A clever but devastating headline

This is evocative prose. You’re right here in my home state of Nevada with me. Which, I should mention, is also a state of mind. It smells like sagebrush, or if you’re very lucky, the dust churned up by rain. There’s the faint buzz or crickets, or if you’ve hit the 777 on the whirling jackpot slot of years, the hum of cicadas. It’s extremely hot. Or extremely cold. You compare the feeling to existing within a convection oven or a meat locker. You can’t see a town for miles and the last town we passed through wasn’t really a town, and I’ve forced you to eat food from a gas station. Because there aren’t restaurants. No one knows about gluten-free or vegan. MSG or bust!!!!!!!

But you could see the stars at night and we made a wish on the big dipper. I promised that the little dipper was up there, and you might have believed me, but probably not. Steam from the hot springs, from our breath, swirled into the desert and the big wide expanse of this nowhere.

I try to make sense of it all. I hear you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave. Art Bell’s aliens or maybe it was top-secret government agents who captured those lyrics from a song strummed out on guitar in the Great Basin in 1970? I’ve heard if you play it backward with a video projector, it will broadcast the Barbie movie.

Honestly, I’m just trying to survive my own life.

But that, of course, is a stupid thing to say.

Everybody does. Nobody does.

We write anyway.