The television mumbled in the background, and we followed along as the eclipse passed through Mazatlan, Dallas, Little Rock, and Indianapolis. When our turn came, we stood on a ridge by the river and watched the moon chip away at the sun. A lone helicopter crossed the sky. The temperature dropped. The light turned silvery and dim with crisp strange shadows. Dogs barked. Birds stopped chirping.

Darkness fell quickly from the north, bringing a staggering kind of stillness. For ninety seconds, the eclipse was total, and I stood beneath it feeling a giddy sense of slippage, a perceptual freefall that edged toward the frightening. The television had not prepared me for this.

Although I was grateful for the brief fellowship when everyone across a troubled hemisphere was momentarily joined by the sun and moon, broadcasting their experiences in real-time, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to encounter such a chaotic sky in ancient times, bewildered and alone. As daylight returned, I understood why the first rituals were performed to ensure the sun would rise each morning, and I wondered what the last ritual might be.

An Alberta clipper shocked the metro area last night with six inches of snow. I crept along at twelve miles per hour in whiteout conditions, scrolling past spun-out cars as I headed to the superstore because I needed some peanut butter cookies and a case of Topo Chico to get the weekend started.

Fact: the Topo Chico that comes in clear glass bottles tastes slightly better than the tinted green bottles.

As the world becomes increasingly incomprehensible, I’m learning to find pleasure in the ultramundane and routine. My preferred table at the library. The Thursday night philosophy book club I’ve joined. In the evenings, C. and I watch Tokyo Vice, my new favorite show. It’s a slow drift with neon pouring down car windows and violent men with righteous hair, punctuated by delightful moments such as Ken Watanabe watching Full House with his family. And god, it makes me miss smoking. (This piece in Vulture is a good companion if you’re one of the five or six other people who watch it.) After I perform my nightly ablutions, I like to fall asleep to old documentaries about Rome. I fantasize about Rome and Tokyo, but right now, I’m happy where I am, existing in pleasantly neutral conditions that give my mind room to roam on the page.

My friend O. sent me a WikiHow tutorial called “How to Disappear Completely.” (He stumbled across it while searching for something else; he’s doing okay.) I can’t stop thinking about this article: the clinical tone without any trace of an author, the untalented illustrations in shades of pastel, the hard turn from “running away usually isn’t necessary” to “withdraw cash gradually from any bank accounts you have.” Beneath a lightbulb icon, there’s a tip to “make sure you have enough food and water with you.” This tutorial has been read over two million times and has three-and-a-half stars. I give it five stars as a creative writing exercise that lives in the genre of horror: an aggressively benign presentation that launches the imagination into frightening terrain.

At the superstore, a little girl said, “Most of the things on my street are dead.” I think she was talking about the trees in the winter, but what an excellent sentence to start a horror story or fuel an awful dream.

Kevin Richard Martin – To Disappear

Black | Intercranial, 2023 | Bandcamp

Kevin Richard Martin’s subterranean eulogy for Amy Winehouse. Boomkat described it as “the elegiac appeal of Bohren und der Club of Gore at a midnight crossroads with Rhythm & Sound,” which might be the Platonic equation for all the music I enjoy. This is a perfect late-winter soundtrack.

Virga is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain. When rain does fall, the unique scent of a desert storm comes from the oil released by the creosote bush, and this odor has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from pétros, the Greek word for stone, and ichor, the mythic golden blood of the gods. In Mexico, the creosote bush is called gobernadora or “the governess” because its root system crowds out nearby plants. This is why they appear so evenly spaced apart. There’s a creosote known as “King Clone” in the Mojave Desert that is 11,700 years old. The Mojave is a rain shadow desert because it is surrounded by mountains that absorb the damp winds from the Pacific and dry the air on the leeward slopes.

Today the air temperature in Vegas reached 100 degrees for the first time this year. Meanwhile, 28 miles away, C. and I found a 68-degree breeze and a few patches of snow at 8,600 feet in the Spring Mountains.

But I did not enjoy the mountaintop. Each year I feel a little more vertiginous. A little more overwhelmed by the belly-flop sensation of tumbling from a great height. Perhaps this is another fun side-effect of becoming more familiar with mortality. Or maybe I’m just a ground-dwelling creature who prefers the pavement and neon and dunes.

Abul Mogard – Dizziness That Shakes Rivers and Mountains

Schleißen 1 | Emotional Response, 2015 | Bandcamp

Heavy skies here in Vegas, and the wind has been ferocious. I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert. By now, I thought I’d be begging for a cloud.

“I can’t wait for summer,” I said, and the lady cutting my hair shushed me as if I were summoning a demon. She gave me a long talk about hydration while she snipped away. Not just plenty of water, she said, but also salads and cucumbers, and you should never go outside in daylight. By the time she finished, I was convinced a cup of coffee in July would send me to the emergency room.

“I love the summer,” said the man next to me. “Especially the nights.”
“Because it gets cooler?”
“Because it’s hot and dark.”

Among all U.S. states, church attendance is lowest in Nevada. But I think this is where I’ll really learn to pray. The other day C. and I went to a zen temple behind a strip mall for a beginner’s meditation session. We removed our shoes and stepped inside to find a dozen bald elderly people in red robes chanting in Burmese. We edged backward out of the room and quietly closed the door.

The wind is still howling, but the cold is finally gone. Forty-mile-per-hour gusts out of the southwest spill over the Spring Mountains after soaking California with another atmospheric river and a collapsed bank.

Spent last week thrashing in the grip of a nasty bug, my fever dreams enhanced by the American government, which, after fifteen votes for speaker of the House, has been reduced to an endless screech. 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 Peripheral, William Gibson describes “the jackpot,” a cascade of crises that wipe out most of humanity ten or twenty years from now. His vision of the apocalypse is “multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns . . .” And ten pages later: “Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”

Shopping at Walmart in Vegas sounds bleak, but it was remarkably pleasant. Phil Collins sang about how he could feel it coming in the air tonight while I collected the materials for a shepherd’s pie. But the secret ingredient must be found elsewhere: Sichuan peppercorns.

There’s a bird in the desert that sounds like a buzzy little synthesizer, maybe a 303, and I’d like to know its name.

The longest day of the year, and, thank god, soon we’ll be making more night. The weather has been vivid lately. 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.

A headline in The New York Times says “America is Heading Off a Cliff,” which is pretty evergreen. Last week a computer programmer claimed a chatbot achieved consciousness. Either Google is abusing sentient chatbots, or one of their chatbots drove a man insane. I’m not sure which scenario is more frightening. This morning I flipped on the local news, and they were interviewing “the first non-celebrity family” to ride a new waterslide. All of this feels like weather, too.

Tonight I’m trying to figure out what to do with this journal. I don’t want to write about current events or, god forbid, issues. There are far too many faith dealers, soothsayers, and thought leaders. The last thing this world needs is another opinion. Certainly not mine. On the other hand, writing about my life feels increasingly recursive, more and more like a dead end. Probably because I’m doing my best to live a boring life of routine.

I’m increasingly interested in digging deeper into fiction, particularly as the 21st century grows more science-fictional by the minute. I’d like to rewire this station into a space for experiments and exercises, for writing weirder and trying on points of view I don’t necessarily believe. So this journal will become a halfway house for homeless paragraphs, remixed and upcycled snippets from the past, and a few bloopers from the novel I’m writing. I’m going to call this series Interstate Scenes, and if I reach a decent number, maybe I’ll shape them into a little book. Hopefully, this feed will get a little strange. But I promise, I’m okay.

Mostly sunny, the heat is building, and there’s a strawberry supermoon. Wall Street fell into a bear market today, and last year’s attempted coup is being relitigated on television in the hope that justice might still exist in some corner of the universe. I admire their faith. The television followed this up with a special report about dogs overdosing on their owners’ drugs. Later, a senator solemnly said, “We just want to keep guns out of the hands of people who might use them for violence.” The weather lady looked a little freaked out as she stood before a map soaked in neon red, forecasting a heat index of 110 degrees and 80-mile-per-hour winds.

A few months ago in London, I had a beautiful bowl of ramen so spicy I got the sniffles and glimpsed the face of god. I went back every Saturday like church. Now I’ve found something similar here in Ohio: a Szechuan lamb dish soaked in chili oil and cumin that can only be described as holy. It’s good to have a meal in your life that demands regular pilgrimage.

Hypothetical art project: a device that gives you fifty dollars each time you share an embarrassing personal detail—but there’s a one-in-fifty chance it will share a picture of you and your secrets online.

Sometimes we go to IKEA just for a nice and affordable meatball dinner.

Massive Attack vs Mad Professor – Heat Miser (Backward Sucking)

No Protection | Wild Bunch Records, 1995 | More

London. We experienced a brief hour of sunlight before the rain and gloom resumed. Meanwhile, a storm named Eunice is churning over the Celtic Sea, and the news is advertising it heavily. I thought naming winter storms was a purely American marketing move to drum up ratings. But events are being canceled, the government says it will be “a major incident,” and the United Kingdom is a swirl of yellow, amber, and red alerts. They’re saying it could be the most powerful storm in thirty years. They’re saying it could develop something called a “sting jet.”

But I never know how seriously to take anything anymore.

At first, I thought London was filled with a rare and surreal species of tree with thick branches and twisted, blunted tops. Now I’m beginning to suspect these are just normal trees that the city has abused. This is the type of thing I never bother to look up, preferring my impressionistic sense of the world. Let the mystery be, I say. We have far too few of them these days.

I remember staring at the sky in a superstore parking lot somewhere in North or South Dakota, watching a dozen seagulls circle overhead, hunting for minnows or plankton or whatever they eat. What had drawn them to this landlocked square? Their rusty squawks filled the night, and that’s when I realized something in nature was breaking.

There are quite a few palm trees here in London, enhancing my disorientation.

Ohio. Clear skies with highs in the mid-thirties, sunset at 5:34pm, and it finally snowed last night. Not a lot of snow, but enough to soften the world a little. Enough to remember childhood winters and even recall a sense of wonder at all this strange material falling from the sky.

After admiring the snow, I navigated the rat’s nest of modern living. Caught in a reverse Voight-Kampff test, I spent nine minutes quarreling with a telephone robot who refused to deliver me to a human until I successfully answered its increasingly existential questions: Is there a disruption in your area? Are you experiencing technical difficulties? Is your connection intermittent?

As I waited to be connected, I caught a glimpse of a cold future, a binary world in which all of our services and transactions are brokered by robots—1 for yes, 2 for no—leaving no room for the grey zone of being human.

Anthony Rother – Destroy Him My Robots

Redlight District | Elektrolux, 1998 | Bandcamp

A grey Sunday with the possibility of snow. They’re calling it a Saskatchewan Screamer, this weather system moving northeast across the Tennessee Valley. In the meantime, I’m trying to sort myself out. Will I ever untangle the stories scattered across my notebooks? What am I doing with my time on planet Earth? What do I stand for? But I’m not going to figure myself out today. It’s a lifelong process, I know, and I can’t imagine many of us walk around feeling certain about ourselves and the choices we’ve made. At least not without being an absolute jackass.

Looks like C. and I are going to London next month for a residency, coronavirus be damned. But first we must contend with the paranoia of nation-states and institutional logistics. Yesterday we got fingerprinted for an FBI background check, and I was surprised by my anxiety as we awaited the results. Maybe they’ve figured me out; I certainly haven’t.

I braced for surveillance footage of myself doing something awful, maybe a print-out of my search history or photographs of my strangest dreams. But I’m clean. A search of the fingerprints provided by this individual has revealed no prior arrest date, said the report. This does not preclude further criminal history at the state or local level. I admire how they’ve hedged their bets in case I’m causing local problems.

So these are days of waiting. Today I’m waiting for the snow to arrive on this Sunday afternoon in the long middle stretch of January. The year is no longer shiny yet it has not fully started, its rhythms only faintly heard. There’s a thrum in the atmosphere just before the weather changes, maybe something to do with barometric pressure that I’ve never understood. The forecast has been downgraded from six inches of snow to only two, and there should be a word for this: the specific flavor of disappointment when the weather fails to perform as advertised.

I went for a short ugly run to get out of my Sunday funk, and I stopped to admire a streak of white against the grey clouds: the contrails of an airplane—jet screams, I called them when I was small—and it neatly divided the sky in two. For a moment, I wanted to assign it cosmic significance.

Dean Hurley – Edge of the Known

Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosophy of Beyond | Sacred Bones, 2019 | Bandcamp

Sunset: 5:51pm. Partly cloudy in New York with a high of 60 degrees and lows dipping into the 40s at last. Now begins my favorite season, the deep stretch of time when the landscape weighs upon the mind and perhaps the other way around. This is the season of choral music and childhood memories drifting through the heating vents, of headlights in the gloom and trees that look like old gentlemen.

Tonight I’m grateful I’ve returned to this channel in the static, writing for whoever might find it. The idea of an audience, real or imagined, forces me to move beyond fractured scribblings in my notebook towards complete sentences and, occasionally, better thoughts. I’d like to read more blogs. If you’re still broadcasting on the information superhighway like it’s 2004, please let me know so I can add your station to my feed.

Gas – Oktember

Oktember | Mille Plateaux, 1999 | Bandcamp

Fast clouds rolled across the overheated city this afternoon. Heat lightning and thunder. I love the free-falling sense of the atmosphere rearranging itself before a storm. On the corner of First Avenue, I watched a dozen pigeons gather on a traffic light, and I couldn’t remember if they always perched there or if this was weather-related.

Right now there are storms on Jupiter, unwitnessed and unseen.

America is back to losing over a thousand people each day to the virus. The owner of a company that’s eating the world made thirteen billion dollars in a single day. Now he has $189 billion. Meanwhile, our president brags about his mental fitness because he correctly identified an elephant in a test designed to detect dementia. He goes on TV and says, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” He repeats these words like instructions. This is the man sending federal troops into American cities, hoping to transform peaceful protest into televised violence.

And for a lunatic moment I wonder if it will keep raining until everything is washed clean.

Cybotron – Cosmic Raindance

Enter | Fantasy Records, 1983 | More

A massive plume of desert dust has crossed the Atlantic. It began in the Sahara after a heavy rain. Now it’s tinting the skies in Miami as it bleeds across the American South, generating brown haze and fantastic sunsets. They’re calling it the Gorilla Dust Cloud, and you can see it from outer space.

Reading about sand plumes has left me fantasizing about a quiet life of trade winds and shipping lanes. Tonight I’m reciting the far-flung and elemental grammar of rain shadow deserts, the Siberian anticyclone, and the Eurasian steppe. And sand, a substance that seeps into everything like today’s digital flotsam of anxiety, outrage, and compulsion.

Kōbō Abe writes beautifully about sand in The Woman in the Dunes: “While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”

Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to hit record highs across the nation because too many Americans believe Jesus and the Second Amendment will shield them. We have so many unnecessary dead and more to come. At midnight tonight, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey will require out-of-state travelers to quarantine for two weeks.

The arrival of a sand plume across American skies has the aura of a warning as if the virus has briefly been granted physical form to remind us of nature’s blind logic.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Sand

Nancy & Lee | Reprise, 1968 | More