I feel a little more vertiginous, a little more overwhelmed by the belly-flop sensation of tumbling from a great height. July 1, 2023
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country. May 22, 2023
And it was about the goddamned work of art in the goddamned age of mechanical reproduction, of all things. April 18, 2023
She said we were looking at the Bonanza King Formation, a lovely bit of cadence that sounds like a doomed band from the 1970s. April 14, 2023
I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987. April 10, 2023
A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful. April 1, 2023
Yesterday C. and I took a break from our screens and drove into the Valley of Fire. February 21, 2023
We hit the brakes and followed a dusty road past a gigantic fiberglass ice cream sundae. February 6, 2023
Time and space get wobbly in the desert. I think I’m puttering along, but the speedometer says 98. February 2, 2023
Years ago, an old man in a church basement said, "Stick around long enough, and this becomes a life spent stepping over dead bodies." February 1, 2023
The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film. January 26, 2023
Here in Las Vegas, we’re catching the faintest edge of a weather event that sounds like something from a fantasy novel. January 10, 2023
We drove home on an empty parkway, feeling futuristic while fireworks burst alongside our car. January 1, 2023
This year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert. December 31, 2022
The unique scent of desert rain has a scientific name derived from the Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods. December 28, 2022
Each time I step outside, I feel like I’m on a new planet, and I wonder if I will ever tire of the desert. December 27, 2022
As I begin to orient myself in Vegas, I know I’m edging too close to the Strip when the plasma donation centers appear. December 22, 2022
Due to some 19th-century railroad logic, Nevada is the only non-coastal state in the Pacific Time Zone. December 21, 2022
I enjoyed driving along smooth parkways to a fast food joint that served spicy Korean pork in a cup. November 30, 2022
Most Christian churches are located along an east-west axis, with the entrance to the west and the altar to the east. November 29, 2022
We woke to the melancholic stillness of a holiday morning somewhere in the middle of America. Even the International House of Pancakes was closed. November 24, 2022
The billboards we passed felt like chapters from one big story: automatic weapon rentals, bulk ammo, Jesus Christ, and lawyers. November 23, 2022
The road trip kicks off tomorrow, and my packing has been delayed by a much more critical matter: putting together a road trip playlist. November 22, 2022
It’s like some mythical creature from the past has wandered into the middle of a twelve-land expressway. November 20, 2022
We convinced ourselves our tweets were important, newsworthy, career-making, or, god forbid, agents for social change, and it made us crazy. November 19, 2022
I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light. November 15, 2022
I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name. November 14, 2022
Combing through eighteen years of digital cruft has led me down an unexpectedly emotional walk down memory lane. November 13, 2022
Changing the clocks should be the year's biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. November 6, 2022
These summery November days echo my sense of losing the rhythm, of being out of time. November 3, 2022
I took an afternoon drive through Indiana the other day, and it was clear that America is not doing well. October 25, 2022
Yesterday in twenty-first-century America, I idled behind a jeep with an InfoWars license plate. October 9, 2022
I stood in line at the Gas ‘n Go behind a man with a pistol tucked into the elastic waistband of his sweatpants. October 7, 2022
The real heroes of this blessed land are the short-order cooks at Chinese takeout joints who manipulate fire, oil, and steel like gods. October 1, 2022
I have zero interest in football, which can make it challenging to move through American life. September 21, 2022
Service plazas are modern works of art where I can eat slick food next to twelve lanes of humming traffic, lording over a glittering river of steel and glass. September 18, 2022
Hill House, famously not sane, bothers the soul because Jackson describes the perception of horror, not the horror itself. September 15, 2022
I've been stuck on the last 20% of a story I'm writing about a haunted frequency, so I went to the museum to shake some ideas loose. September 5, 2022
The first thing I do with a new notebook is write something stupid and messy on the first page. August 31, 2022
This morning I fed a robot a few sentences from the novel I'm writing, and it generated some startlingly accurate pictures. August 18, 2022
I sneeze whenever I glance at the sun, which I’ve always taken as proof I am a night owl. August 10, 2022
The Rockies appeared through the gloom, slow beasts moving across the continent at the speed of time. July 24, 2022
A heat dome has settled over the Middle West, the moon was extra bright last night, and I saw a rainbow in the parking lot yesterday. June 21, 2022
The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and tonight I'm wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists. May 23, 2022
My first memory of God: I was five or six years old and feverishly rubbing a white crayon into a dark blue piece of construction paper. May 4, 2022
I’m always in a heavy state whenever I see Greenland, usually red-eyed and emotionally shredded. April 19, 2022
I still find myself stopping in the street, stunned by how low the clouds hang on this island. April 4, 2022
The photograph of my mom refuses to leave the auditorium. We jiggle the cords, but she’s still there, twenty feet tall and gazing at the water. March 5, 2022
I keep colliding with people in the streets and shops. I just can't pick up the rhythm here. February 15, 2022
While explaining myself to the grumpy clerk behind the glass, I realized I had no idea where I legally lived. January 21, 2022
I spent an hour in the corner of a shopping mall, borrowing the internet of a fast-fashion shop that closed at noon because too many of its workers had the plague. January 9, 2022
I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years. January 8, 2022
Maybe it's limbic and hardwired, this desire to see the divine rather than hear or touch. October 15, 2021
There are over a thousand responses from visitors now, far more than we anticipated at this point. October 13, 2021
Insects buzz in the trees like bad reception, but the nights are finally cooler and crisping up. September 19, 2020
I enjoy skipping through frazzled sermons, nutritional advice, alien abductions, financial planning, and light drizzle at the airport. September 3, 2020
This morning in the park, I sat across from a woman who was talking to the pigeons gathered around her feet. June 25, 2020
We took a ship through the Finnish archipelago towards a small island in the Baltic Sea. January 13, 2020
Pictures, songs, and paragraphs wash across my screen one minute and disappear the next. December 29, 2019
The endless churn of the digital jukebox brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase from 1944: “the freedom to choose what is always the same.” December 30, 2018