Post From The Road 2

A lot of places are selling those “dirt shirts” in the sw. Shirts made entirely from red clay. Here’s their big mistake, though: There’s red dirt everywhere! I just got some rubber cement and rolled around on the ground; made my own shirt. Take that, fat cat novelty-t-shirt retailers!

Tried to get across the worst of the mojave desert last night, to avoid the heat there in the daytime, but had to pull over and sleep. Wound up in this surreal place where dozens and dozens of semi trucks were filling parking lots, sitting in the road, most of them with their engines running while the drivers slept. It was hot, loud, bright from headlights and streetlights, and crowded. I suppose it wasn’t the complete opposite of a perect night of camping, because we weren’t covered in spiders, but around 2:30am as I was sweating, and my ears were ringing from the engines, and M slept happily away, I might have been willing to argue the point.

Message to every single person in Needles, California: there are other places you can live. Literally thousands. Every single one of them is better than where you are. I just thought maybe no one’s ever told you, so you didn’t know you could leave.

In Sedona, Arizona, there is a famous church designed by a pupil of Frank Lloyd-Wright. It is exquisitely beautiful and elegant. It seems to grow from the rocks themselves inviting contemplation of natural wonder and introspection. Right next to it, someone has just bulldozed two existing homes and built an enormous, 12 million dollar house that is ostentatious and glitzy. They had to very intentionally build there. And every single thing about it that is so showy is facing the church, so that from the viewpoint outside the church you look right into the compound. Instead of contemplating, half the people were talking about the house. I suspect someone could write a pretty thorough psychological profile of the homeowner based just off of the design and placement of that house.