A Hitchhiker's Guide to a Wounded Mind
Desert highways won’t take you to Huck Finn’s America
Leaving Las Vegas on a motorized trike after 58 dead, 867 wounded
A schizoid nation of nurses, meth-heads and bums mourns losses it can barely name
There are days when whole cities are harried and unshaven; sleepless nights when the sunrise brings no cleansing promise to man or woman alike. Apocalyptic neon columns cut the dawn, leering over the desert, where hundreds of thousands of souls linger in disillusionment and fear as the sirens endlessly scream. It was the morning of October 2nd in Las Vegas, 2017. Sleep-deprived nurses from area hospitals dragged themselves through drive-thrus for coffee, listlessly muttering their orders, shocked by the carnage they’d witnessed only the night before.
In line at the Goodwill in Henderson, just south of the city, one of the nurses seemed liable to combust. His eyes hung down, morose and lamblike, somehow ancient in their grief. He moved up in line clutching a t-shirt bearing the word “HOGWARTS” — a gift for his girlfriend, he said. It was only his first week as a clinical nursing student. As the cashier’s …
The Front Porch
There is no shortage of opinions going around these days. What they mostly have in common is that the people who offer them don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about, and at the same time imagine that they themselves will bear zero responsibility for the consequences of their passionate opinionating, which removes any normal incentive to tell the truth. If someone begins a sentence with some version of the words “I believe,” it is therefore a sure-fire signal that what follows will be some form of a lie, which will in turn diminish our ever-shrinking common reservoir of trust.
Lying is in general a nasty business that should always make you feel a bit low. It’s bad for your character, and it almost always means treating someone else unfairly, by denying them access to an accurate picture of reality, which is why even well-intentioned lies can be so cruel. Lying interferes with the human …
Johnny Carson's Secret
Treated hog farmers and foul-mouthed comics with equal courtesy
Didn’t give a crap about being on television
Late night king’s legacy offers fleeting glimpse of hope that the legion of second and third-generation Carson imitators including David Letterman, Jay Leno, Howard Stern, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and that weird Scottish guy named Craig something who was on TV for a minute before COVID might one day take a page from the master’s script and bugger off to Africa
The kids were mostly asleep when the funniest thing ever to happen on network television aired around midnight on January 12th, 1979. It would be decades before children had portable digital slot machines to unnaturally stretch out their days, and there were no DVRs either, meaning that the moment had the tenuousness of any other unconfirmable rumor — it could not be shared or repackaged or distorted. As far as anyone knew, Richard Pryor impersonating a stuttering Chinese waiter on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson could only be experienced once, within the dying present of the lived moment.
“I mean the man was stuttering in Chinese!” pleaded the stand-up legend, priming a supposedly disbelieving audience for the astonishments to come. Pryor fluttered his eyelids and quivered his entire body as he forced a pileup of consonants through his clenched mouth. On the vowels his whole face suddenly …
