Journal 2025-05-11
I’m just going to start writing because I keep getting distracted with a bunch of other nonsense. There’s all sorts of chores and errands just to keep this whole game going, with keeping life going. That does feel good — it feels like I’m an active player in the world, like I ‘m whittling away at all the things that could get in the way and just preempt all of them, all the little myriad expenses and nonsense that wear away at my resources — but it also feels like busy-work sometimes.
The desert is a strange place. I wonder if it’s something in my nervous system that wants a place to be really green, humid, a place that feels conducive to bringing forth life. Here in the desert, the water gets absorbed right off my tongue, like it’s sucking the very life-force out of me. The desert is a vampire.
It also just contributes to this low-level paranoia that I sense being out on the road. It feels like at any moment, my car could break down and I’d inevitably die of thirst out in the desert. It activates the survival instinct in the brain, planning all the various ways in which this giant emptiness could kill me and thinking in advance to plan around them. It’s a background task that slowly drains my mental battery to dangerously low levels.
There’s a recreation of a Prada store out in the middle of nowhere about 20 miles outside of Alpine, Texas, which is itself essentially hundreds of miles from the next nearest town. It’s a Warhol-esque Pop Art installation, a storefront that you cannot enter. It’s stood for almost 20 years now, and for living in the desert for that long — not to mention that it’s also technically illegal now — it’s in excellent condition. There’s locks all over the fence around it, but there’s no graffiti on it at all. I’d bet that the median building in West Texas is almost certainly abandoned and collapsing, and yet this building stands pristine. There’s something mystical going on there.
I don’t know what else to say. I have much more to write about West Texas, but I don’t think I want to do that as part of my mornings pages. I want to leave some gas in the tank for that, since I have much more to do. I “fired” Genaro; stuff like that always makes me feel terrible. But I didn’t really fire him, I just said that there’s a tenant who will reconsider if they’re going to use his services, and that Thorne would handle that stuff from now on since he’s managing the property.
Blah blah blah what else. My sleep has been all over the place recently. Part of it is very clearly aligned with sleeping in a tent, or more specifically sleeping on that shitty little pad. It’s not really the fault of the pad itself, so much as getting used to a tent is a strange process. I slept in a regular bed last night and my dreams were just so active. I’m going to need a nap today, probably in a few hours given the fact that I’m already kinda dying on the inside and still haven’t even really gotten past the Chore stage of my morning plan. I still need to write essentially this entire post for All Hail West Texas, plus I should edit some photos and post to IG and some other stuff. All in all, that’s actually not all the much work — the photo editing and the IG posting are things I could do in my sleep — but I’m still sufficiently tired as to think that that’s kinda a lot.
Anyways, writing stuff out like this always helps me feel slightly less overwhelmed by it all. Sometimes I look at the work other folks can clearly handle, work that is orders of magnitude more exhausting than mine, and all of a sudden writing an article or two seems entirely feasible. I get the joy and benefit of doing this stuff at the moment without deadlines or publishers breathing down my neck to get this thing out. It’s for the love of the game. And the game I want to play is to produce a lot, to connect with other people who see the world the way I do. And to do that I want to have a real body of work to represent who I am. It’s not really “who I am” but rather a view and summation of my own life experience. In the same way that writing is a way to reflect back on what we think, putting down the felt experience of a memory is a way for us to relive it, and in a way modify how we relive it, to reflect on those little sticking points that latch onto us even years later.