​as im writing this i'm on a road trip in utah.

 

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whenever i see something so terrifyingly beautiful in nature i think about how nice it would be to kill myself there. fittingly it happens often in high places, it’s easy and natural to imagine jumping off. i've seen patches of shrubland blackened from dense overhead clouding, stratified layers of red rock, powdery sand. forests of dead trees resting on their side, stretching on for miles. glowing expanses of flat, mountainous canyon land; contradictory land washed by sunrise. my lips are dry, there’s dust in my hair; the dirt here is punished by the hale beams above, like an eldest-daughter-gifted-burnout-millennial loved too much by her parents. you look out into the vast tract of land, your eyes tear after a horizon that’s impossibly far, you say to yourself: “this and a cigarette.”

 

 

 

there are places here that come to you as revelations: decades-long delayed gratification that fulfill what a life of american media consumption has sold you. you can’t look past the mountains, experience the visual paling of the hills beyond, and not understand the westward expansion, manifest destiny, the religious fervor coursing through the ley lines of america. i get mormonism. i see you, nara smith. temple square takes up multiple blocks in the center of salt lake city, ten acres in its heart. it is composed of staggering, humbling, austere architecture. the lds conference center is practically a modernist rendition of the hanging gardens of babylon, or the mortuary temple of hatshepsut. the schoenstein organ, installed in its 21,000 seating theater, threatens you, its pipes mirror the baleen of a whale, closing over you. two missionariesapproach you, one wearing the flags of the netherlands, the other from the philippines, in ankle-length, flower-print dresses. at their sides are the quilted cos bags, and you can’t help but laugh.

 

 

 

an unsubtle rush of wonder hits me as a jeep tagged in wwg1wga decals passes by. it’s like the feeling i got spotting alex consani walk past while i was in dimes. it’s exclamatory, of disbelief, like some child who was read gulliver’s in the nursery discovering lilliput was real. or like visiting a zoo. realtree camo, american flag hat, is that praying? SALEM merch? im in utah, his jeans are too tight, his face doesnt look gay enough. seeing soldiers in the west 4th station is like seeing the tourist traps along the utah highways pastiche old time-y cowboy saloons. i get up from my hotel room at 8am and i'm overjoyed to see the middle-aged men and women drinking two beers, down $200 at a vegas casino. im slack jawed in awe at the airport slot machine: it’s a sign of the promised land. this is exactly what I thought america would be.

 

 

 

it’s gratifying that none of my impressions were wrong and my ego is intact. when you visit everywhere else, you fall into the pitfalls of caricature, the lens of a location filtered through american hegemony. at this point i don’t think i can say anything with intuition, definitively, about the places i’ve lived in pre-america. it doesn't make sense that jacob elordi grew up in private school melbourne. he’s part of the chalamet-allen-white-faist white boy industrial complex. it’s impossible in america, because it is the caricaturizer. everything you ever believed about this place will come true. hold onto your thoughts. clutch those fat pearls. the prophets wrote in a perfect tense, because everything they predicted that would come true may as well have happened already. jesus rose again in texas, because they found a vast wealth of lithium in pennsylvania. if you read the cliff faces in utah you’ll come to the same conclusions.