we’re in the desert and i still don’t know if i’m spelling that correctly.
spelling ‘desert’ that is. i think i’m fixated on how to spell ‘desert’.
sorry.
i’m staying on route 66 about 4 hours from l.a and 2 hours from las vegas in a little town (population 15, i kid you not) called amboy. we’re staying at a motel that is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. i have a tiny little cabin to myself that, lucky for me, has heat. cos it gets cold out here at night in the desert. the vastness of the american west is pretty remarkable, especially for a new yorker/new englander such as myself. you could pretty much fit all of new england into california twice and still have room to spare. maybe even three times. very few people say thrice.
why is that? twice but not thrice? let’s bring back thrice.
the desert is so interesting and so desolate. you can drive for hours.
and hours.
and hours. and not see any other sign of humanity other than the road upon which you’re driving. no wonder don van vliet (aka-captain beefheart) chose to live in the desert. it’s a fascinating and ancient place. duh. at the end of the day i guess everywhere in the universe is fascinating and ancient. even the new cities and towns. it’s not as if there are new materials that are used to build new buildings.
all of the matter in the universe is, apparently, 15 billion years old.
even us.
so everything is ancient. but, from my subjective human perspective, the desert feels considerably more ancient than, say, atlanta. atlanta feels new.
this desert feels old.
they’re both made out of stuff that is 15 billion years old, but the desert still feels very ancient. i guess it’s the vastness and the lack of human influence. and when humans do put up a house or a gas station in the desert it feels so small and temporary. and most structures in the desert quickly succumb to entropy and start to sink back into the sand and scrub. or so it seems to me.
there are long freight trains going by and the wind is howling around my little cabin.
it’s nice here. empty and nice.
-moby