(I broke-up this ride with a night in Katherine. Which meant a six hour bus trip from Darwin to Katherine the first day, then a seventeen hour ride from Katherine to Alice Springs the next. If you follow along on a map the route went from Darwin, to Katherine, to Birdum, to Tennant Creek, to Alice Springs.)

The fires outside Birdum1 made the already impossible red landscape redder, adding glowing rings of red fire to a dirt red ground saturated with red termite mounds, and red smog to the sunset red sky.

That cinematic entry, after four hours of unchanging but dramatic scenery, fit Birdum’s prominence on past maps — long a solitary dot in the Australian outback, a distinction earned only because cartographers loathe voids — quite an achievement for a truck stop at the center of a vast governmental zone housing maybe fifty full time residents.

This night however the single truck stop was buzzing, its dining room full of truckers in their high-vis jumpsuit uniforms gossiping over steaming plates served by sweet Vietnamese ladies, and an actual queue at the front desk, of FIFO2s (temporary workers) checking into the motel, their names scratched off one by one from a list provided by the company they were to be attached to for the next six weeks.

There were eight in the line, all expressionless, inured, dressed in similar well-worn high-vis outfits, with rucksacks stuffed with rig tools and clothes slung over their shoulders, all had clearly done some version of this before. Maybe not in Birdum, but in some other dot on the Australian map. Six had come from my bus, four had gotten on with me in Katherine (where I’d spent the prior night).

I’d found them sitting in the sliver of shade cast by a sign, their work gear scattered around them. They were friendly, but spare and weary men, who when I asked them where they were going mentioned a name not on the map, then shrugged and said, “some oil town” when I asked where that was, and when I pushed further and asked where they had come from they said, “Some other oil town three days away.” When I pestered them even more, one pulled out papers, scanned them, handed them to me, and said, “they tell us where to go and we go” and when I tried to act in the know, and said, “I was just in Perth and there is a lot of oil there….” one interrupted me, and said, “There is oil everywhere in Australia mate” and went back to staring straight ahead and that was that and I went back to waiting with them in silence, all of us watching an aboriginal man splayed out in a circle of shade on the sidewalk yards from us. Two made bets on if he would move when the sun inching towards his head hit him, and when it did, and he got up on his knees and crawled a few yards towards the center, yawned, and plopped right back down again, money was taken out and exchanged.

We had stopped several times prior to Birdum in equally minuscule towns, mostly to drop off cargo from the hold and attached trailer, the larger source of Greyhounds revenue than us riders, but a young Indonesian woman did get off, with five large trunks, at one of the stops, to work at the restaurant attached to a gas station, a hardship move from her prior job in Darwin which she explained would allow her to stay a third year in Australia.

In Birdum we picked up a new rider, a sullen man whose baseball cap (with the single loud word “CUNT” written on it) suggested I should probably leave him be, to sleep the remaining twelve hours to Alice Springs. That wasn’t the obvious thing to do, since everyone else on the bus all knew each other, chatted often, or at least acknowledged each other, a result of there being so few of us, the length of the ride (twenty-two hours from Darwin to Alice Springs), and the general friendliness of Australians. With the loss of the six FIFOs, and the young woman, Cunt-hat joined myself, the two drivers (who alternated sleeping in back and driving), half-sisters accompanying a rambunctious child headed from Katherine to Alice for a funeral, and three aboriginals, two a couple heading back south to “the bush to be with their family”, the other a single man also headed to the bush because he “needed to dry out”, although the bottles wedged in his backpack suggested his commitment to that was tentative.

The bus's mix of temporary workers — both Australian and immigrant — alongside aboriginals, mirrored the demographics of the outback we were driving through, at least in spirit. It is a region of the transient, because while the aboriginal residents are born, raised, and live there, they are also constantly moving between bush communities and the cities, a physical manifestation of an identity suspended — and often fractured — between a sixty-five thousand year old legacy of bush tucker and the reverence of nature, and a modernity of McDonald’s and cases of Victoria Bitter.

Katherine, where I’d spent the night after riding from Darwin, was like that. Half the population had come to work high-paying jobs there, mostly in mining and/or the massive farms irrigated by the aquifer beneath the town. The other half are aboriginals, who while they do “come from there”, what that translates to is that every few weeks they catch a ride into Katherine from the bush, to hang in the McDonald’s, or the small mall adjacent to the bus stop. But mostly from what I saw, to binge drink in the Katherine Hotel, a cavernous block sized bar with bouncers from New Zealand, swollen affable Māori men drawn by the exceptional pay (“The highest paying policing job in Australia!”), who are effectively school marms crossed with prison guards, constantly monitoring who is allowed to drink that day, and exactly how much, and who is currently on the banned list.

For my twenty-four hours in the town, from the second I got off the bus until I got back on, I was approached by aboriginals on the wrong side of that list, asked to buy them liquor, or by those temporarily on the good side, for one more dollar to buy one more drink. Each of them was polite mind you, friendly, with a sense of humor about the situation. Walking through Katherine wasn’t a case of continually nagging desperation, of hard-edged aggressive begging, but more one of constant tentative requests, of being swarmed by melodic and harmless gnats. None though — not the drunk nor those presently denied being drunk — seemed to have a job. Which clashed with the rest of the town, which was industrious. Including the young Indonesian woman at my hotel who came to Katherine to make money to send to her parents, something she had to do since they were farmers and she was their only daughter, and that’s just what you do as a child. You go abroad, work at whatever job you can get, and then also go to night school, to get a degree so that you can eventually earn enough for them to retire. Did she like Katherine, Australia? Yes, she liked both, but she hadn’t seen much of either since she didn’t get a lot of time off and she really didn’t know that many Australians since she lived with friends she had made since arriving, and all of those were like her, but from Vietnam, China, and Sudan.

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(Prior pieces on Australia: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise, Twenty-seven hours on the Aussie dog, Alice Springs, and Final thoughts on Australia, and from last week, Perth.

I’m in a McDonald’s in Katherine, half way on my bus trip to Alice Springs. I have more to write about that, and about Alice Springs, but until I can get settled and figure it all out, here is an essay I wrote over last few days. Sorry for being a little late!)

Travel comes with lows and highs and right now I’m at a low, and have been for over a week. I’m not saying this for sympathy — I have a great life and job — but rather because I don’t want to lie to people and suggest being in another country automatically means constant happiness. Or that everything always goes as planned.

On my last few days in Perth, a beautiful but lonely city, as I was navigating another screen trying to book another round of bus trips and hotels, and failing because getting a room in small town Western Australia is close to impossible for less than five hundred a night, I decided I was done with this whole walking the world thing and needed to quit for a bit. In a moment of haste I booked a flight to Sydney, then moved my flight back home to an earlier date, but a few days later my mood lifted and I regretted that, and booked a flight to Darwin, where I am now, with the plan to head to Alice Springs by bus.

When I was a trader (on Wall Street) I used to say the easy part of the job was evaluating risk, and the difficult part was controlling your emotions. Emotional management, not risk management, was the actual key to being successful at the job, and that’s also true of what I do now.

On this trip I’ve failed at the emotional management part. I was down for a few days — lonely, a feeling magnified by being turned upside down by twelve hour time change, removed from everyone and everything I knew, in a town bereft of people — and looked forward and saw only more challenges and emptiness, and I hit the eject button, to a place I felt more at home, Sydney.

That worked for a few days, because as I wrote last year, it might be the most comfortable city in the world, assuming you can afford it. A first world city, immersed in physical beauty, with a healthy balance between work and leisure. So for a week I spent each morning at my local cafe chatting with employees (from Vietnam, Indonesia) and regulars, then went for a ten mile walk along the southern shore of cliffs, beaches, and inlets, napped, and ended the day with an exceptional meal (Australia has the world’s best Asian cuisine) and sipping ciders and reading in a pub.

That’s all well and good, but that’s not why I travel. I travel to experience the different, and most of Australia isn’t different, not to an American at least. Sydney is a fantastic town to move to, get a job in, and start a family in, but it doesn’t work for what I am doing right now, which is trying to figure out how the world works. It is different enough to feel imbalanced, to feel isolated, but not enough to be stimulated.

As I noted last year the US and Australia are strikingly similar. Not only are they so alike at a thin level — in built environment, and all the necessities of life, to a point where a first time US visitor to Australia will experience whatever the opposite of culture shock is (Culture embrace, cultural salve, culture balm), but they share a thick culture. They have roughly the same national purpose, the same animating purpose that the majority of citizens have without knowing they have it.

Both have a national dream, or a vision of success, which are minor variations of the same thing — which is to be justly rewarded for all of your hard work with a house of your own, personal safety, a plethora of free time to explore your hobbies, and a better life for your children. It is an entrepreneurial understanding of success that binds the otherwise disparate citizens together, along with a moral code descended from the Old Testament.

That house isn’t any house though, it is a suburban house, a stand alone gated home on a plot of land in a community of the like-minded with as many cars as people. It is a very individualistic concept of the good life, in the sense that while you live in a community, you have your own estate, even if it might be less than a quarter of an acre.

It is the democratization of the lordly life for the well-to-do plebes. A fenced-in home that is yours and yours alone, on a quarter-acre yard, with a two-car garage, is a trickle down version of the English manor, complete with “having a carriage (car),” for the masses.

As I’ve written many times, the English-speaking world’s love of suburbia isn’t an accident, isn’t a lifestyle forced on the masses by car-loving legislatures, but a revealed preference of the citizens. They vote for it, they flock to it, they want it, because it’s in their cultural blood.

That Australia and the US share this vision isn’t surprising, because both are the children of the United Kingdom, and both have taken their parents’ concept of felicity (a manor) and run with it, unshackling it from limited land and the despotic monarchs who controlled membership, opening up membership to all.

This isn’t a new insight, as Tocqueville wrote almost two hundred years ago when visiting the new US, “The American is the Englishman left to himself.” That is, free to be what they want to be. I would refine that to say, the American (and Australian) is the Englishman finally allowed, by democracy and geography, to flourish.

That the children had a new slate to build on certainly matters as well. The bulk of development happened after the widespread adoption of the car, and that as much as anything, has determined how the US and Australia built themselves.

As I wrote last year,

The irony is that the UK itself has far fewer suburbs than its children, a result of a lack of space, a more rigid class system, and a calcified landscape whose development preceded the availability of the car.

The mass-produced car was revolutionary because it made these mini-manors accessible to everyone, providing them with their own version of the English concept of success. It allowed the English-speaking masses to achieve their lordly aspirations by creating modern suburbs that strike the perfect balance: sprawling enough for individual yards, yet clustered enough to maintain economic efficiency.

There are differences of course, most surface level, but some stubbornly constitutive, driven primarily by geography. If you populate disparate lands with the same people the topography won’t entirely disappear, much as flowing water carves out different paths based on the surrounding geology. Geography isn’t destiny, but it is a current that continually nudges a culture.

All the differences between Australia and the US are a result of geography, with the US having received the world’s geographical trophy, with Australia closer to the bottom than top. I could go on endlessly about how naturally gifted the US is, with an embarrassment of geographical riches, but Australia has little of that, other than picturesque scenery and enough valuable rocks to fund its first world lifestyle.

While not a surprising insight, I keep emphasizing how empty Australia is because it is hard to comprehend exactly how empty it is until you come here, and spend twenty seven hours on a bus crossing only half of its width and the only communities you pass through are titular — names attached to an outpost without citizens.

Australia is massive, but it is also isolated, largely inhospitable, and harsh, with only a sliver of resplendent landscape, primarily along the coastline1. Consequently despite being roughly the same physical size as the US, it has one tenth the people, which explains the greatest difference — a physical sparseness that manifests as, depending on your temperament, either a relaxed gentility, an admirable self-reliance, and a stubborn ruggedness, or a crude, hollowed-out, emptiness.

The other major difference is also about geography. Both US and Australia have embraced being nations of immigrants and over the course of their short histories have had fairly liberal entrance policies, especially over the last several decades, which has made Australia more South Asian, and US more Latino. Filling your country up with Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians versus Mexicans and Central Americans has a dramatic impact, beyond what type of family-run restaurant do you find in every town.

(PS: It’s an interesting question to ask if “the lord’s life” as the inherited concept of success makes the English-speaking world more open to immigration than other cultures. It’s easy to be here in Australia, where almost all the service workers are Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Filipinos, on three-year work visas, and wonder if immigration isn’t really about bringing in a servant class for everyone. Of importing inexpensive help for the newly minted middle class lords2. )

There is a singular difference though which isn’t just about geography, but is about people, and that is the Aboriginals, who while they make up only about four percent of Australia’s population, have had an outsized impact on its history, culture, and its sense of self.

While the Aboriginal population is minimal in the SE coast where the majority of Australians live, they are a significant percentage of the Outback, especially in all the fringe communities in the middle of a nowhere gifted with the precious minerals and explosive gases that fund Australia’s lavish lifestyle.

While the open West plays a large role in US mythology, the Outback here is significantly more important. It is central to Australia’s concept of itself, and more precisely what makes it special.

The Outback, and the Aboriginal population, is what makes Australia Australia, and without it you are left with a poorer, emptier, hotter US.

All of the above is basically a thousand word explanation for why I made my second change of plans, and flew to Darwin with the plan to eventually hop on a bus to Alice Springs, after famously saying last year, it is a shithole, and while I’m glad I saw it, I had no interest in returning.

I’ve liked Darwin, which like Perth and Townsville, is a port town that ships out those valuable rocks and LNG to Asia, but also cattle raised in the interior, and consequently it has the feel of a Texas town, a rough and tumble redneck town, with Rodeos, 4x4 trucks, and Stetsons and boots, although in Australia paired with footie jerseys and shorts, rather than button-ups and jeans.

During my four days walking around, there were times I would forget where I was, and given the weather, fauna, and built infrastructure — the low slung commercial district, the waterfront parks, the busy roads lined by box-stores and strip malls — and think I was in Galveston, or Sarasota FL, or Wilmington NC.

Then all of a sudden you turn a corner and spot fifteen aboriginals sprawled on blankets underneath a tree, and realize you are definitely not in the US — people who still look like what they are very recently descended from, people who successfully lived and thrived with only stone-aged technology for sixty-five thousand years, but dressed up in modern clothes — footie outfits, Tupac shirts, Michael Jordan jerseys, Raiders hats, button-up western shirts, flip-flops, or no shoes at all.

They occupy all the liminal shaded spaces (under park trees, in walkways, bus stops, public parks), lounging. On their blankets, with bags around them, drinking or otherwise doing nothing. Maybe yelling at each other, some passed out, most just sitting though, looking forward, without much movement.

I understand this might be rude to say, rude to write about, but I mean this with no disrespect, but they are impossible to ignore because of how striking in appearance they are, contrary to how we think of modern man. They appear as ghosts from our very distant past, emerging whole from another time. Dark wide open faces, with spindly arms and legs, toothpick thin, and big barreled torsos, and then wild wiry hair, either shockingly white, or dark, sometimes stuffed into a baseball cap, or under a wool beanie regardless of the heat.

I understand some of you will be put off by such a blunt description, will find it “othering”, but the Aboriginals are very much an other, and to pretend they are not is denial. Being the other does not necessarily mean being inferior, or lesser, but different, and as I wrote last time I was in Alice Springs, I am genuinely fond of aboriginals and their culture. They are sweet, thoughtful people, who I find to be generous and forthcoming, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way, as if they are people who need our help and our sympathy. They have agency, like every person does.

I travel to try and understand how the world works, and human history is one of cultural conflict, of varying ways of being human coming into contact with each other, and one “winning” from that, and another “losing.” Aboriginals definitely lost, every technologically inferior group has regardless of how successful they were prior to contact, and two hundred or so years later Australia is still dealing with that, trying to figure out how to navigate building a country composed of such different groups, one dominant and the majority, the other a clear minority, but who have lived here at least three hundred times longer. That longevity, which in historical terms is about as permanent as you can get, has to count for something, assuming you are working in a thoughtful moral system.

Consequently, while I am not in denial about the problems in the Aboriginal community, I’ve got a lot of empathy for the position it finds itself in, and understand and support most of their claims, which I will write more about next week.

But they, and the question of cultural conflict, is why I returned to this “insignificant” part of Australia, why I am returning to Alice Springs next week, why I will take another twenty-four hour bus trip across nothing — because the Aboriginals, and the Outback they live in, is what makes Australia Australia.

You can come to Australia and happily spend a month sipping pints in Paddington, going for nature walks, and sunning on the beach. There is nothing wrong with that and I look forward to doing it many more times in my life, including at the end of this trip, but doing only that won’t teach you much about what makes this country unique.

For that, you have to go to Alice Springs, even if it is a shithole.

(This is my second time in Australia. Here are five pieces from my prior trip: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise, Twenty-seven hours on the Aussie dog, Alice Springs, and Final thoughts on Australia.)

As our plane to Perth angled out of Sydney, its full magnificence — the harbor, cliffs, and beaches — spread diorama like beneath us, I mentioned to the elderly woman next to me, “You have such a beautiful country, so gifted” and she shrugged, “Too many people. We had a good time (in Sydney), but I’m glad to be going home.” I laughed, saying that’s opposite of what I’d found in Australia, which felt empty, to which she replied, “Wait until you get to Perth. We have the same beauty, but without the crowds.” When I told her I am a travel writer coming to Western Australia for the first time, she added, “Well, don’t write anything good about Perth. We don’t want any more people.”

In my week in Perth I’ve heard that same sentiment from everyone I’ve talked to — which is they don’t want me to tell you how fantastic Perth is — which it is (more on that below), but admittedly I only got that opinion from a few people, because Perth is empty. Very very empty. Not in a “they don’t have any people here” way, which they obviously do, but in a “they have a quarter of the people they could have and sometimes you will be walking and realize you haven’t seen a person or a car in fifteen minutes and you look around, struck with how you are all alone, and you begin to believe you’re in a stage setting of a city, where two thirds of the actors have been plucked out, removed to play some sort of trick on you” way.

It’s not that the city is destitute, ragged, or falling apart, rather it’s the opposite. It is immaculate, with extensive neighborhoods of ridiculously handsome homes with well manicured lawns, parks with well-groomed playgrounds, high streets of European cafes and top-notch Asian restaurants. The infrastructure is all there for a lot of people to live fulfilling lives. Fantastic first world infrastructure, which magnifies the solitude, because it feels off, and/or wrong. It feels as if it is your fault you are alone, since there must be fun being had that you simply don’t know about, or the emptiness is because of a recent catastrophe. Maybe a plague, or pandemic, or nuclear holocaust.

Right next to my apartment is a tidy pocket park, with playground, dog walk, bathroom, and a garden of plants that only could be found in Western Australia. It’s idyllic and as I passed it my first night I imagined spending my week sitting there, reading, watching kids play, making friends with the retirees, but since then I’ve never seen anyone in it other than solitary morning walkers anxiously scolding their dog for not defecating fast enough.

Over two million people live in Perth, so of course there’s plenty going on, with the peaks of action and density that every large city has — malls with shoppers, bars with celebrations, office buildings with workers, restaurants with diners. But here in Perth they are isolated, localized points of action, where everything falls off rapidly beyond their walls. You leave a shop, and within a block you are all alone. It is the Perth power law of people — excitement drops off as the inverse of the square of distance from the action.

It is unnerving, but it shouldn’t matter, not rationally, since you can still navigate between those fortresses of excitement, yet it has mattered to me, despite being used to being alone, and it has affected my week here, covering it with a thin blanket of ennui. Which is unfortunate, because Perth is a singular and remarkable city and contrary to what everyone has told me, I will loudly announce that more people could and should move here, since Perth has a lot going for it.

It is a fully functional major city, with good jobs, that because of that emptiness, is especially relaxing, without all the stress of modern city life, like finding a parking spot, or traffic, or fighting the crowds1.

It’s set in a physically singular location, with a gazillion miles of beaches, and flora and fauna that’s head turning, and frankly absurd. Walking from downtown to the beach, my ten mile daily walk, passes through suburban neighborhoods festooned with monumental trees (Norfolk Island Pines, Tuart and Jarrah Eucalyptus) that tower over everything, or are perfumed (Peppermint), or that bloom only once in decades (Agave americana).

Each lawn — lush, well maintained, and highly curated — even those of the most humble houses, could be featured in Homes and Gardens. Add to that the swarms of enormous, raucous, birds, nesting in those trees, whose collective human like wails make the crepuscular hours sound like you’re adjacent to a nursery under assault, and you have a magical, majestic, and chimerical setting that is something straight out of Dr Seuss.

Yet the citizens who live here are anything but dreamers. Perth is the most grounded, most practical of Australia’s major cities because Perth is adjacent to what keeps Australia wealthy — mines of coveted rocks, and deposits of combustible gases.

It’s appropriate that I came here directly from the US Midwest, after writing a piece extolling its virtues, especially how the citizens have jobs that tether them to reality. How building tangible things (manufacturing), means they can only get so many fancy (and absurd) notions about themselves, and their place in the world. If you have one foot firmly on the earth, then you are more likely to be, well, grounded.

Perth is that for Australia, because Australia gets almost all its money from digging up those rocks and capturing those gasses and selling them to China and the rest of Asia. Almost all of which is done in the desolate stretches of Western Australia, with Perth as the lifeline to all of that.

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Each morning I wake up and go to the beach1, without crowds or sticky salt water. After a short swim, because I’m not much of a beach person, I leave for a ten mile walk on small shaded roads through forests and fields. Then in the afternoon I read in the McDonald’s, or in a park, or the library, and then at night I either go to a dive bar (I’ve got five excellent choices where I can get twenty five ounce drafts for five or less), or one of the six craft beer places nearby.

I’ve been resting for the last ten days before my long trip to Australia, and doing it in the Midwest — Northern Indiana, Michigan City to be exact — because it might be my favorite part of the US. It is certainly the most underrated one. I’ve written before about why I like the Midwest, so since I’m relaxing, I’ll quote myself,

I keep coming back to the Midwest because there is a relaxed contentment here that I find refreshing. The American Dream is largely working here again for both the front-row and back-row, after a rough couple of decades, at least relative to the rest of the U.S. I saw this in Michigan City, in South Chicago, in Duluth, and points in between.

There are respected jobs in the Midwest for the front-row who chose to stay, as well as the back-row—all of which you can get without long resumes built on lots of schooling and accumulated debt, and that makes all the difference. Housing is also far more affordable, and housing is probably the single biggest economic factor in the American Dream. You can’t believe in America if you can’t afford a ranch home with a two-car garage.

The result is a vibe here that is especially refreshing because of the contrast to the cynicism I find in a lot of the Northeast, where housing is less affordable and jobs less fulfilling for those not in the front-row.

The type of work available is important. Manufacturing is still a major employer in the Midwest and still respected. People build tangible things, and others understand and appreciate that, and so there is a dignity in that type of work here that is missing from places where front-row jobs dominate.

People here have careers that tether them to physical reality, which means a culture (thick and thin) can only drift so far. You can only get so many fancy (and absurd) notions about you, and your place in the world, and what it means to be happy, if you have one foot firmly on the earth.

The nasty and demeaning version of this is saying simple people need simple jobs, but that is front-row cope. Everyone, regardless of abilities and aspirations, is better served by being grounded, and the further you remove yourself from the consequences of your actions, the more likely you are to become supercilious, arrogant, and alone, and few escape that life without eventually crashing hard.

I’ve spent so much of my prior years writing about the decline of the American Dream, that my time here in the Midwest has been especially refreshing. It gives me hope that we’ve bottomed out and I can see the path forward—one where place is still a capital-G Good for most Americans, and a refined version of the American Dream unifies the country again. A just-industrialized-enough post-industrial America, where our shared thick culture binds us together.

Where people of all educational levels can find dignity in work, meaning in community, and home in the place where they were born. The Midwest shows it’s possible to recover. Let’s hope the rest of America catches up.

What strikes me this trip is besides being polite, people here are not performative. They aren’t navel-gazing self-aware, playing up a role, a stereotype they saw online, like Southerners and Hillbillies more and more do, as social media osmosis has made everyone influencer aligned. I’m not even sure what the Midwest stereotype is, beyond being polite and naively sincere, which is not really something you can play up.

There is no cloyingly saccharine politeness here, no nosy time-wasting grilling, rather it is a genuine hold the door, say hello, and then move on politeness, that only goes deeper if both want it, or if you are clearly in need of help.

Between jobs that ground them, and with few aspirations to act a part, people here are consequently comfortable in their own skin, and that makes for a very relaxing time. I’ve spent more evenings here in dive bars than I want to admit, and I’ve never yet seen anything close to a fight. No spats, no arguments over anything more intense than sports, and that is always done with humor2.

That lack of confrontation extends to politics, and while this part of Northern Indiana might have the greatest density of US flags, I’ve seen no political signs, not from either side. Whatever people’s views on elections, they largely keep them to themselves, a marked contrast to the South, where its famous politeness ends when elections begin, and especially the North East, where politics is morality.

Labeling a people as “real” is abused to a point of meaninglessness, but if it is to have any value, it’s about a genuineness divorced from promotion, and bounded by proximity to the logistical necessities of life, and by that measure, the Midwest is the most “real” place in America, and why I would suggest to any foreigner wanting to “see the real America” they should focus on the Midwest first. It’s not that they are more American than any other region, but that you can view America more easily, more inexpensively, and comfortably.

Life here in the Midwest is very good, at the material and spiritual level, and I’m surprised more people haven’t figured that out. Maybe it’s the harsh winters, maybe the stigma of the de-industrialized past, but whatever the reason, it still feels as if moving to the Midwest, or staying here for your life, is seen as consolation prize, a lesser thing that you have to explain. That is silly, because as I keep discovering, it’s a great place to build a fulfilling life, with good jobs, cities with a plethora of the diversions citizens now expect, while not being too taxing, or stressful, and so I would bet on its image rebounding. And, as I’m embarrassed to say I only just realized, it also has great beaches!

I’ve got the best job, and all you readers are the reason, and I’m thankful for that, but there are times when I want to go for a walk without thinking about what I can take away from it, can sit in a bar and talk with whoever without thinking “wonder what I can write about this?” This last ten days have been like that, and I’ve kept my camera in my backpack, and tried to empty my mind of looking for content. To be part of the Midwest, down to the attitude of being happy to exist, without constantly trying to find the self promotion angle.

So, in that vein, I’ll end this short essay here, because Culver’s is about to open, and I want a ButterBurger and Concrete mixer. If you know me, you know how hard it is to stop me from going to McDonald’s, and Culver’s has accomplished that. Well, at least for dinner.

Why is it all the same?

There is a nagging feeling you can get when you travel, that it is all the same. It’s an especially depressing thing for someone who travels as much as me to believe. It’s not that just buildings start looking alike, that downtowns take on the same form, but landscape as well. Everything becomes one, and you start to think of yourself as a widget moving along a conveyor belt, jostled along from factory to factory.

I get it often, especially when I’m jet-lagged, on a bus heading from an airport, after the first few moments of excitement of being somewhere new evaporates, and look out the window, at the side of the road and see the same trees, the same fields of pines, or green overgrowth, the strip along the road cluttered with the same litter, the guardrails of the same material, with the same dingy dirt color to them, their pylons stuck in the same concrete, the cars around you doing the same long commute, or pulling the same logistics of life.

It’s an insidious thought to have as a travel writer, because there’s no point in putting yourself through the maze of flying twenty-seven hours to not find enchantment.

Yet, while I do have these thoughts more often than I would like to admit, they always drift away because I eventually meet people, get out among the crowds, and am reminded that culture isn’t physical — that’s only the backdrop — but it’s social.

This vacation I’ve been reading “The Adventures of Augie March”, by Saul Bellow, which seemed appropriate to the Midwest, a “great American novel” set in Chicago. I’ve enjoyed it, despite its often unnecessarily opaque prose, that serves little purpose, especially since he doesn’t have the lyricism of Melville.

Then I found this excerpt, where the hero (Augie) is riding around Chicago on the elevated, and becomes depressed by the uniformity, the sameness of everything (highlights mine),

“so going around the city on the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stove-side cat because of the closeness inside; and there was something fuddling besides in the mass piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and the bricks of buildings. To sit and be trundled, while you see: there’s a danger in that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard goods; if there’s not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there’s some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated. There haven’t been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.”

Again, Bellow is in my view unnecessarily complex, but he’s right here. Yes, everything does look the same, a result that the physical world imposes on us (there are only so many ways to make a working life), but that dreariness “begets its own fire” because it’s impossible for humans to not be social, to not create something in, or with others.

You cannot have cities without civilizations, or at least without enchantments. Even in my worst trips (Phoenix, Dakar) I’ve found plenty of beauty, the sublime, and humor.

It’s now been about ten years since I wrote Dignity, and someone asked me what about it I would update now, and it’s the lack of humor in the book. Even in the most dire circumstances people still laugh, and make others laugh. It might be dark humor, but it is humor.

I’ve speculated before about why Anthony Bourdain killed himself, and it’s entirely speculation, but there is something about the setting that’s so familiar for me. A hotel room, another stop in endless wanderings that are supposed to be magical, but at some point you have begun to find oppressive. If you let that happen to yourself, and you don’t stop (and you should stop at that point), then in Bellow’s words, you have become a “bobbin for endless thread”, spinning around the globe as a vehicle for fame/fortune/(insert another external good), while stuck in the same mental place.

The antidote I’ve found is to become a regular at an unremarkable place. An Izakaya you choose randomly, an old mans bar, a restaurant without hype — and after a few days you will see that while every place might look the same, at least materially, each has its own unique warmth, its own sense of place, and its own culture.

As I wrote before,

That’s one of my biggest travel tips — don’t stress too much about trying to maximize your experience. Give yourself room to let things develop naturally, and don’t feel you’re missing out if you fall into a rut. If you really like a restaurant, bar, or cafe, then go back!

When I look back on past trips, what I remember most are those moments that happened serendipitously, and you can maximize serendipity — primarily by walking a lot, with a healthy curiosity, which allows you to experience a city on all levels.

My upcoming Australia trip

I leave for Australia this Sunday,3 where I will be for five weeks, and hopefully this time I will see a Kangaroo. Last year, in five weeks, I didn’t manage to see a single one, not even during a twenty-seven hour bus ride from Townsville to Alice Springs. Dead or alive.

I arrive in Perth on Tuesday, where I will be for a week, before I’ll attempt to set off to Darwin via buses (and a single flight). Below is my current itinerary, although I can’t be certain I will be able to pull it off.

Bus to Newman (Leaves Tuesday 10 pm, arrives Wednesday 2 pm)

Fly to Port Hedland (Friday 12 pm flight, arrive 1 pm, then leave again at midnight)

Bus to Broome (get on at midnight Friday, arrive Saturday morning),

Bus to Kununurra (get on 6 am Tuesday, arrive 7 pm Tuesday)

Bus to Darwin (get on at 8 pm Thursday, arrive 8 am Friday)

Bus to Alice Springs (every week day, leave at 10 am, get in 7 am next day)

Then, somehow, make it to Sydney where I will spend the last several days

As usual, if you are around, please reach out, and we can go for a walk together, or just chat over a pint.

Until next week, be good!

(Last weekend I spoke at the Doomer Optimism conference, Another Life is Possible, at the Woodcrest Bruderhof community in Rifton, NY. Below is the talk I didn’t give, and then the talk I did, as well as thoughts a week removed.

The theme was “exploring the far-reaching effects of technology … and the search for meaning in a world increasingly defined by machines.” More on the Bruderhof, and who they are, further below.)

When I first moved to Brooklyn Heights it wasn’t yet the exemplary well-to-do NYC neighborhood it is now, it was only a few decades beyond its nadir, with a shabby gentility that made it attractive to people like me, with more ambition than money, to purchase an apartment to raise a family in.

The co-op my family chose wasn’t yet uniformly professionals, wasn’t only bankers, lawyers, and academics. On each floor there was at least one, or two, residents, mostly elderly single women, who’d been there since the “bad old days,” such as Rose, across my hall, in her early 90s, who had raised a family in the two bedroom, but was now alone, except for a part-time Jamaican nurse to manage her decline into dementia. A knock on my door meant that it was either Rose coming to tell me, “There is a Negro woman in my apartment, trying to steal my things, can you come remove her?” or the nurse coming to sit in peace for a few minutes, and complain about that “nasty racist woman.” Rose was certainly open to the accusation of racism, even before dementia took her mind away, although her judgements, always told with effervescence, weren’t confined to blacks, and weren’t singularly negative, since she would cheerfully tell you the shortcomings, and advantages, of every ethnic group, including her own Southern Italians, but in language offensive to all but 19th-century anthropologists.

Then there was Lee, of a similar age, who lived on the second floor with her three scruffy dogs, which she walked constantly, the dogs pulling her through Brooklyn Heights as she made her rounds, picking through trash bins, to collect treasures she brought back. She became a source of concern for the building, as her mind slipped further away, walking through the neighborhood to construct piles in her small apartment, with a tendency to leave her stove on, a problem I thought about often at 3 am, given that we shared an internal air shaft four floors removed.

Lee’s end wasn’t dignified, although she did her best to maintain grace. Social services were eventually called in, her stove disconnected and food deliveries set up, and then her dogs began to perish, before the last one was removed, and she was placed in a nursing home. She died a few months later, and when I went to her funeral, attended by a disconcertingly small number, there was a reproduction of a striking portrait of a beautiful young woman, which was Lee at nineteen. A painting, which they said, now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

By then I was no longer surprised that the bag-lady in my building used to be glamorous, because as I had learned something of her past, gleaned from gossip, but never told with certainty, that she had been a successful artist, a cellist, married to a pianist, and had a vibrant social life, before a decline that began a decade before I moved in.

I also knew, from my brief interactions with her, that she was no normal bag-lady. One morning, while I was heading out of the building through the back narrow corridor, pushing a stroller with two toddlers, while holding a third and two bags of garbage, she came bursting in, headed the other way, pulled by her three dogs, her arms full of discoveries, her bra outside her dress, and we became entangled. After a minute of awkwardness, when finally past each other, she turned to me and said, in her usual cheery way, “Aaah, the machinations of life!”

That moment, insignificant, was close to thirty years ago, and yet it’s one that I find myself thinking about often, muttering, “Aaah, the machinations of life” whenever I’m logistically challenged, or in an equally absurd situation of my own making. Such as two weeks ago, when I was half-way through my daily walk, carrying a backpack stuffed with books in extreme heat, to “train my body” and invest it with a sense of heroism, and I became the target for a cloud of deer-flies, so thick, so persistent to use my blood as an incubator, that I had to start running, swatting wildly at my head with my big floppy hat, hitting myself so firmly that I set my ears ringing until the next day.

When I finally made it to a spot where I could rest, bug free, where the road curves sharply at the foot of two steep hills, I took off my pack, and sat there on the edge of the lonely road, clothes drenched, laughing at myself, my body overheated, tears running down my cheeks, when a FedEx truck came barrelling down far too fast for the curve, and my eyes and the driver’s locked onto each other, him leaning against the centripetal force, his body almost falling out of the angled truck, as if he alone was going to keep it from tipping over, and we smiled at each other, a brief friendly glance, and as he rumbled up the hill, all wheels now firmly on the ground, he stuck a hand out, gave me a thumbs up, and once again, I said out loud to nobody, “Aaaah, the machinations of life.”

The absurd things we do to ourselves, to endow our lives with a sense of purpose, or we believe we have to do because we are trying to make it in an indecipherable world, trying to make sense of what it means to be alive, and to be fulfilled. Me in the hallway, an eager thirty-year-old banker, headlong into building a career and a family, something I did without much consideration, because that is what you do, and Lee convinced by some urge she had, born from a desire that only she could understand, that she needed to find every discarded treasure in Brooklyn Heights and bring it back to her apartment. (I’d thought of dropping off the more appealing discarded items from my apartment on her doormat, but then I realized she would get more satisfaction finding them out in the trash. Easter eggs need to be discovered, not handed over.)

Then me, almost thirty years later, banking career completed, trying to find fulfillment through extreme walks, which while not as inscrutable as Lee’s quest, isn’t that different, and the FedEx delivery guy, literally hurling headlong, barrelling towards his own rewarding career.

That people are always reaching for a higher purpose, the way a beaver builds a dam, is the foundation of my optimism. We are industrious, inquisitive, and always aiming for the Good. Dams are not enough for us, we must also know why we are here, and what it all means, so we construct elaborate theories, harness and unleash titanic amounts of energy, invent complex machines, all attempting to achieve complete knowledge.

Yet for all my optimism, I am also a skeptic, in that I have a fundamental humility, because I believe there are some questions no amount of additional computing time, no amount of additional variables in your model, no amount of additional data centers, can solve. We might aim for perfection, but we will never achieve it.

As Wittgenstein states,

I know that this world exists.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

Modern life is very good, but it isn’t complete, perfect, or necessarily fulfilling, because it never can be. That is why I sometimes overlap with critics of modernity — including the eccentric collection of localist, anti-tech, environmentalist, romanticist, spiritualists that gather under the online umbrella of Doomer Optimism.

Yet I don’t like the doomer word at all. I am not pessimistic, fatalistic, or nihilistic about the future, rather, I believe that we humans will never be satisfied, that the Good cannot be fully captured and achieved, at least here in the City of Man.

The anti-tech critics of modernity look at data centers and see evil, see the inhuman, see the soulless, see climate change. I look at them and mutter, “aaah, the machinations of life.” They are a physical manifestation of our drive, ingenuity, and curiosity, that has liberated us from so much physical suffering, but they also symbolize the absurd lengths we will go to try and solve it all, to try and defeat a God, to remove them from the picture, to make it all about us.

It isn’t enough to walk ten miles in the suffering heat with a backpack of books, you have to keep adding more and more books each walk.

That isn’t depressing to me, but rather almost beautiful. Our drive, pride, and even hubris is our feature, it is who we are, but it also is the source of our bugs, when it makes us blind to our limitations.

We have achieved so much because of that compulsion, and now assured of the material needs (food, water, medical care) necessary for a long physically pain-free life, gifted with a surfeit of leisure time, we engage in ever more absurd intellectual machinations (we live in a simulation! It’s a multiverse! Eleven dimensions, six curled up and unobservable!), manufacture ever larger castles of complexity trying to understand what it all means, and what the Good is.

We long ago achieved the physical good, and yet we are still unfulfilled, still restless. It’s not enough we live twice as long as our ancestors, but some strive for immortality, without ever first asking, why.

I have two snapping turtles that live in my pond, who I’ve been feeding for a decade now, Reginald and No-Name. Each summer evening I tap on the water and they come swimming, their noses poking out of the muck, to get their fill of chicken gizzards.

I’ve freed them from material discomfort, from having to spend their days hunting for frogs, gorging on discarded vegetation, and so I often wonder, what do they do with their lives now? I’ve taken away their purpose, and so I imagine they now bask in the sun in a state of turtle felicity. They don’t have an internal life, not that I know of, so I highly doubt they spend the time thinking about what it all means, how to be Good and what they must do to achieve it.

Only us humans do that and while we might turn that gift into a momentary curse through our own actions, we will never be able to bask in the sun without doubts. We will always, no matter how far we progress, find ourselves in situations of our own making, muttering, “aaah, the machinations of life.”

I wish in retrospect that I’d taken more time to try and talk to Lee, but I was too wrapped up in my own schemes, and she wasn’t forthcoming, politely brushing off anything other than brief acknowledgments.

Now I walk the world talking to other people, trying to listen to them, trying to understand what drives them, and trying to understand what they see as the point of life.

Last night I was in the bar Three Sheets, that lived up to its name. I sat with two women around my age, chain-smoking, telling me of their lives, which they acknowledged as complicated, with incomprehensibly complex family trees — “So Jerry Springer, I know.”

Between the two of them they had nine artificial joints, their bodies held together by modern medicine, procedures now so routine they can be done in a day, but so fantastic in my childhood they were the premise of a successful TV show: The Six Million Dollar Man, and then the Bionic Woman spin-off. We joked about that show, with them calling themselves the six-dollar women, the cost of their drinks, yet each was thankful for what they had, with the pain diminished, their mobility granted.

When at the end of the night, when I asked them if they were happy, the more talkative one laughed between coughs, then said, “Sure I am. I’m alive past when my parents died, bless them, they had such hard lives. I’ve finally found a good man. He’s an idiot at times, but he’s still a good man. I got some regrets, who doesn’t, but you can’t dwell. You know what I mean?”

I nodded, then asked, “You lost so many people close to you. So many. You ever think about what it all means though? About death. About why we here, what’s the point of it all?” and she laughed and said, “Sure, but you can’t dwell Right? That’s God’s job.”

The talk I gave

(Two prior essays of mine addressing similar topic: Modern Life is Good Actually, Is it Really so Much Better Now?)

I come here as a fully committed optimist, and to the degree I’m a doomer, it’s that I believe life is hard, has always been hard, and will continue to be hard, because that’s the permanent state of man — fallen, seeking the Good, but never fully achieving it.

Life here in the City of Man is rife with difficulties, it has always been that way, and it always will be, but life is getting better, and although there will be bumps in the road, mankind will endure, and will come out on the other side better.

Aristotle understood Man as an animal that can talk, and with that, reason, and with reason comes technology, and so Mankind and technology can never be separated. If reason is God’s gift, then so is Technology.

I giggle a little to myself when I see the well-intended across history, and there have always been these people, including in Aristotle’s time, when upset by the “new fashions,” confronted with the disruptions of a new invention, scurry off to try and live a life focused on a “more fulfilling past.”

As if there ever was a past where Nature wasn’t impacted by Mankind, and our technology.

Over in Foxwoods, the casino about two-hundred miles from here, there is a museum built by the Pequot tribe. It's a beautiful museum, flush with cash, because apparently monetizing the modern sins of your past colonialists is very profitable.

In that museum they have a small exhibit about Native American farming, and in it, they show the evolution of corn.

If you think God, when he created this earth, seeded it with a plant called corn that looks anything like what you buy now, and what organic farmers fleeing modernity try to grow with hoes and hard-work, well, you need to go to this museum and look at what corn, in its primordial state looks like.

It looks like a little nub, maybe the size of your finger-nail. Humans, Native Americans, transformed that, through reason/technology, into something approximating what we know corn to be now.

The point is, there is no pristine state, no technology-free world. Humans have always been up to that trick of changing their surroundings, and they won’t stop, and they can’t stop.

I also believe that while that “progress” isn’t linear, it arcs over time towards the Good. And has done so even over my sixty years on this planet.

Life is better now than it was when I was a child, and much of that is because of the technology that has been invented, and the choices it offers us.

The spiritual loss so many of you here have spoken about so well, and that I’ve also written extensively about, is not because of iPhones, and computers, and GPS, and won’t be about AI, but it is about larger issues, mostly about how we choose to use the new technology.

Or, technology is not the problem, but the culture that uses it is.

I think it is very appropriate we are having this conference here, at the Bruderhof commune, because they are a perfect illustration of that — a thriving, meaningful community, committed to the Good, imbued with spirituality and all those transcendent things we claim are being eroded by the modern world, and yet, they are not Luddites.

They run companies that have machines. They have an art magazine, a very good one, with a website. They are on Twitter for God’s sake.

When I first moved here, to New Paltz only a few miles away, I would run into some of their members, who stood out by their appearance, which tracked as anti-technology.

Then I became more familiar with them, had conversations with them, and you know, they were just like everyone else in the New Paltz, just a lot more polite, thoughtful, and happy!

What being here should illustrate to us, is that you don’t need to run away into the mountains, toss your phone into a gutter, ditch your John Deere riding mower for a scythe to find meaning, but rather, you need to find a community committed to a Good that’s beyond this earth. An external good that tempers the inherent volatility and machinations that come with the earthly part of living.

All the things we rightly criticize modern life for — the hyper individuality, the rampant technology — also provides the setting possible for communities like the Bruderhof to thrive.

Modern life provides you the ability to live spiritually IF YOU WANT TO, in a way never before possible.

You don’t have to worry about foreign invaders ransacking your village. You don’t have to worry about starvation. You don’t have to worry about pestilence. You don’t have to worry about dropping dead from a minor wound going septic.

You can, if you want to, live a long, largely pain-free life focused on living meaningfully.

Now to get back to the crux of this particular conference. Technology. Here again, as I said, I’m an optimist. I see it as another tool God provides us, and how we choose to use it, either towards the Good, or away from it, is our choice.

You don’t have to spend your evenings staring at your phone, playing Candy Crush, but instead you can use it to order any book ever written, in almost all of history, from Amazon, and have it delivered to you the next day and sit in the McDonald’s, sipping your dollar iced coffee, and read it!

I don’t think people now understand how frustrating it was to grow up, with a single library eight miles away, with a selection of texts curated by a school-marm, whose reading whims you were held captive to.

Want to read Marx? Sorry, we don’t believe a boy like you should read him. Want to read Plato’s dialogues? Sorry again, but whose dialogues? I have Peyton Place is that similar? Is that what you mean? You want the Red and the Black? What is that, a Soap Opera? (Well, yes, it actually is, but a smart one.)

The present age, and the technology of it, has allowed all of us to live a lord’s life, rich in so many ways. To live longer than ever, without physical pain, to be surrounded by spectacles a child only fifty years ago could never imagine.

But at what costs? The lack of community? Sure, a certain community is being eroded, but again, it has also opened up so many choices! This conference is an example of that. You can now form communities, and lasting friendships, with people across the globe.

You are no longer limited with what the town you grew up in offers.

Having grown up in a small town in the deep south, of only five-hundred people, prior to the internet, while I might extol the benefits of having a community you are born into, I don’t overly romanticize it either. I know the limitations.

As the John Prine song goes, “If you smoke a cigarette, they’ll be talkin’ about your breath” — and yes, that’s also the point, you want to find a community that shares your values, enough so that the other members call you out for your mistakes, hopefully though, through love, not spite.

I want to pause here to make another point. The majority of Americans still do have a lot of community, are still attached to the things we think have been lost.

Most people still live a fifteen-minute drive from where they were born, and the churches in the US are still filled, especially compared to the rest of the world.

It is us intellectuals, us wandering minds, who are the most adrift, because we are inherently always seeking, and now there are so many diversions to wander off into.

Maybe you say, the despair of contemporary life is that it is too distracting, that we have been blinded to the meaningful because of the plenty.

Pulled further into hedonism by so much cheap spectacle, then hit over the head by a bland corporatization, that’s left us both dazzled by the flashy, and then dulled by the mediocrity of modern efficiency.

Caught between Sirens luring us with their beautiful, irresistible songs into strip-malls dehumanizing us by their uniform dreariness.

This growing “corrosion of the soul” isn’t simply a result of increasing technology though, but once again, how we have chosen to use that technology.

Which isn’t only to replace dangerous, dreary, and repetitive work, but to also try and replace human interaction.

To try and reduce that interaction down to programmed rules, that then can be done by a machine. That is a big mistake, because while the machines might be far better than us at transforming nature (plowing fields, erecting buildings, digging for metals, etc.) they are not better at interacting with humans.

You can’t replicate face-to-face human interactions with a scripted procedure.

Algorithms don’t have the flexibility that a fully socialized human has — they don’t come with that sixth sense of knowing when someone’s pleas reveal a deeper concern, or someone’s momentary anger isn’t reflective of who they are, but of the situation they find themselves in.

Computers might be great at following a script, and then using it to fly a plane, but they are not good at those things that can’t be put into written rules, like how to comfort a person in distress.

Or God forbid, be at their bedside as they die. You laugh, but the idea of a computer as hospice companion isn’t far-fetched.

The un-scriptable part of being a human is what people think colloquially of as the soul, and it is why apps, computers, spreadsheets and AI, can never replace humans when it comes to dealing with other humans.

AI might momentarily change the job market, but it will, in my opinion, eventually bring back jobs for people with empathy as a skill.

That we are trying to make computers do this, is why so many people do feel trapped by the machines, rather than freed by them from the hard drudgeries of life.

We are trying to make machines do something they shouldn’t be doing.

You can’t, and shouldn’t, efficiency away the human touch.

It is in Weber’s language, disenchanting, and here I agree with the critics of modernity that a fulfilling life requires enchantment.

Thankfully modern life still has a lot of soul and enchantment left in it.

That is why I write about McDonald’s so much, which are great illustrations that the human soul, and enchantment, is impossible to destroy.

That you can find warm meaningful communities, and yes even enchantment, in a McDonald’s shows that both of these things are immune to whatever is thrown at them, existing in spades even in restaurants originally designed to be about cold efficiency.

It is why I will always be an optimist, because the machines can never destroy the soul, no matter how hard we try.

Humans are resilient, and enchantment is like the carpet too big for the room. You might try and push the bump down in one part of the room, but it will always pop up somewhere else.

Aristotle famously wrote “A man cannot live alone, unless he is either a God or a Beast”1

And we are neither, and we will always live together, in communities of some form, and technology will always be part of that.

Final thoughts from the weekend

For me, the Bruderhof were the winners of the conference — not that they would ever suggest that, or that there was any competition being had. This was a meeting of an eclectic group, not confined to academics as most of these things are, genuine in their desire to better the world, and make it more human. I met many people I’d only known from online, and that is always a pleasure. People shine in person, something we forget too often.

The Bruderhof are hard to explain, and once you do hear about them, easy to dismiss as some fringe oddity. They are at the most overly-simplified, Anabaptist communist, in that they live by the bible, and share all possessions. Yet they run companies, successful ones, send almost every child to college (literature, architecture, etc), and are active members in the surrounding communities.

They have two communities near me, and when after a storm a local bridge was washed away, they immediately called the mayor of my town to offer to help fix it, without a charge.

(PS: The days before the conference a storm blasted through my town, knocking down three large willow trees on my property, two across my long driveway, that made it impossible for me to leave. Thankfully, I found a guy online who quickly rectified the situation for cash, but when I told the story to the Bruderhof, who also lost trees, they all said, without pause, “you should have called us, we would have gotten you out.” I have no doubt they would have.)

To spend a few days with them, and eat with them in the shared dining hall, feasting on pork sausage made by them, from pigs they raised, and drinking beer brewed by one of the members, while children run around the community, minded by all, playing tag, or water balloon fights, all while being serenaded by a communal band, is to understand how much effort, and thought, they put into the notion of a common good. And how idyllic a life you can still live, if you do so.

When I visited one of their communities several years ago, I got a walk through of one of their factories, which makes children’s furniture, and while they use machines in the process, they also chose not to use them for certain less labor-intensive tasks, because they wanted to give some of the less physically able members a fulfilling role. A way to contribute that gave them pride.

The stated point of the conference was to think about the expanding role of technology in society, and how to maintain human dignity in the face of what can feel like an expanding soullessness.

I kept thinking though, that we should be listening to the Bruderhof, not speaking to them. Not because I feel everyone can, or should, become a member of a community built around the bible, and shared possessions, but rather because they illustrate how you can still build meaningful lives, and communities, when you make decisions built around a public good grounded in a concrete moral system.

I’m not naive enough to think the US can go full Bruderhof — or should — a nation of three hundred million of varying religions is very different from a community of three thousand of the same faith, but the old bumper sticker, “Think globally, act locally”, which they do in their way, has a lot more wisdom in it than it’s given credit for.

I would amend it to, “Think of the City of God, act in the City of Man.” Have a moral system that will make you fulfilled on your death bed, having lived a life that will make others in your community weep at your death.

More people than ever can now live a long fulfilling life, because of the machines, and among them, but it requires wanting to, and prioritizing friends over things.

Our material wealth has freed us from physical pain and suffering, but it hasn’t solved the issue of meaningfulness. That won’t be solved by the machines, that is a problem as old as human existence, and it is in the past the answers to it can be found.

PS: I leave for Australia in two weeks, where I will be for a month. I have an audacious plan to take buses from Perth (where I will begin) to Darwin, and then Alice Spring (again), before ending in Sydney. So, once that begins, this newsletter will go back to being more travel-y.

I walk because it allows you to see a place in a way that you can’t when zooming through it, treating it as a spectacle to be commodified1. You get to know it, and the people in it, at a thick level, warts and all. You see things that others, including sometimes locals, miss, because of a perspective that comes with being an outsider, but one moving cautiously and slowly.

The two people I’m interviewing here also do that, but in different ways, and in different places. Will Bardenwerper spent considerable time in a small town, Batavia, New York, documenting the impact of Major League Baseball’s decision to “streamline” their minor leagues, and what they tried to do about it. Kendric Tonn has now made three trips to Japan, spending months painting images from it, often of the unremarkable, that he renders remarkable.

Both are outsiders, who respect the communities they document, because they practice what I call Thick Travel — spending enough time somewhere to be confronted with the mundane, which is where most of life resides, including the excellent2.

Will Bardenwerper, author of Homestand

I met Will at a conference of writers, academics, and outcasts of both, who worry about the loss of community in the U.S., and through that we became friendly, and when he published his latest book, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, I was happy to provide a blurb, something I get asked often, but rarely do, because I respect that he actually goes out and talks to people, not to poll them and then leave, but to listen to them for an extended period, and the issue he addresses, of a small town (Batavia NY) trying to preserve its heritage, is one I’ve long been interested in. Also, I love baseball.

As I wrote then, his book is “A deep and emphatic look at communities, and a very American game, trying to cope with and overcome powerful external forces that only see profits and have forgotten the transcendent in life, and in baseball.”

I’ve been remiss not to give him, or the book, a big spotlight, and below is my interview with him to try to rectify that.

Me: First of all, congratulations on the wonderful book. I will say, when I first met you I had no idea you were ex-military, much less an Iraq war veteran, much less an Airborne Ranger, and then a Princeton graduate on top of all of that. In a world where so many people use their past to pontificate, brag, and demand attention, you could do all of those things, but you don’t do any of them. I find that very admirable, but also very telling of who you are, which is quietly very impressive.

I suppose that is a long-winded way of getting to my first question, which is: given that your prior book was about Iraq, how did your military experience inform this book, which is on a topic that from the outside is far more placid and uplifting—small-town minor league baseball being about as symbolic of the good American life as you can get. The opposite of US as a military aggressor. Yet what you find, and write about, is way more complex and nuanced than that. I don’t want to say your book is depressing, because that’s not fair to the good you still find, and highlight, but it’s hardly a sunny picture from the mom, apple pie, and baseball cliché.

Or, to put it another way, one might imagine this was an attempt to immerse yourself in the Good of the US, after seeing so much Bad, but as you know, better than most, neither is that simple. 

Will: That’s a great question. And a tough one.

Baseball for me always has kind of occupied this Norman Rockwell/Americana, somewhat idealistic, image in my psyche. Obviously it was never really that way, and has always had its share of villains and scandals, but scenes like Robert Redford playing catch with his son near the cornfield on their farm in The Natural have always resonated deeply with me as a kind of example of the sort of goodness and happiness baseball can deliver. 

I would sometimes draw on these sort of abstract images and thoughts and associated memories, like playing wiffle ball in my grandfather’s backyard with my brother as a child, to get me through some of the tougher experiences I had in the military… kind of a vehicle to transport myself to a simpler, more innocent, happier time. 

But, as you say, nothing is that simple. I witnessed and participated in plenty of good in Iraq in the most unlikely circumstances, and, by the same token, came to discover some not-so-good dynamics in Major League Baseball today as I researched and wrote this book.

In both I saw inspiring stories of goodness at the grassroots, local level, instances of “ordinary” people trying to do the best they can in circumstances made more difficult by decisions made by distant elites, over which they have no control. 

So, for example, in Iraq you might have soldiers who were thrust into a tough fight, not of their choosing, and perhaps absent a coherent or achievable strategy, and yet they band together to do the best they can despite this, and sometimes achieve some remarkable things in their local area, even if that never ties in to enduring, nationwide success. 

Likewise with baseball, I write about how the greed of Major League Baseball’s commissioner and billionaire owners stripped forty communities of minor league teams that had in some cases been civic treasures for over a century, and yet, in places like Batavia, which I write about, local business leaders and fans rallied behind a new team to fill the void. And, in so doing, preserved in many ways the good that baseball had delivered to them on summer nights for generations. 

I think we can see this dynamic all over America today… a playing field that is tilted against the little guy by enormous corporate and societal forces far outside of their control, and yet people still coming together as friends and neighbors to help each other out and do the best they can. 

You sometimes write about this through the prism of McDonald’s, I observed it in small-town ballparks, but the dynamic is kind of the same.

And, as I write in Homestand, these are the sorts of communal gathering places we desperately need more of, and should be fighting to preserve, not eliminate as MLB has been doing to minor league baseball (and that’s not to mention the impact private equity buying up so many of the surviving minor league clubs is going to have on the minor league landscape). 

Me: Very much so. I grew up a huge baseball fan, and by ten I could recite every statistic of my favorite team, the Cleveland Indians, which if you know the sport, rooting for the 1970s Cleveland Indians was like being a regular of the broken down diner on the edge of town, the one that might have once been storied, but now was dismal, depressing, and where at six in the morning the guy whose wife kicked him out of the house the night before, for completely justifiable reasons, is holding court telling everyone how he’d been, once again, wronged.

So like you, I’ve long been drawn to both the sport, and to what others see as the bad, or the loser, or the depressing. Which is why, when writing Dignity, I would “reward” myself after a long day immersed in stories of pain, go to a baseball game at night if possible, usually a minor league or college game, and some of my most rewarding memories are drawn from those — like when I got a flat tire in the Pulaski Virginia Yankees parking lot, and five guys attending the game helped me change it, free of charge, or in Ogden Utah, when I found myself in a section of the stands where the local knitting club went, to knit, gossip about sports, and everything else, or in Danville VA, an otherwise thoroughly depressing town, I spent a wonderful evening watching the minor league team with two older hippie-rednecks, stoned out of their mind, reciting Melvillian soliloquies on trees, every inning seemingly changing their focus to another species, with the Loblolly pine suffering most of their wrath, and the Chestnut oak their praise.

It was for me, like the McDonald’s, another illustration that community survives no matter how hard the circumstances, as well as humor, and often, as your book illustrates, can thrive because of it.

I especially had a soft spot for the Appalachian league, the lowest of the minor leagues, with players straight out of high school, in communities dealing with decades of decay, and so when I found out, partly through your book, that MLB had gutted that league, I wasn’t so much surprised, but deeply disappointed. Maybe I was naive, but I still believed MLB understood its role in the US, as good member of the community, as an ideal of what we can be, and so they would be one of the last of the big industries to give into ruthless efficiency in the name of money.

Will: First off, I love your memories of those minor league games, the knitting club and redneck stoners, help with your flat tire… those sorts of things really capture the essence of what makes it so special. And notice how none of them actually include what was going on on the field! Similarly in my book, I would say twenty percent of the “action” takes places on the diamond and eighty percent on the folks in the stands and on the community.

To answer your question, though, sadly, after peeking behind the curtain, as you say, it has grown a lot harder for me to embrace MLB. And this is really sad, as my son has grown to love baseball, and enjoys going to MLB games. We have one of the best ballparks in the country here in Pittsburgh in the form of PNC Park. And so we do go, because I don’t want my bitterness to infect his love of the game or the ability of our family to enjoy the fun of an afternoon taking in a game. Around them at least, I keep my frustration to myself.

But I can’t really get past the myriad problems of the game, whether it is how they stripped minor league teams from forty communities across America to save the equivalent of one major league minimum contract per year (roughly $600,000, or the amount some superstars make in two games), the competitive imbalance that results in the Dodgers essentially being an All-Star Team while other teams essentially feature AAA lineups, or the general distaste I have for any line of work that results in one person making nearly a billion dollars when so many Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

In my book I refer to Roger Kahn’s classic “The Boys of Summer,” where he tracks down legendary 1950s-era Brooklyn Dodgers years after their playing days ended, and discovers them doing things like working construction and bartending at the VFW. I’m not saying players today - the best in the world at what they do - should need second jobs after they retire, but at the same time I do think that as the chasm between their lives and ours grows unimaginably wide, it becomes harder to relate to them (and vice versa) and to really invest oneself in their success on the field as a fan. That’s not to say the owners should just pay them less and pocket the difference, but rather that the entire enterprise just seems more distant and difficult to really embrace.

But don’t just take my word for it. One of the friends I made as I researched my Harper’s article on the Appalachian League was a lifelong fan and season-ticket holder of the former Burlington Royals (one of the communities MLB stripped of their affiliate during the recent contraction of the minors prior to the 2021 season). He was one of the biggest baseball fans at all levels I’ve ever met. When I ran your question past him, he reminded me of the preposterous lie MLB-mouthpiece Harold Reynolds was pushing on the MLB Network and elsewhere that nearly 50% of the players the “new” collegiate Appalachian League MLB was supporting might go on to play in the majors. He wrote to me, “This is the 6th year of the collegiate summer league team in Burlington and we have not had a single player get past a cup of coffee in Double-A, much less 50% make it to the majors.”

He went on to express his alienation from MLB, explaining, “MLB has eliminated the best and least expensive marketing tool, the low minors. MLB killed my love and interest in the sport, at both the professional and amateur levels. I don’t watch MLB games on television any longer. I ride by the stadium in Burlington occasionally and just gnash my teeth, thinking of what was and what has been taken away.”

Were it not for my son, and his growing love of the sport, I would likely also walk away.

On a brighter note, I do indeed have so many wonderful, enduring memories of my time in Batavia. Some of the ones that really stick with me feature Ernie Lawrence, whom I talk about in the book a little - the man who beaded rosaries as he took in the game - as he was such a wonderful man and I grew to really value the time I would spend in his company. He was a prodigious reader, often with a thick book in hand to enjoy between innings, and a man of deep faith that was manifested in a life of service to his community, as a longtime high school teacher, coach, and, later, a volunteer at a local hospice.

As I spent time in his company, he exuded a sense of serenity that was contagious and that I grew to appreciate. Sadly, he passed away before the book came out and never had a chance to read it. During more recent visits to Dwyer Stadium I found myself looking over to the section of the bleachers where he used to sit, half expecting to see him, and saddened by his absence. That said, if there is indeed the afterlife that he surely believed in, I don’t doubt that he sometimes joins us there in spirit. 

Me: I find the trajectory of baseball a good illustration of what I call the professionalization (or corporatization) that’s dominated my lifetime, especially sports. The morphing of once smaller, more organic, more communal industries, into bigger, more efficient, and more profitable ones. McDonald’s, which I genuinely love, is another, and I could argue in the case of food, it’s been a net positive, delivering the option of inexpensive high quality products to everyone.

Yet, there have certainly been very important things lost, and I’m not blind to them, and that’s especially true in sports where the product is entertainment, but one tied to the community. What is a local team after all, but a collection of players who you support because they in theory represent your town, and while they may continually change, at least the fans stay constant, and so what the team is should be about them, and their connection to each other, and hopefully, to the players.

I became a Cleveland Indians fan, despite growing up in central Florida, when the closest team was the Atlanta Braves, and the only way to follow the sport was reading box scores in my weekly Sporting News subscription, because a friend of the family, James “Mudcat” Grant had played for them. He’d started in a local team, the Lacoochee Nine Devils, and worked his way up the minor leagues, and eventually made it to the World Series. His trajectory, a guy who was good at athletics, who found baseball eventually, was less immersive than what modern players require, where they are effectively groomed from childhood, weaving their way through a series of workshops, traveling-teams, summer leagues, etc, so that by nineteen, they are fantastic at baseball, already five years or more in a professional bubble.

I’m not going to deny that consequently the quality of play currently is phenomenal, better than it has ever been perhaps, but the players are now less “regular people” with a different skill, but something altogether different.

Also, the entire cost structure has changed. Put bluntly, it’s very expensive now! So when going to a game, to hang with the other fans, and hopefully interact with them in some small way, starts to cost well over a hundred dollars for a family, then you’re taking away the most important access point. And when the players become businessmen who diminish their personality to maximize their career earnings, you lose a lot of the appeal of the game, and the ability for fans to relate to them, like the players in “The Boys of Summer.”

Minor League baseball always tempered that trend, allowing access to a wider group of fans, at far less cost, and again to sound naive, I’d thought MLB would expand it, rather than contract it, because it understood that, and also still felt some obligation to be a public good. It does after all claim to be America’s pastime.

In your first answer you drew a parallel between Iraq and small-town baseball — ordinary people doing the best they can despite decisions made by distant elites over which they have no control. A move towards professionalization, which while it might be delivering a “better product”, at least by one metric, is also taking away community. Do you think that’s the defining American story of our era, and if so, what do you think it says about the health of the country that the same dynamic keeps appearing everywhere you look?

Will: You are right, we are seeing this dynamic playing out across so many industries, though for some reason putting profit maximization and creating “shareholder value” above all else - including the civic health of our communities - at least seems somewhat more palatable when you are making widgets as opposed to purporting to be “America’s Pastime” (and enjoy an anti-trust exemption in part due to this carefully cultivated identity). From everything I can see it seems like MLB has a very short-term focus on profit maximization today as opposed to acting like sincere stewards of the game with a focus on its long-term health. 

And there is something alienating to me at least watching someone like Juan Soto on the hapless Mets (my team, no less!) misplay a ball, loaf after it, and then laugh off the entire episode. As if that wasn’t aggravating enough, you then remember that he earned $300,000 that afternoon for that level of effort. It just seems like a slap in the face to working families, who, like you say, just paid $50 to PARK at the stadium, before paying $50 for average seats, $15 for beers, $10 for hot dogs, etc. 

Though I am pretty critical of how insulated contemporary players are from the “real world,” and the communities they represent, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a recent example of a superstar doing something very cool here in Pittsburgh. Paul Skenes, one of the best young pitchers in the game, stopped at a local Little League diamond one evening Pirates had off and played catch with the young kids who were there for practice for over an hour. As far as anyone can tell, this wasn’t a publicity stunt but rather just a genuine spontaneous nice thing to do. Needless to say the kids – and parents – were overjoyed. My son was insanely jealous of them when I showed him the clips that had been posted to X.

That said, the fact that the entire episode instantly went viral and was a lead story the next day on ESPN shows just how unbelievably rare such organic interactions now are. Long gone are the days when it was not that uncommon for all-time greats like Roberto Clemente – also a Pirate – to stop on the way home and toss a ball with youngsters he saw playing as he drove past.

Back to your question, I would actually challenge a few of the assumptions you made. I would contend that while the sheer athleticism of baseball players today may eclipse that of players forty years ago as far as their speed, power, velocity, etc., the quality of the play and overall entertainment value of the game may not be as good. The obsession with analytics over human experience and intuition (and again, one can find parallels of this in other industries) has resulted in a game featuring lineups full of .240 hitters who either strikeout or hit an occasional homerun facing five different pitchers who appear briefly to just throw as hard as they possibly can, while fielding seems to be getting sloppier and sloppier. This does not - to my mind - result in a more appealing product.

Furthermore, I would push back a little on the assertion that businesses really are more “efficient.” I mean, look at airlines. Or almost anything involving customer service. Does having the customer wait on hold for forty-five minutes to speak to a chat bot that can’t even answer his question make things more efficient? Or does it just save the company money at the expense of jobs and customer satisfaction? Or replacing a restaurant server with a QR code that takes ten minutes to navigate through on your iPhone whereas it used to take ten seconds to place an order with an actual human being?

Similarly in baseball, eliminating the low minors and just sending top prospects to a spring training complex to run them through some tests and then have a quant wizard spit those numbers into a computer to identify the most valuable ones as opposed to having an old school scout actually watching them over the course of an entire minor league season may be cheaper, and perhaps even more efficient for the MLB club, but I am not totally convinced it is the most effective way to identify the best baseball players. And, as always seems to be the case when “efficiency” is cited as the reason for a corporate decision, this results in fewer jobs for those lower on the ladder, such as scouts, coaches, not to mention the players themselves as there are fewer minor league clubs to play for, and more money for the owners. 

So yes, what I see MLB doing is what we can see happening everywhere, across industries ranging from nursing homes to health care and hospitals to hardware stores, airlines, financial institutions, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, and the list goes on. Consolidate (often after buying with debt), wipe out local ownership, homogenize operations, lose local character, cut costs, eliminate jobs, produce an inferior customer experience and product, all while making a few wealthy investors and corporate insiders even more wealthy.

All of this is to say that I am not terribly bullish on the health of our country... and this isn’t even getting into our toxic politics or the collateral damage to the labor market that the forced embrace of AI is likely to produce.

All that said, hopefully we can end on a slightly less grim note, as I hope some of your readers will be encouraged to actually read my book! And they won’t if they think it is three-hundred pages of me lamenting the state of America today. 

I really did try - and reader feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in this regard - to focus on communicating the happiness that these small-town teams like the Muckdogs deliver to their communities. This is perhaps even more noteworthy and important in light of the aforementioned challenges many Americans are confronting today. For a few hours at least on most nights of the summer you can find generations of fans coming together as the sun sets over towns across America like Batavia, all with smiles on their faces.

My hope is that Homestand captures some of this magic; the kids gleefully playing catch by the bullpen and hounding average college players for autographs as if they are celebrity athletes, the packs of high school boys and girls trying to act cool as they anxiously circle each other, parents spooning ice cream into the mouths of toddlers, twenty-somethings downing cold beers after work, and grandparents taking it all in with an air of serene satisfaction as they enjoy conversations that slowly unspool over the course of days and weeks in their usual bleacher seats surrounded by friends and neighbors. 

Me: I agree baseball is far less entertaining now, despite having more athleticism, and I disagree (kind of) that efficiency hasn’t made other industries “better”, but I’ll end this on the positive images you have in Homestand, which while a condemnation of corporatization, I read more as a celebration of human resilience.

Kendric Tonn: Painter

I found Kendric online, where we kept bumping into each other, usually over comments about Japan, where I found he exhibited a rare (especially for social media) thoughtfulness, modesty, and insight. He seemed to spend a lot of time there, and yet unlike many accounts, he wasn’t the Japan-bro, who constantly told people, “No, you don’t understand Japan like I do.”

I was further intrigued when I realized he made his living as an oil painter, living in Columbus Ohio. So when I passed through, we shared a coffee at McDonald’s, and in person he was more impressive than online, although equally humble.

This last October we overlapped in Kumamoto — he was working on his third book of watercolors of Japan, me doing my usual walking thing, and we spent more time together, and he was kind enough to give me copies of his two prior books. I’ve always been intrigued by how artist work, what it means to “try and capture a place”, especially in words and pictures, and I believe he’s the perfect person to talk about that. So, we chatted over email.

Me: I’ll start with the most obvious question. What drew you to painting Japan?

Kendric: Let me start with a brief introduction: I was trained as an oil painter in the Western tradition, and the core of my work is representational oils of figures, portraits, and still lifes.  If you’re picturing a guy with a beret and stereotypical arm palette painting naked people in a somewhat gloomy maximalized environment, I don’t own any berets, but you’re otherwise spot-on.

For the last few years, though, I’ve been heavily engaged in a Japan-based project.  The work I’m doing for that, inspired by Japanese printmakers, is primarily watercolor (properly you’d call them mixed-medium watercolors). I just returned from my third long trip there for this project, and I’m currently pulling the paintings into my third art book-slash-travelogue.

This is a question with an obvious answer, and that answer isn’t wrong, so I’ll start there.  Everyone wants to paint Japan!  The mountains and deep-forested valleys, the shrines and bridges, the herons in rice fields, the Ghibli-esque train lines running parallel to rough coasts where the sea splashes on dramatic boulders.  The country really does look like that, and it’s certainly fertile aesthetic ground.

It doesn’t, however, all look like that.  Not even remotely.  So let’s return to the question of what drew me to Japan via a circuitous route: I’d been there before I started this project, actually.  Once as an exchange student, and again after I graduated to take an ESL job for a year while I sorted out my early-20s crisis.  I did a lot of drawing on both those trips, too (I made the decision to go back to school for art while in Japan, in fact).  It left a lingering mark, and I’d always wanted to return there to paint, but it wasn’t the shrines-and-Fujis Japan that really stuck in my head.  Neither was it really the Neuromancer-Blade Runner-Lain aesthetic axis, though you can find that too.

Rather: there’s a dreariness to Japanese city design, actually.  Whether it’s because the whole country had to be rebuilt rapidly, or a conception of buildings and houses as a bit more consumable that we think of em, or some other factor, I don’t know, but you quite rapidly begin to learn the blocks out of which the urban environment is built: thus the houses and the drain covers; thus the stations and the konbinis; all to a relatively limited set of patterns.  The places of shocking beauty we think about are mixed into a… well, a repetitive setting.  And I don’t mean mere functional, like a McDonald’s, laundromat, and gas station by the side of the highway.

And yet, it’s not entirely unpleasant.  It can be dreary, but the repetitiveness can also be uncanny: you can feel unmoored in time and space.  And that sort of vibe is really what stuck in my head over the years between leaving Japan and returning there as a professional artist!  It’s not the only thing I go there to paint–I am very happy to paint the Fujis and the temples too–but I’ve tried, across the body of work, to catch a little of those two sides, and how it felt to walk through them.

Me: That dreariness, or even an ugliness, is something I’ve written about and photographed. I remember on one particularly long walk — out of one large town, through the rice-fields, to the next large town that looked like where I’d started, I felt as if I was going a little mad, and began to obsess about how boxy everything was, and I even shouted out, to nobody, “Give me a curve, any curve. My kingdom for a curve!”

Yet, like you, I keep coming back, because despite those periodic moments of claustrophobic insanity, there’s so much beauty there — not only in the nature, but in the calming familiarity. Then there are the easter eggs you find, the ubiquitous vending machine adjacent to a Shinto shrine, or the paper mill (clean, orderly, and almost regal, despite belching sour smoke) with a well-tended rice field as one border, a boxy apartment building another, a 7-eleven another, and lastly, a field of parked bikes, presumably for the workers.

When we overlapped in Kumamoto, we both went on long seemingly aimless walks, separately, but both with the intention to find “images”, me to photograph, or write about, you to paint. Given your medium is much more selective, requiring a few days at least per image, I’m curious how you decide what to paint. I realize that’s almost an impossible question, but perhaps you could give it a go by highlighting two of the paintings from Kumamoto, and say why you chose those?

Kendric: The destination feeling like the starting point is so real.  I feel it most in Tokyo–something about the Tokyo way of having multiple distributed urban centers.  You get on a train, viscerally feel yourself travelling for an hour or two, and then when you get off at your destination you think, huh, this feels like a lightly-remixed version of where I began.

As far as subjects and methods go, though, we operate in somewhat similar ways, I think, though while you cover ground more linearly–you’re actually travelling!--I tend to loop and loop and wander back through familiar territory.  I try to get a gauge on what a place is like, internalize the essentials, and sometimes seeing the same thing in different conditions can make something stand out.  Here’s one piece that I did late in my stay in Kumamoto that was, maybe, a thousand feet from my apartment:

I’d had the vague idea I wanted to do something with utility poles and wires–they’re such a dominant element of the way they build, even relative to us in the US–but although I’d walked past this grouping of three poles probably thirty times or more by then, it wasn’t until I happened by while the sun was setting and a crow was being noisy nearby that I thought, ah, there’s the composition.

Or similarly, this piece here, which again was quite near where I was staying in Hakodate:

I’d known I wanted to do a long shot of an unprepossessing street.  You walk down a thousand streets that look pretty much just like this, and it’s an important subject in that it’s a huge part of the feel of wandering around Japan.  I hadn’t been able to find one I quite wanted to do, though.  Then I’m going along one evening–you know, I’ve just realized that both of these pieces started with an excursion to a convenience store for candy–and, bam, there’s the puddle in the road.  It opens up the scene a little, gives a window and some interest.  But again, it’s a place I’d walked past several times without noticing anything.

Me: I see you doing what I’ve labeled Thick Travel, spending enough time in a place to be confronted with the mundane, and hence see things essential to a place that can be lost in a mad rush to see the spectacles.

But you, and me as well, are also never fully a local. We remain permanently a visitor, which gives us a kind of double vision, always the outsider, but with enough familiarity to see things others might not. Do you think that in-between state, neither tourist nor resident, is actually the most productive place to work from?

Kendric: I do feel like–to put it romantically–loving something from a distance can be a fertile condition to work in.  Artists probably should be outsiders in a way, don’t you think?  I don’t mind political movies, but I don’t much care for them when the director or screenwriters are “inside” the politics, so to speak.  There’s a state of engaged detachment that I think produces the most honest work, and that’s also true depicting a place, be it in words or photos or paint.  You have to engage with it, which takes time and effort, but a job in Tokyo, a Japanese girlfriend, a tight crew at the local izakaya–whatever–aren’t the kind of engagement you need.  

Me: I definitely believe that in-between state of neither fully an outsider, or insider, has clear advantages for artist, and writers. You have the ability to see “the water everyone swims in” that sometimes locals don’t recognize, because it’s so normal, since it is unfamiliar to you, as well as the things missed by tourist, the odd things wedged away from the must-see sights. Of course every perspective comes with minuses, and it would be absurd to ever claim you fully understand a place. For that, you need a mix of perspectives, obviously including from life-long residents.

To those ends, I’ve noticed, when in Japan, you seem to live a rather monastic life when in Japan, and rather in indulging in its food, drink, and nightlife, choose the sparse. In one instance, you stayed in a tiny seaside village for an extended period, that from your accounts, and paintings, seems to be literally disappearing back into the earth, slowly, one aging residents death at a time. The closest convenience store was an hour (am I wrong) bus ride away, and you had no car. I’m fascinated by that, and would love to hear more about the experience, and how it shaped your understanding of Japan. 

Kendric: Before I went on the first trip, I thought, you know, I’ll have some fun too.  I’ll go out, have drinks, whatever.  I absolutely did not, not on any of the trips.  Monastic is absolutely the word.  Kind of as earlier, I’m there as a thickly embedded yet highly detached observer, and I never even found I wanted to exit that mode, really.

That’s a pretty accurate description of a place I spent a month on trip two, Iinoura in Shimane Prefecture, yeah.  And of a lot of places in Japan.  It’s something I’m lucky to have had the chance to see.  Villages like that are, of course, dying all over the country.  I suspect Japan as a whole will be fine, and honestly I think they may deal better with their demographic contraction than a whole lot of other places are going to, but that said, I suspect a lot of life and lifestyle that existed in little places like that will be washed away.  The village goes, the people regroup towards Tokyo.  Eventually people probably go back out: someone with a starlink connection, autonomous car, and three robot servants thinks, hey, building my new place out in half-forgotten village X sounds like the move. But it won’t be the same, eh?  Nothing ever is.

Don’t let me overstate it, though: again, it’s not like I was going to village festivals.  It’s not like the handful of sweet ninety year old women who would bow and say good morning while looking bemused at my presence were probably putting any on.  The shrine looked unvisited; I was the only one getting on or off the one-car train that stopped like three times a day; the boats moored at the fishing collective were unmoved and the collective itself sure didn’t look to be having much happening either.  They were taking down abandoned houses while I was there.  I just got to see a brief impression of the place.

Me: One of the things I appreciate about your books are the short essays that accompany each painting. I became a writer because I felt that the cliche, “A picture is worth a thousand words” wasn’t applicable. Sure a picture says a lot, but you can’t say everything with it and so I began to add larger and larger descriptions to my photos, and soon the writing became primary, the photos secondary. Painting is a different medium, and a more expressive, but you still add text. I’m curious how you view that balance? I liked your writing enough I often wanted to hear more from you!

Kendric: I found something similar!  I think I’m, in a sense, doing two different kinds of art on these trips.  There are the paintings, each one (I hope) standing up as a self-contained thing, an image that makes its own aesthetic statement.  And then there are the books, which I’ve sometimes called a painted travelogue.  I don’t want to go into a lengthy blow-by-blow of every train change and meal like some travel writing does, but I’m hoping to convey some feeling to the reader-viewer of what it’s like: to be this specific person, doing this specific thing, in these specific places.

I briefly had, and sensibly discarded, the idea of writing a haiku for each painting.  If I ever descend that far into cliche please beat me with a stick, a stout one.  But that said, I kept the ghost of the concept: the short length and visual appearance of the short prose sections that accompany each painting, and sometimes their emphasis on passing experiential effects, are meant slightly to recall that idea.

Me: First of all, thank you for your time, and the wonderful books. I hope all my readers buy them. They make great gifts! Before we end though, since this is after-all a travel newsletter, a few simply questions. You’ve now done three extended painting trips to the country, so give us a few quick takes, with single sentence answers.

What is your favorite city in Japan, where you would live for a year if you had to?

Kendric: I really liked my two weeks in Kamakura and the Shonan Coast, but honestly, I’d spend a year where I did spend a year teaching ESL just after college: somewhere in Chiba, convenient to everything but not as crushingly busy as Tokyo proper.

Me: What image of yours (I know this is like choosing your favorite child), sticks with you, that gun to your head, you would pick.

Kendric: Sneak preview from book three!  I suspect this might be more of a “painter’s painting”, as it were–it’s not flashy or high-saturation–but I felt good about this one.

Me: What three “tips” would you give a first time visitor to Japan, logistical, or other, to give them a more meaningful, and fun, experience?

Kendric: Get out of Tokyo and Kyoto.  No shade to either, I’m not saying don’t go, but… get out of Tokyo and Kyoto.  Or generalizing, man, you don’t need to do the Standard Itinerary, you know? 

I’m a big believer–I suspect you won’t be hostile to this idea–in walking.  If you’re going from station A to station B, consider an off-the-main-arteries walk; that’s where the interesting incidents seem to happen.

My personal tip number three is “have a self-directed project you carry with you that’s intimately linked to being where you are.”  I’m not sure if that’s exactly universally actionable, although it’s what I’ve always relied on.

Me: Where can people buy your books?

Kendric: We’ve talked a bit about the books.  They’ve been a huge component of this whole Japan project, but they weren’t initially part of the plan.  I’d only intended to go, paint, and bring back the pieces, more or less in the same way I always work. I ended up doing a much larger body of work on the first trip than I’d expected, though, so some friends pushed me to collect the pieces in a book.  I did a Kickstarter which went quite well, well enough that I returned for a second painting trip and a second book.  And two books together didn’t look quite right, so I decided to go one more time to round out the trilogy.  That Kickstarter is currently ongoing, in fact, and I hope to deliver the third book very soon!

Moby Dick Book Group!

Reminder, the book group call will be July 14th (Tuesday) at 7 pm, and July 15th (Wednesdy) at 12 pm noon -- both NYC time.

I would like to limit it to no more than twenty per zoom call, so everyone has a chance to talk, so if you can make the Thursday afternoon, please do that, since most of you are in the US.

If I get more interest, I’ll add a third and later date, until then, lets go with these two.

Below is the links for the calls. All I ask is everyone come to the call with a book at your side so we can reference excerpts if necessary, and to have read it, or at least re-skimmed it if you not read it in awhile.

I’ll do minimal moderation, hoping the discussion can go in a more organic direction. For those who have not already read it, here is my own review: Reading Moby Dick

I’ve found it helps me to write a short essay before joining a book group, to gather your thoughts, although that certainly isn’t a requirement.

Regardless, enjoy the book, if you haven’t already finished, and see you then!

Below are the two links for the zoom calls:

Topic: Moby Dick Book Group
Time: Jul 14, 07:00 PM Eastern Time
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86144267042?pwd=yti3vmdeGl3TjnyzGjF3UsxkDfiNaK.1

Meeting ID: 861 4426 7042
Passcode: 053337

------------

Time: Jul 15, 12:00 PM Eastern Time
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82870471111?pwd=spKqz2yGH1xQ8iID4HESKwQMWNzjft.1

Meeting ID: 828 7047 1111
Passcode: 866887

PS: After a brief stop-over in Chicago, I’ll be spending all of August in Australia. I have a ambitious agenda, and we will see how much of it I achieve, but right now I’ll be making my way from Perth, to Sydney, via Broome and Darwin (and many additional stops), by bus. As always, if you happen to be along my route, especially in Newman (lol), please reach out.

I’ll be doing two zoom calls to discuss Moby Dick — July 14th (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. and July 15th (a Wednesday) at noon, (both NY time) — I hope many of you read it, and then join one of the calls1. Below is my review, of sorts. Needless to say, with spoilers, so if somehow you don’t already know how it ends, maybe wait until you finish the book.

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on a flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

“What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too?”

“Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man, or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.”

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

“I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”

Despite being obsessive about packing light, I always carry at least one book, to fill the many empty moments of travel, which becomes a security blanket of sorts; a competing world I can step into when the physical world grows wearisome. Tired of the linoleum and fluorescence of terminal three, sick of the pervasive sticky pungence of Auntie Anne’s, feeling untethered, I open up Thackeray and flee into the high vanities of English nobility.

That’s how I started reading Moby-Dick, a book I’d tried and failed to complete three times before, each time put off by what I then saw as unnecessarily opaque prose, as if the author had something to prove. A showy “look ma, no hands!” style.

I picked up Moby Dick again, plucked from the library shelves, for mostly physical reasons, because it had exactly the balance and heft I needed for my daily maintenance walks while home, the ballast my ship needed. Into my backpack you mighty weighty tome, to reform my calves, hamstrings, and Achilles.

That it was packaged with two early Melville novels, one a travelogue focused on Liverpool (Redburn) was also a selling point, but as I found out, post walk, sitting in a McDonald’s, early Melville is something entirely different, and not in a good way, and disappointed, I tried Moby Dick again, and this time, I was enchanted, engrossed, and most importantly taken in.

I’d found my other world, the one to temper the blandness around me — A 19th century whaling ship captained by a cinematic megalomaniac, narrated by an autodidact, who at times comes off as a waggish imp drunk on grog, having the time of his life, sitting in his single-room Bronx apartment, laughing at the lines he’d just put on paper (“Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”), and at other times a man going through a severe psychic break.

Ishmael is clearly Melville, the third-person omniscient Melville, and Moby-Dick (the book) his diary from his two-ish years immersed in the whaling and maritime world, fictionalized, made more romantic, more compelling, more dramatic, through poetic license. I’ve long believed great fiction has at its core non-fiction (Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Bolaño, Faulkner), that keeps it tethered to what we know, but with enough slack to allow it to shine, and be seen in a different light, or to readers in a distant time and place, seen at all.

Moby-Dick is great fiction, and it shines, and it worked for me because I now have a notion of what it was like to be a ship-hand on a 19th century whaling vessel, which is an extraordinary thing to have been, to leave your family for three years to live with forty strangers, most with questionable and/or complicated pasts, sleeping right next to all of them on thin corn-husk-filled mattresses in a dirty, windowless pitching cabin, to spend your waking hours climbing a tangle of ropes fifty yards high, to stand in the weather, balanced on a single gyrating beam, searching the oceans for a whale’s spout, to then at the cry of “thar she blows,” rappel down into fragile row boats, and make our way straight into the gyrating mass of three-ton mammals, try and spear one from ten yards, or less, away, and if successful, and if you and your boat are not obliterated in the process, pull the carcass alongside the mother ship, to spend the next four days chopping it up before the swarm of feasting sharks do, boiling the tonnage of flesh down into casks of oil. An unctuous, dangerous, isolated task with little to no monetary reward.

That Melville worked on a whaling ship is only unusual because of who he was, an educated elite. There are many exaggerations in Moby-Dick, many fabrications for excitement and drama, but the setting is not one of them. Whaling was a dominant industry prior to the 20th century, especially in the US, where it was the fifth largest employer, and its output, machine lubricant, candles, and baleen one of the largest sources of hard foreign currency for the young country.

Whale oil, specifically the head oil from the sperm whale, was famously at some point more valuable in weight than gold, and America, the land of opportunity (flush with inexpensive labor, vast unharvested oceans, capital striving for rewards, clean of antiquated regulations) quickly excelled at whaling, eclipsing the Dutch and English.

I paired Moby Dick with Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America, by Eric Jay Dolin, an excellent companion, because it highlights how unremarkable the seemingly remarkable setting is.

In that light, Moby Dick is a quintessential American novel, an ethnography of a dominant but shunned-by-the-literate lifestyle, the quest for wealth through entrepreneurial toil. A mid 19th century oil-rush preceding the gold rush that siphoned away its men with dreams, before the oil-from-the-soil rush killed it entirely.

Putting yourself through immense physical and psychological hardship, all in the hope that your lay will be the fortune that makes you whole. You’re gambling on you, and while it might be long odds (that 1/170th of a lot is still a lot), you at least have a stake. America as a nation of “temporarily embarrassed capitalist” might be over-simplified, but it captures an essential component of our thick culture, especially when compared to the rest of the world.

“I have little sympathy for the Americans … but their energy in bringing the trade (whaling) to the pitch it has arrived at, deserves the highest encomium.” wrote an English whaler in 18462. That energy is still there, and is foundational to who we are, especially when it’s about making money. The US is a nation of capitalism, of citizens striving for material wealth, and comfort, unfettered by their past, class, or race, held together by a shared faith, and all that is good, bad, and hypocritical about us is held within that.

To the degree Moby Dick is the great American novel, it’s because it’s about that, about forty or so men, from disparate backgrounds, united in that desire, and willing to undergo all sorts of hardships to obtain it, and in the process, realizing, some slowly, some never, that hard-work alone won’t overcome forces greater than you — including nature, an immoral economic system still rife with class/race, and metaphysical issues beyond you.

Moby Dick is long, dense, philosophical, and punctuated with eccentric soliloquies, many moving and beautiful, and some that sound like they come from that guy sitting in corner of a McDonald’s, wearing remains of a once fine outfit, who smells bad, has a bag of used books, scribbling slanted notes in a waterlogged notebook, and who you regret talking to when fifteen minutes later he won’t stop. Which means it’s ripe for “what does it all mean” interpretations, and picking through the thousands of them, they generally fall into four camps, with further sub-camps: The theological, the economic, political, and then the psychological.

Here is my list of them, although it’s hardly complete, because every review I read I find a new take. Moby Dick is one of those rare books where the interpretations don't diminish it, and each one you read makes you want to go back and find what you missed, which is a sign of inexhaustible richness. It is the book that keeps on giving, in a literary criticism way.

• Calvinist God — Moby Dick as the omnipotent divinity that destroys without reason, Ahab as the man who won’t submit.

• Gnostic demiurge — Moby Dick as the false creator god, powerful and malevolent but not the true divinity. Ahab, fighting against that, and failing3.

• The Godless universe — Moby Dick as pure indifferent nature, man as another animal forced to compete, and while able to defeat most of it, fails when his hubris, and emotions, overtakes him.

• Human hubris — Ahab represents mankind that cannot accept limitation, either imposed by nature, or by the Gods.

• American imperialism, the bad side — the Pequod as America, its multiracial crew exploited in service of one man’s obsessive capitalist extraction from nature.

• American exceptionalism, the mostly good side — the Pequod as America itself, the crew striving for wealth, and in the process doing great things, until done in by a corrupt leader.

• Capitalism itself — The hunting of whales as industrial capitalism, the crew as exploited labor, Ahab as the monomaniacal CEO who pursues Moby Dick for a personal vendetta, which he can do because he’s flush with unwarranted profits.

• Democracy and tyranny — the Pequod as failed democracy, Ahab as the demagogue who sways lesser men into instruments against the common good.

• The unconscious — the whale as the shadow self, the hunt as the ego’s doomed attempt to destroy what it cannot integrate. Or something like that — I didn't read much of these interpretations, since Freud and all his sidekicks have never been my thing.

I’m mostly in the economic camp, as is clear from what I wrote before, but the theological is certainly there, as it is in the US. We are an economic nation steeped in faith, and the two, especially in the 19th century, are inseparable.

Yet what struck me was the crew, who while not well fleshed out (more on that below), are recognizable, still today. Go into any dive bar, any military base, into any McDonald’s when the work crews come in from their break, sweaty in their orange shirts, and you see men who want to make something of themselves through hard labor, to be in their own way, a hero. Who want to be part of a meaningful (even if misplaced) quest. To be able to conquer something, with other like-minded souls, and return to accolades, with dignity granted.

The Pequod is a fraternal order — that and the appeal of the unknown, of adventure, of a danger that can test them, draws the men (and a few women) to it, which is made even clearer in Leviathan, where excerpts from diaries of young men reveal they went less for the money, more to be part of a precarious journey.

Even today, with life less unstable, men4 still need this, and will go to great lengths to manufacture it. I was thinking of the documentary The Dark Wizard, about the life of the solo climber Dean Potter, who kept pushing and pushing, and succeeding, then moving on to the next absurdly risky goal, until he found one that killed him. There is a surfeit of young men who seek out the precarious, not for the money, but for spiritual fulfillment.

I was thinking about the returning service men I’ve met, many of them now in a deep funk, who still perk up when they talk about the camaraderie they had in the military, the friendships made under duress (and boredom), and how that is what they miss the most about civilian life — and how lost they feel without it5.

Whaling offered an antidote to that, a community yoked to something larger than themselves, and I came away from both books believing that was the greater motivation, not the pay. I would bet that if the stigma of hunting whales was removed, you would still find plenty of men who would sign up for the Pequod now, simply for the thrill, the greater the sense of danger, the greater the reward from conquering it.

It’s especially appealing to men who feel slighted, who feel they’ve yet to achieve anything in life worth celebrating. Who feel disrespected, and consequently, suicidal.

That's how Melville starts Moby Dick, with Ishmael confessing that whaling and suicide draw from the same death wish — one just more alive, scenic, meaningful, and communal than the other:

This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feeling towards the ocean with me.

Yet none of the other interpretations are outright wrong. The strength of Moby Dick comes from its richness. It is one hundred and thirty-five diverse, insightful, and moving essays held together by an irresistible plot, which is also its greatest weakness as well — the characters get subsumed, at the expense of depth. They are primarily devices to make a point, and few come alive, and are distinguished, beyond caricatures. Ahab the obsessive, Queequeg the noble savage, Pip the innocent, Stubb and Flask the devoted but simple upper management yes-men, Fedalla the foreign mystic.

Starbuck is given the most space to flourish, given over to doubt, but even then it’s through actions, not thought. Maybe that’s the point, that we are all actors with little free will, being moved around by forces beyond us. Or maybe Melville believes that is how the majority of us go through life, acting without thought. As he writes, “But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!”

It is after all Ishmael's (which is to say Melville's) story, and for all its strengths as an ethnography, it can't escape the writer's perspective: we rarely grant others the depth we assume in ourselves. It’s about Ishmael, not the others, which makes me wonder if Melville spent his two years on the whaling ship feeling the isolated intellectual, unable to fully comprehend those around him, unable to fit in, and spent his long nights standing watch, thinking about what the color white really means, or what it would be like to have eyes on the opposite side of your head, unable to look ahead. The quixotic bookish nerd, trying to understand, anything and everything, but never fitting in. Alienation versus belonging, the role most writers inhabit.

Of all the interpretations, the one I found least satisfying is the one currently fashionable — which is the political. Ahab as the dictator, which while true, wasn’t where the energy of the book was. I was reading Moby Dick at the same time as Plato’s Gorgias, his dialogue on rhetoric and I’d imagined this review might turn into a comparison of the two. Yet, there is little exploration of why Ahab had the control he had, why the crew followed him, other than that they did, because that is how the system, corrupted though it may be, worked. Again, Starbuck comes the closest to contemplating mutiny, but what’s going through his mind is absent. Which is all the more surprising since Melville himself was a crew member on a mutinous ship6.

The most emotionally powerful, and empathetic, chapters are not about the people, but about nature and especially the whales, which even though it is a book about a floating abattoir, didn’t surprise me. Hunters, ranchers, fishermen, often have deep respect for their prey, built from proximity. There is a reason early religion was so steeped in and intertwined with the ecological, including the animals that provided the people with their food. It is an adversary that you respect, because you know it so well.

The image of the row boats of hunting men with lances, trapped inside the foaming circle of herding bulls, spotting the mothers and newborns under the calm waters, with Queequeg reaching out to playfully scratch one’s head, will be the last to leave me7. While Melville might not have directly intended this to be a plea to end the slaughter of whales, that is what it reads as now, although there are parts where he directly questions the ethics behind the whole industry, writing at the end of a long chase of an elderly maimed bull, “For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

Men get what they want, animals are the Loose-Fish, men the Fast-Fish. Until he aims too high, gets too full of himself, and believes he can do no wrong. Hubris sure, but never forget we are still animals, still made of the same stuff, by the same creator, as the leviathans we harvest to light our lamps and give our corsets shape.

None of the debate over what it all means would survive a lesser writer. What carries Moby Dick, what makes it a pleasure, is the prose itself. It shines so bright because it’s exceptionally well written, with six hundred plus pages of lyrical prose. It is prose that reads as poetry8, and so I supplemented my reading with an audiobook, and for three weeks that’s all I listened to on my walks, even though I’d read the sections before. Even the simple description of a boat plowing through the water, its deck try-pots ablaze, is turned majestic,

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

It’s also very playful, with far more humor than it is credited with. That playfulness, at times absurd (the bull whale with his harem, chapter 88), at times bawdy (the double entendres of sperm), can also be self-referential, such as when he suggests trying to figure out what the white whale means is only for us over-educated fools, “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

We, the critics, are thinking too much, “So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.’”

We should sit back and enjoy the story, for the incantatory writing, the lessons in whaling, and a compelling adventure story. And for the jokes, because I laughed out loud every few pages, to the confusion of those in the McDonald’s, and anyone spotting me walking alone through the woods, headset in my ears.

Which is why I keep reading Moby Dick, picking it up, flipping to a random section, and being entertained, and finding things I missed, because there is so much there, even if what it means is uncertain.

PS: There was recently an article asking, Who is America’s Homer, that received a lot of attention, with Zena Hitz nominating Melville, and Moby Dick, suggesting “The voyage of the Pequod is America’s greatest quest, the search for meaning.”

(It’s a great article, and I urge everyone to read it.)

As I argued in this piece, I do believe Moby Dick can be seen as representing the American Dream, as capturing the American desire for entrepreneurial excellence, channeled through capitalism, wrapped in old testament theology.

Yet to be more precise about it, in such a diverse, individualistic society, I doubt we can ever have a single author, or work, that defines us the way Homer defined the ancient world.

Homer’s works didn’t just “capture the Greek spirit, the Greek story, the Greek identity”, but became archetypes that citizens strove for, even if they didn’t realize it. It wasn’t just a product of the thick culture, but came to represent it, and then change it.

As I’ve written before, I believe societies provide their citizens an array of “roles to play”, like character select in a video game, and that’s what Homer came to represent to the ancient world, so much so that Alexander the Great carried a copy of the Iliad with him, as his “blueprint” for life.

Moby Dick does represent our thick culture — as well as any single work of art — but I doubt there are many citizens who take it as a guide to how to live a good life.

Sometimes I immediately like a place, or don’t. As a travel writer I’m supposed to have informed reasons for my judgements, but the reality is sometimes I simply fall in love (or hate) at first sight, and that happened with Estonia, an infatuation that grew and grew over my week there.

I liked Estonia from my first minutes in the country, despite it starting off so badly, because getting to Tallinn was far harder than it should have been, the result of a missed connection and an airline that provided absolutely no support. My plan of arriving, by a relaxing ferry from Helsinki was replaced, at considerable out-of-pocket expense, by a last-second flight from Copenhagen, surrounded by a boisterous group of French friends, all in matching bucket hats, on a bacchanalian excursion they were pre-gaming, one festive shout of “Putain!” and “Cul sec!” at a time.

Once off the airplane, everything began to change. At the information booth, I asked the affable woman if I could directly walk from the terminal into town, without the bus, and after a back-and-forth in which she expressed some confusion, not because of language issues but because of my American abruptness, she finally said, “It seems you certainly want to do that, so of course you should do that.”

I did that, and while there wasn’t any single thing along the four miles I could point to that warmed my heart, my heart warmed. I like uncomplicated low-stress cities, and that is what Tallinn is, but as I found out once I settled in, with a lot of physical beauty, and cultural richness.

It certainly helped I was seeing Tallinn at its best, a few days from Jaanipäev, when the summer light stretches over eighteen hours, almost never extinguishing, the horizon glowing like a nightlight even at two a.m. The days are long, the atmosphere enchanting, and you feel as if you’re wrapped in a soft blanket of crepuscular light.

That first night, stupefied from a day of sleepless travel, I sat at an outdoor cafe, eating a plate of pelmeni, drinking mugs of pilsner, wrapped in that light and a blanket, on the edge of “old town”, watching the youth of Estonia, recently paroled into recess from ten months of schooling. A continuous two month recess that, given the absence of night, becomes a single long play date — of rambunctious scampering about for the pre-teens, graduating to a focus on courting for the teens, the boys all with the same atrocious broccoli haircut, trying to impress the girls, all with faces painted to play grown-up.

The cafe I chose was Russian, built around nostalgia for the 1980 Olympics, which Tallinn played a minor role in, as the venue for the sailing events, and that first night, I began to glimpse the storm beneath Estonia’s calm. The 1980 Olympics is the most PR-friendly marketing for their Russian past. A soft blanket of nostalgia to try and mute the brutal reality of invasions, rule, and totalitarian authoritarianism.

And present, because modern Estonia is still close to twenty-five percent ethnic Russian, and that sits uneasily with what it means to be a citizen of Estonia, a country forged by that exact desire, to finally be free of an oppressor, to celebrate Estonianism, a distinct, genuine, and rich culture with a thousand-year lineage, but one pockmarked by centuries of outside rule, by the Swedes, Germans, Russians.

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In my sixty years of traveling, spanning three different careers and many conventions, I’d never been to Las Vegas. That was mostly intentional, because if given a choice between something hyped as premium, and anything lesser, I’ll choose the lesser. So I’ve been to Reno, Hot Springs, AR, and a variety of other despondent casinos in despondent towns, where the musical act is a band milking a name forged from a single hit decades before — coming this spring to the Zia Park Casino Hotel and Racetrack: Men Without Hats!

Las Vegas is hyperbole manifest, a city built on the promise of excess in the middle of inhospitable desert, as if that promise can ward off the bone-dry blistering sun, turning the desiccated lush. Well, that promise and plenty of AC, windowless labyrinthine casinos, and car services that whisk you from A to B so that you rarely touch the earth. We’ve defeated nature, and Las Vegas is our bounty, our displayed heads of slain warriors, a trophy proclaiming victory.

But now I’d finally come to Vegas for the only thing that could have brought me in June — the McDonald’s worldwide convention, a biennial festival of franchises, management, and vendors that I’d been invited to speak at. My original plan was to attend, then stay for three more days and walk beyond the strip. That evaporated within an hour after landing, as I shuffled from bus stop to bus stop under the 103 degree heat-lamp sun, trying to figure out how to get to my hotel without using a cab. I’d assumed that would be easy, given the thousands who do that daily, but no, apparently nothing in Vegas is easy unless you throw money at it. So after a sweltering shuttle van, and two musty buses, I’d made it to my hotel, parched and overheated, realizing you can’t walk Vegas, not in June at least, unless you’re mad, which plenty of people around me were. Ranting, swaddled in rags, twitching from drugs, mad.

I also realized I’d bought into an image of the Strip that was more hype than reality. By the time I reached my hotel I’d resigned myself to being confined to it, figuring I could still happily walk up and down it, the superior vena cava of America’s hedonistic body, gawking at the marvelous. That was also quickly dispelled, after a mile trudging on its shadeless sidewalks lined with fake grass and music pumped in from far-away casinos.

Vegas is spread out, all of it, even the Strip, and going from one casino to the next is akin to passing from one castle to another, through gates manned by bored security guards, over moats of chlorinated water, and around gardens of perfunctory hedges and Uber drivers. The magnificent was there, all lined up in a four-mile avenue, but intentionally fortified, not to keep people out, but to keep them in. The banal was also there, with strip malls of tattoo parlors, fast-food franchises, and vape shops filling in the gaps, only differing from the rest of America in all being open 24 hours, because the city that never sleeps is earned hype.

I wasn’t going to get anything out of walking Vegas this trip, in this heat, other than scorn, so I shelved that for another time, and pivoted to focusing entirely on the convention, which given how much of the last two decades of my life has been built around McDonald’s was fitting.

My life has been tethered to McDonald’s since I left banking and began to write about America, awkwardly at first, but now firmly, and without the least bit of remorse.

McDonald’s is … central to who I am. My first viral piece, that effectively launched my writing career, was about how McDonald’s has become America’s community centers, especially for communities where so much else has fallen apart, or disappointed people. Over half of my book Dignity takes place in McDonald’s, and while writing it, in a McDonald’s, my working title was, “Everything you want to know about America can be learned in a McDonald’s” because I sincerely believe that. Which is why, when I do a brief turn as a political reporter, I spend my months interviewing people in McDonald’s, not at campaign events, or non-profits, or even in diners, because all of those are self-selecting for highly engaged voters and elections are not determined by only the highly engaged voters but by the far larger “normies” who only tune in and turn out every few years.

I now love McDonald's, as a place to be a detached cultural observer, but also as a regular.

Each morning, if possible, I began it in a McDonald's, and there was one adjacent to my hotel, or about as adjacent as anything in Vegas can get, which meant a few football fields’ walk from my hotel compound’s borders. It is where I met the teenage Maria, only a few years in America from Venezuela, her hat blossoming with flair, her mind with the American Dream, which she was sure McDonald's was her first step toward, "I'll work any shift they give me, no matter what hour. That's how it is done, right?"

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Northeastern New Jersey is part of New York City in everything but name. It's culturally, physically, and economically bound to the city, only removed by the Hudson River, but tethered to it by bridges, tunnels, and a shared history, like a sidecar being pulled along. That minority status has made it the dumping ground, literally and figuratively, for the messy logistics needed to keep a city running — the rail lines, the tangles of expressways, the power plants, the newer immigrants — which has further eroded its status. Everyone around the world I've met has visited New York City, or wants to, yet almost none have gone to New Jersey, or want to, unless they had to pass through to get to somewhere else.

I was thinking about all of this when a bunch of memes popped up on social media about the upcoming World Cup, because some games will be played in New York City, which means at the MetLife stadium, which means tourists will have to venture out to New Jersey. That getting there isn’t easy, or inexpensive, has become the latest dust up in the seemingly never ending Euro-poor versus Ameri-poor debate, a debate I just can’t seem to keep away from, no matter how fruitless it might seem.

So, given that I had some time to kill, and like every New Yorker I’ve neglected New Jersey for too long, I decided to try and walk from Manhattan to MetLife stadium, to prove that you can, but more as a troll to highlight that nobody would ever think of doing that because that’s not how the US is built. We have a different model of what felicity means, and prioritizing being able to walk to a football game isn’t an essential part of that. Being the lord of your own manor — having your own home, your own yard, and your own cars — is our national blueprint for success, and so you drive to the game, or catch an uber, or go to the sports bar down the block and watch it on giant screens.

My walk, which started1 at the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan, was a little shy of fifteen miles, and took me across three additional bridges fording a canal, a river, a railyard, and an interstate, because this part of New Jersey is carved up into a jumble of segments by logistics. While it wasn’t exactly pleasant, there was always a sidewalk, and the bulk of the time I was passing through residential neighborhoods, with more parks and war memorials than industrial blight. While Garden State doesn’t quite describe the scenery, a state with lots of yard gardens, VFW halls, and Korean take-out stores does, although that probably wouldn’t fit on a license plate.

As I found out during my last New Jersey walk, its embrace of car culture, rather than public transportation, doesn’t mean there’s not localized community. I did this hike for speed, as a task to complete, so I only stopped to talk to a few people, but I could have spent several days, lingering in parks, restaurants, and neighborhoods, gabbing away. Every city is a confederation of small communities, and New Jersey is no different, despite the infrastructural mayhem.

In Fort Lee I met a Croatian-American couple watching their toddler’s t-ball game, along with hundreds of other parents, almost all recent immigrants. It was about as idyllic a picture of the American Dream as could be, but played out only a stone’s throw from a tangle of interstates. She was a mother of two, one of whom was on the field, and he was a cop whose parents came to Jersey in 1970, escaping Tito. They both spend their summer vacations on a dot of an island in the Adriatic (Otočić Školjić) with other families from the neighborhood with a similar past. It’s where they plan to retire, to a house they are building. As he said, “Isn’t it funny that all of our parents left Croatia to come here, and now their children are going back.” Indeed, if that’s not the American Dream, then what is?

He was confused why I would want to walk to MetLife stadium, a very natural reaction. When I asked him who would he root for if Croatia ended up playing the U.S., I knew the answer already, Croatia, because that’s probably the last vestige of ethnic pride assimilation erodes. A harmless thin cultural difference that the U.S. accepts, as long as you buy in to the larger purpose, which he clearly has. Work hard, play by the rules, build a life where you spend your weekends at the local ballpark with your children, and make enough to build a house on an island that your parents could only dream of.

In Ridgefield I met D (cover picture), a retired barber, oil salesman, mechanic, and more who came from Cuba sixty years ago, fleeing a different communist regime, who was doing his personal best to make New Jersey the Garden State, at least his little part of it. I didn’t need to ask him who he’d support in a U.S. versus Cuba match, his flag, shirt, and “Super Trump” yard signs told me that, but he wanted to make sure I knew that if you come to America you better come loving it, all of it, and if you don’t, then don’t bother coming, because what’s the point. His other sign, nestled among blooming roses, read,

“WHEN THE PEOPLE FEAR THE GOVERNMENT IT’S TYRANNY”

“WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FEARS THE PEOPLE IT’S LIBERTY!!”

That resonated with me, because I understood the sentiment, but with Government replaced by cyclists. What should have been the most enjoyable part of the walk, crossing the George Washington Bridge with its stunning views of the city and the Hudson Valley, was the most unpleasant, thanks to a surfeit of obnoxious cyclists. Someone will have to explain to me why weekend cyclists are such jerks, especially around New York City, treating pedestrians like they claim cars treat them, assuming everyone else is in their way. You're on a weekend ride, not the Tour de France, relax spandex boy.

The rest of the walk was uneventful, more a trek through the banality of suburban life, with a mix of light industry thrown in because it is New Jersey. I made it to MetLife stadium four and a half hours later, and contrary to online memes, I was able to do it entirely on sidewalks.

The walk was never intended to prove that you could do that, except to the most pedantic, because for the actual games, pedestrians will be barred from entering Meadowlands Sports Complex, presumably for safety reasons. And anyways, let’s be realistic, as the father at the T-ball game noted, nobody will want to make that walk, because again, that’s not how the U.S. is structured or what we value. We believe in a different model of living than Europe, or Asia. You have your home, a democratized version of the lord’s manor, and you keep a carriage, or many carriages, and you drive yourself to events, and if you can’t do that, you call someone else to drive you, or deliver stuff to you.

As I’ve written before, modern suburban life can be viewed as,

the democratization of the lordly life for the well-to-do, but still decidedly not nobility, plebes. A fenced-in home that is yours and yours alone, on a quarter-acre yard, with a two-car garage, is a version of the manor, complete with “having a carriage,” for the masses.

That’s what the highly scorned McMansions aspire to, but fall short of achieving. They are, like all suburbs, an attempt to replicate the English manor life, without the resources, historical background, or full cultural infrastructure.

The American model wasn't designed with World Cup fans in mind, the U.S. was chosen because it's the richest media market on earth, not because you can walk to the stadium. This is a television event that happens to have stadiums attached. Holding it in the U.S. is a square peg in a round hole thing. It, like everything Fifa does, is about making money and marketing. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, and the biggest media market, and consequently it’s a great place to broadcast a global event, with the ancillary benefit that Fifa believes it will help make the U.S. as soccer crazy as the rest of the world.

This World Cup will look great on TV, the fans will have fun outside of the game, and it will accelerate interest in soccer in the U.S., something that’s happening already, because the U.S. is huge, and even if it is our fifth favorite sport, that’s a bigger, and wealthier, market than being first in most countries.

Sports, especially soccer, are now big business, the top players millionaires with little connection to their birth country.

If you want the more personal connection to a sport, then go watch a high school game, or as I was fortunate to do, Faroe Islands play Macedonia, in Tórshavn. Or better yet, go watch a t-ball game in a Fort Lee park. Or, do what ninety-eight percent of the world does, and go to the local bar, and root for whoever you root for. That you can walk to, and it’s far cheaper. Although this being the U.S., most people will drive their SUV to the sports bar down at the strip-mall, where they can relax in air-conditioned comfort, complete with plenty of high definition replays.

Reginald Returns

If you followed me for several years you know I have two “pet” snapping turtles that live in my pond, Reginald and No-Name. For over a decade I’ve been feeding Reginald (and for five years No-Name) who appear every spring, after the ice cover melts, to get their evening hot dogs, or grapes, or chicken, but mostly hot dogs. It’s now our ritual. I tap on the water a few times, and they come racing to snap up whatever I put in front of them. They’re not discerning gourmets, more given to attack and eat mode, having grabbed a camera tripod and dragged it off into the pond before.

This year was different, because my pond suffered a winter-kill. Which means it iced over longer than normal, oxygen was depleted, most of the fish in it died, and when the early spring thaw hit carcasses floated to the top. Several weeks later I spotted Reginald sunning on the edge of the lake. He'd survived, but after a few days of thought, he bolted, slowly trudging off to the surrounding wetlands to find a pond without dead fish. I was happy he survived, but a little miffed he didn't have a little more gratitude for our ten-year friendship. I hoped he would eventually come back when he realized that other ponds don't come with a weird tree on the bank that taps its branches in the water, and then when you approach it, sheds hot dogs.

He didn’t come back, up until several days ago, when I found him hanging in his usual evening spot, waiting to be fed. I have to say it made me surprisingly happy. His absence was depressing, because I’ve become attached to him, and really all snapping turtles, and I’ve yet to see No-name, so there’s still a small turtle-sized black cloud hovering over me.

Everyone ends up with some eccentric cause as they age, and mine has become advocate for turtles, snappers in particular2. The world loves sea turtles, but snappers are too common, too ornery for adulation. But they are survivalists, and I admire that, and while I'm not sure I'd call them intelligent, they've got a tenacity, and a cunning built from millions of years of adaptability, that makes them interesting and admirable. And as I've learned, they actually do have personalities. Subtle ones, various shades of brutishness, but I could pick out Reginald from a snapper line-up based on behavior alone.

They also lead a more varied life than I’d realized. I’d assumed Reginald, being a male (I’m sure of that based on tail and shell size), has spent almost all of his thirty plus years in my pond, buried under the mud in the winter, and trolling around for refuse during the summer, but I’ve now spotted him hundreds of yards away, on walkabouts. The internet tells me that’s not uncommon. Even the most content snapper, and Reginald has it all in the turtle world, periodically checks out their surroundings to see if they can “level up.” I’m assuming his latest stroll was because he sensed a change in the pond’s chemistry, and was more motivated. Whatever the reason I’m glad he came back.

On my daily walks here in my town, I run into a few snappers every week, either laying eggs by the side of the road3, or crossing it. If you do, and you want to help, then grab them just in front of the back legs, where their long neck can’t reach, and carry them to the other side, in the direction they were headed. That might sound obvious, but I grew up in a time and place where someone was as likely to swerve to hit it, for fun, as to try and miss it. Few stopped to help them across the road, other than eccentrics. Life is a lot less brutal now than it used to be, in big and small ways.

So, join the pro-snapper club. It’s small, the utilitarian benefits are not clear, but it will make you a happier person. Really.

Upcoming plans and a great book

I usually plan for the next several months, airline tickets are the cheapest at that point, and as I get closer, I fill in the details. I’m posting this from the airport, heading to Las Vegas, for the McDonald’s Worldwide 2026, a biennial meeting of McDonald’s management and franchise owners. I’ve been invited as a speaker, along with Gary He, author of the spectacular McAtlas.

I’ve never been to Las Vegas before, so I’m excited to see the city, but I’m especially excited to go to the convention. At some point in the last few years McDonald’s realized I’d been to over two thousand of their restaurants, and I offer a unique perspective on what makes them work. I’m going as an unabashed fan, and as a regular. I wrote Dignity in my local McDonald’s, and that’s where I write most of my pieces. At my corner booth in the New Paltz franchise, where I go every morning at six a.m., to get my latte, read, write, and be social.

I’ll write a lot more about the convention next week, but if you are in Vegas this week, please reach out to me. I’ll try to do a meet up on Friday night if there’s enough interest.

The rest of my upcoming schedule is,

June 1st to 6th: Las Vegas

June 12th to 20th: Estonia — Tallinn, Narva, and Tartu, with a final stop in Helsinki

July 11th and 12th: “Another Life is Possible” conference at the Bruderhof commune in Rifton, NY.

July 27th to August 26th: Australia again. My plan (if you can call it that) is after a week in Perth make my way to Sydney on buses, via Newman, Broome, Darwin, Alice Springs, and a few points in-between4. And there are only a few points in-between. If you know Australia, that’s a rather audacious plan, and while my last long bus ride across the Australian interior was my favorite trip of last year, I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull it off. Regardless, I’ll be bouncing around Australia for most of August.

After that, I’ll be going back to South East Asia, for six weeks, probably starting in October. I’m not sure exactly what I will be doing, other than revisiting Hong Kong, which I felt I short changed the last time, and finally going to the Philippines.

For the Korea leg of my trip, I want to do something different than staying in Seoul and visiting my favorite LP bar, and my girlfriends. I’ve become motivated by a fantastic book I’m reading, The Imjin War, by Samuel Hawley.

I’m embarrassed I’d not read it earlier, because the 1592 invasion of Korea by Japan is so central to the history of the region. You can’t understand Korea especially, without understanding the war. It’s still foundational to Korean identity, and their hero of that conflict, Admiral Yi Sun-sin, still factors into Korean pop culture, with one of the top-grossing Korean movies ever, Roaring Currents, being about him.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a trio of books on the Japanese European “conflict” of the 16th century, and that’s how I found this book, which unlike the other three, gives a different perspective into the “clash of cultures.” Japan, Korea, and China were not backward cultures “found” by Westerners, but equally successful ones, although with a different definition of that. It wasn’t obvious in 1550 that the Europeans would colonize Japan, Korea, and China, because while they were certainly further along the path towards capitalism, and consequently the Industrial revolution (that’s one argument), they were not more advanced when it came to the arts, many of the sciences, and social structures.

As Samuel Hawley notes, the Japanese invasion force was larger in manpower (up to five times), and more advanced, than the Spanish Armada that sailed to England only four years earlier. The Japanese were armed not only with more guns than the Spanish carried, but better weapons, because in very Japanese fashion they had centralized the manufacturing of them, so all the parts were interchangeable, and standardized.

The romantic notion, central to narratives like Shogun, that Japan needed a Western barbarian to unlock its military potential in 1600 gets the history backwards — by then Japan was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth, and while it had gotten there by initially borrowing the matchlock musket from the Portuguese fifty years earlier, they achieved their military might on their own terms, in their own way.

So I want to do a Japan/Korea trip that traces the route of the invading forces, from Kyushu, through smaller islands in the Sea of Japan, into Busan, and then up to Seoul, where all along that route there are memorials, museums, and relics from the war.

While I’m a lifelong reader of history, I’ve been too flippant about going into a country without doing more research. The past informs the present, and you can’t ignore it to the extent I have.

Regardless, I urge everyone to read the book, or at least google “Turtle ship of Korea.” I say that both as a fan of Korea, and turtles.

As usual, if you happen to be in any of the places I mentioned, please reach out to me.

Until next week, enjoy!

Half way through my first day’s hike, from Ulm to Oberfahlheim, I realized this was going to be a lonely trip. While I was passing through a village every few miles, there was nobody around, except in cars zooming past me, or if lucky, at the single open bakery where they would jump out, get their bread, and then quickly drive off.

That emptiness was especially striking because the towns themselves were idyllic, with a uniformly white aesthetic, like human-sized villages built by a child with limited Lego bricks — a mix of white homes with red roofs, around a central austere white church, topped with nesting white storks, and then a single impossibly high maypole with a scraggly fir tree at its peak. Within a minute of leaving one town, I would see the next in the distance, with the steeple and tree-topped maypole rising over the fields of wheat and rapeseed, but by the end of the day I’d given up thinking it might be different. I’d given up thinking that it would finally be the one with a central plaza with busy cafes ringing the church, or even just a single spot I could sit and watch people. I was in Swabian Germany, not Lombardy, and while they may both be Catholic, linked by thousands of years of history, and only a quarter day’s drive apart, they couldn’t have been more temperamentally different.

I’d figured that would change on my second night in Günzburg, a larger town with a beautifully preserved medieval section, and an adjacent Legoland amusement park, but while it was a Saturday night, and there were plenty of cafes on the map, lining century-old cobblestone streets, half were shuttered, the other half despondent. I spent the evening wandering around trying to find something, anything, that felt alive, but the only place bustling was the McDonald’s on the edge of town. I went to sleep not entirely disappointed, because I could attend mass at the magnificent Rococo cathedral1 adjacent to my room the next morning, and so when its bells woke me, I hurried over excited, only to find it shuttered, the plaza out front emptied except for a solitary white stork, completely uninterested in me. Eventually the stork turned and looked at me like I was an idiot, ‘Don’t you know, silly human, that it’s Sunday and this town doesn’t open up until at least noon, if that?’ So I took the stork’s advice and trudged out of town wondering what in the world Germans did on their Sunday.

This went on for three more days, of fifteen mile walks through fields dotted with religious icons, through somnolent villages, before I gave up and jumped on a train to Augsburg, fast forwarding the last twenty miles. It was all very pleasant and relaxing, with well maintained, but rarely used, paths for wherever I wanted to go, but after Zusmarshausen it got worse, the towns got smaller and somehow emptier, the logistics of getting food harder, and I was getting frustrated. I don’t travel to be in a foul mood, and I didn’t want to begin to hate Germany, to curse another closed bakery. The Germans themselves don’t seem to mind any of this, at least the ones I spoke to, especially on that Sunday when I finally saw others outside, families freed from work, enjoying the enforced relaxation. I can’t celebrate felicity, can’t complain about how us moderns are deluged with stimuli, and then get mad when a place doesn’t cater to my transient whims.

Anyways, my time in Ulm had been fantastic, and perhaps Augsburg would be the same.

Within my first hour in Ulm I got an unexpected present, realizing why I thought it was famous, despite being a town of only a hundred thousand which two separate people on my train from Frankfurt had asked, ‘why you going there, why not Munich?’ Ulm is the birthplace of Albert Einstein, a fact I’d read before and forgotten, a fact revealed to me by an easy-to-miss monument on the spot where the house had been, which is now adjacent to a McDonald’s. Given my affection for both, and my conviction that being within throwing distance of Grimace is an honor, it was a fortuitous beginning.

In those first two days in Ulm I also remembered what I’d liked so much about Germany, when I’d walked from Dortmund to Cologne, which was great beer (every city has their own traditional brewery like Ulm’s Brauerei Gold Ochsen), vastly under-appreciated cuisine, and the finest bakeries in the world. German food suffers by comparison to its neighbors, barely registering on global lists, but it’s within spitting distance of Italian and French, and like those its consistent quality, at all levels, is the most noticeable to an American. I was in Germany during white asparagus season, and while I didn’t order anything from the special asparagus infused menus, that the Germans care enough that every restaurant from high to low builds entire meals around it, is the point.

Instead I ate Maultaschen, because Ulm is in the heart of Swabia (Southwestern region of Germany) and as the saying goes, when in Swabia, do as the Swabians do, which is to consume pasta with meat hidden inside during Lent to trick God. A tongue-in-cheek sacrilege which earned the dish the nickname Herrgottsbscheißerle, or "little cheats on the Lord." A piety-on-the-outside-pragmatism-on-the-inside move that struck me as not dissimilar from flipping your church Protestant just after you crushed a protestant uprising that threatened your earnings.

That is exactly what the Ulm elite had done in 1530, as I learned while visiting the Ulm Minster, which is not only the tallest church in Europe, but also one of the earliest to switch to Protestantism (1530), which it still is. Yet Ulm had also only five years earlier led a confederation of German cities (Swabian League) that had violently suppressed an uprising of peasants at the Battle of Leipheim (1525). An uprising inspired by the very Martin Luther that they now embraced, at least theologically.

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I’m fortunate to have plenty of free time, so when at home, resting in a McDonald’s, waiting in airports, or on planes, I use it to read, or when walking, listening to books1.

I walk to learn, which is why I read, since each is a different way to do that. The Metis versus Techne split2 described by James C Scott, although there are plenty of other terms to describe experiential versus formal learning. I use his because I prefer the framing, which emphasizes that the two differ not only by methodology (talking versus reading) but by where that knowledge resides. Metis is the epistemology of the masses, and it is decentralized, local, and bottom-up versus Techne, which is that of the elite, and so is codified, formal, and top-down. Common sense versus book smarts, in Metis terms, and folk wisdom versus fact, in Techne terms.

Neither encompasses truth, so I believe you have to engage with both. If you focus solely on one, you will end up like the guys at the gym who never work out their legs. That analogy is especially appropriate for today’s elites, who seem to only do Techne days, never Metis, and so come out top-heavy, with spindly legs, too fragile to walk among the masses. I get it, going out into the world, dealing with people on their terms, can be intimidating to intellectuals, which has consequences, because while I value both, most people in the world are Metis, and consequently understanding it is essential, especially in a democracy.

That is one of my concerns about AI, which is that it will codify, then metastasize Techne, since that is what it draws from. Think of it as a grand aggregator of Techne, consuming it, then regurgitating its own watered-down, smoothed-out version as undeniable fact.

While I do try every now and then to adjust my reading around my upcoming trips, often the direction is the other way. What I read inspires a trip, like the one I start this week, of walking from Ulm to Munich. The book that inspired that was Summer of Fire and Blood by Lyndal Roper, about the German Peasants' War, a sixteenth-century uprising central to the Protestant reformation.

While I doubt that I’ll experience anything directly from an event that took place exactly five hundred years ago, even if it was cataclysmic, I appreciate context. I appreciate seeing the geography it took place in, the distances involved, and with Europe being Europe, there will still be buildings, bridges, and icons from then3, and while most will suffer from the “Ship of Theseus” paradox, there can still be enough “aura” left to inspire. Culture, thick and thin, also has an amazing staying power, even in our interconnected modern world. Bavarians are still recognizably Bavarian, different from the English, French, and Americans in ways that someone many centuries ago would recognize.

I’ve got no idea what inspiration I might take away from this walk, and whether it will have anything to do with the German Peasants’ War, but that’s the entire point of Metis — to learn, but in a haphazard way.

Below are a few books I’ve recently read, as well as the more fun category of a TV show I loved. Something I also do, because there’s nothing wrong with simply being entertained.

Aristotle’s Politics

Three times a year I read a great book with a bunch of curious strangers on the internet, thanks to the Catherine Project. It’s a non-profit that embodies what we were promised decades ago, which is an erudite online community. If you grew up before the turn of the century, a book nerd in a smaller town, you know how wonderful this is. You know of having almost nobody to talk to, of libraries you’ve picked over clean for easter eggs, and the discontent of joining the local book group to find ten sweet people reading the latest Stephen King, or if lucky, maybe an Alice Walker book. That’s fine, I like a page-turner every now and then, but if your tastes run towards the Odyssey over Jonathan Livingston Seagull, then Catherine Project is for you.

I’ve now read twelve books with them, including Plutarch, Plato, Thomas Kuhn, St. Augustine, and Machiavelli, working through the texts slowly, with weekly discussions on Zoom.

It’s great to have people to discuss books rich in ideas, but it’s also an added structural nudge to finish them. I doubt I would have completed City of God, my favorite so far, alone. I don’t have the discipline for that.

Aristotle’s Politics is another book I probably would have ditched after a few chapters without the Catherine Project, and while what I ultimately took away from it might sound dismissive — that for political philosophy taking the advice of someone who lived two thousand years ago whose experience is limited to cities of less than ten thousand people should be taken with a big grain of salt — I’m glad I read it because that started me thinking about many different things, including how nations of millions hold together, versus city-states of far less.

Aristotle would be called a socio-biologist today, someone who views humans as animals only differentiated by our ability to talk, and consequently reason. But first and foremost we are animals, and so he sees politics as advanced animal husbandry, with some born to be led, or even enslaved, while others are born to lead. That last group, the philosopher class, are imbued at birth with greater capacity, which he believes needs to be nurtured into excellence via education and good habit, like a pliant but prized calf, and if that training takes, then they will rule over the others.

In the nature versus nurture debate, he comes down firmly on the nature side, but with the caveat that if the right people (basically he and those like him) can be the ones nurturing, those deficient by nature can be tamed, with the right husbandry. Or if the elites play Sim-culture correctly, city-wide felicity can be achieved. He, and other philosophers, are the ones who construct the culture that holds the city together.

A culture with strict rules on who can do what based on designated class, which you’re assigned to at a very early age and with limited ability to change. A slave is a slave, a vulgar craftsman a vulgar craftsman, and so on. To modern readers it is authoritarian, and anti-democratic. Besides justifying slavery and subservient women, Aristotle doesn’t believe the masses to be virtuous enough (rational, subdued) to make decisions, except in the extreme circumstances when the culture is properly fine tuned to imbue them with the reason, temperance, and courage to be judicious. He’s definitely a Techne man far more than a Metis one.

There’s a lot I don’t like with all of that, most obvious. I’m far less a socio-biologist than he is, and while I’m not a blank slate person, because people are indeed born with different abilities, I believe everyone has a soul worthy of freedom, and basic God-given rights.

Yet he’s not wrong that culture is largely built from the top-down, a product of Techne, regardless of if you believe that’s correct. Elites, and every society has some version of them, who run stuff and do play Sim-culture, which in his case (City-states) is also literally Sim-city.

Politics for most of our history has largely been a Techne game, of elites fighting over exactly what culture to build, with outbreaks of bottled up Metis. Those outbreaks rarely take constructive forms, or end well for the masses. Such as the German Peasants’ War, a revolt4 that resulted in widespread slaughter, mostly of the peasants.

When you read the history of politics, from Aristotle up until today, it’s hard not to come away a huge fan of our modern constitutional democracies. Which are a Techne-Metis balance that while it gives most of the day-to-day power to the elites (almost by definition), it comes with enough say from the “people” to allow course corrections when they feel, via Metis, the ship has gone too far astray. They have a soft veto power on the elites, through elections. Finding the “correct” balance on how much corrective power they exactly have is what most of modern politics is about, especially right now in Western democracies.

The question Aristotle never addresses, because of his times, is how his approach “scales-up” to nations of millions. He’s working with political unions of people who mostly know each other, and building a shared culture is consequently easier. The empires in the west came later, although they did exist in his time (Persia, Egypt, China) but he doesn’t address those5.

What is the “glue” that can keep a nation of millions together, what shared cultural norms, other than fear of persecution by an authoritarian regime, is something I wrote about last week, and that was inspired by years of walking in various countries, but also by reading Aristotle.

Lastly, religion is largely absent from his Politics. That’s not surprising because Aristotle sees culture as providing the moral foundation to a society, the thing that nudges people to live a virtuous life, and Greek religion, a hodgepodge of Gods, demi-Gods, and heroes, was an incoherent, confused, and corrupt moral system. The Gods were hardly godly. They were not virtuous, more akin to today’s entertainment stars, with messy personal lives. You could imagine Greek tabloids, with front pages plastered with the recent scandals of Zeus, Dionysus, and Ares. "King of the Gods or King of Cheats? Zeus's 47th Affair Exposed!”

In that light, it’s not hard to see why monotheistic faiths, with a more thoughtful and virtuous morality, became the glue for empires. A moral system that over time leaned heavily on Aristotle. Which is why I will be reading St. Thomas Aquinas the next time Catherine Project offers a class on him.

Three novels on Japan: Silence, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Shogun

I somehow ended up simultaneously reading three novels about Japan6, each about the same issue: The Japanese-European cultural conflict that began with the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch (Shogun, set in 1600), resulting in the closing of Japan to foreigners (Edo period) and Christianity (Silence, set in 1630, and The Thousand Autumns, set in 1799).

I started with Silence, which I began after visiting a Catholic church in Kyushu, not far from where the book takes place. It ended up being my favorite of the three by far. It is a wonderfully rich novel, that somehow is a page-turner despite being about a deeply philosophical question — should faith be maintained when it is tested by extremes, including God’s silence in the face of earthly evil. It also raises another question, which is should you convert those with other beliefs, and if so, at what cost, to you, them, and entire societies.

It’s nuanced, never slipping into a simple good versus evil, with every character flawed, despite being written by a Japanese Catholic, and I came away from it with more questions than answers. It isn’t an easy read, in a metaphysical sense, with visceral descriptions of deaths and torture, so I found myself texting a friend early on in the book, “I’m sitting here in McDonald’s on a beautiful day, annoyed, frustrated, and depressed at something that happened five hundred years ago in Japan.”

I found myself doing that often with the book. Putting it down, despondent. Some images from it will never leave me, and for that reason I’ve got little interest in seeing the movie made about it, no matter how good it is supposed to be. I don’t need to watch someone being tortured to death to get that great pain happened to people who only wanted to know the good. I also don’t need to see the landscape to know what it looks like. Walking along the coast of Japan, where it takes place, helped me with that, even five hundred years later. The writing is sparse, and my memory of that walk fleshed out the words.

That’s also why I picked up an old copy of Shogun I’d found in a Goodwill, which I’d realized was set thirty years before Silence. I wanted a different perspective and a lighter read. I was immediately put off. It felt light and silly by comparison, but despite that, and being cartoonish and historically iffy, I couldn’t stop reading it, and grew to respect it, because it’s a smart book. While it might be heavy-handed at times, prone to overblown stereotypes — Japanese clean, loyal, accepting of fate, and ready to kill themselves at a moment’s notice, while the Westerners are dirty, emotional, uptight, and arrogant — the broad strokes are not wrong. Japan and the West at that time were as different as two successful cultures could be, each having emerged largely ignorant of the other. It’s an entertaining meditation on what happened when they came into contact, so I forgave its simplicity, viewing it as a stylistic choice to reach a broader audience7. While the tragedy of the situation is there, it’s woven into a broader story that mixes in humor, romance, and Hollywood style battle scenes, that mostly work, with only a few eye-rolling scenes every chapter.

It also became my walking book, because I’d downloaded the audiobook from the library, narrated by the amazing David Case, and flipped between reading the text and listening to it. The effectiveness of audiobooks hinges on the narrator, and he was one of the best, and his performance with Shogun is spectacular, managing to make all the characters’ voices distinct, which given how many there are, is impressive.

The last book, and my least favorite, The Thousand Autumns, I picked up as I learned more about the period. It’s set two hundred years later, fifty years before the reopening of Japan, when all that remained of the foreigners was a tiny man-made Dutch trading island in Nagasaki harbor. It’s a great setting for a novel, an outpost of all that came before, complete with the complicated cultural clash still smoldering. About as physical of a metaphor as you can construct, and it was real. Yet, while I know what James Clavell and Shūsaku Endō wanted to achieve, I kept thinking what David Mitchell most wanted to tell us is how clever of a writer he is, and he is. The first third of the book is smart, very funny, and interesting, but the prose was unnecessarily showy. A “Look Ma, No Hands” style that annoyed me enough that when the novel switched gears entirely, from the island to a dystopian Buddhist monastery with enslaved physically broken nuns, I gave up. I couldn’t see the point, and the writing wasn’t clear enough for me to want to try and find it.

I am glad I found the book though, because it sent me down a wormhole of reading more about the end of the Dutch East India Company, especially in Japan, and next time I go to Nagasaki, I’ll go visit the remains of Dejima island, now part of the mainland, and I’ll go sit in the mall on it, eating my sushi, and think about the depressed and drunk Dutch traders that lived there two hundred years before.

Maybe someone else who’s read the book can tell me what I was supposed to get from it, but I’m at a loss.

PS: You can find a whole lot more on books about Japan, in this post by the wonderful Burcu Basa, another outsider who walks Japan and writes a great substack about it, although she’s far less transient than I am, having lived there now for many years.

Detectorists

I’ve likened Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO to a fire-hose of mediocrity. Too much content to sift through, almost all of it forgettable. Yet, I still try every now and then, and so when a friend recommended a British show about a small town metal detector club, I gave it a shot, and I’m glad I did.

It’s a wonderful show, that’s funny, and genuinely sweet. A celebration of the English life that I appreciate so much. The small pubs, the immaculately manicured fields, the rich history, the eccentrics in all classes.

I’ve now done three long walks in England8, and I could easily and happily turn this newsletter into an only walking England one. There is no better country to walk in, and the Detectorists captures that. England currently is in the news for its anger, and its history is replete with those Metis versus Techne conflicts, of revolts, uprisings, and movements. Yet, beneath all of that is a sense of humor that’s not completely given over to cynicism and the crude, more about the absurd. Life is complicated, and you might as well make the best of it, and that means laughing at it and yourself, and the English do that very well.

I was talking to the author Will Bardenwerper,9 who also writes about people and places in America that can feel left behind, about how I regret not being able to capture how much humor I see, even in the most trying times. There was as much laughter as yelling on my most recent Greyhound trip from hell. He agreed, and he’s been in far more trying times than I have, doing a fourteen-month deployment to an especially violent part of Iraq10.

To complete the circle of this essay, humor is a Metis answer to overbearing Techne. A way to humanize the inhuman.

So while I do read to learn, I also read (and watch TV) to simply laugh out loud, which I did watching the Detectorists often, to the confusion of the McDonald’s employees.

Veronica,11 a line-cook wearing a plastic garbage bag she uses to clean the ice-cream machine: “What’s so funny Chris?”

Me: “A show I’m watching.”

Veronica: “Would I like it? What’s it about?”

Me: “It’s about guys in England who go around trying to find treasure with those little metal detectors.”

Veronica: “So they loco?”

Me: “Not anymore loco than everyone who works here.”

Veronica, laughing: “So they definitely loco.”

I’m posting this from Ulm Germany. I will set off this Friday to try and walk to Munich. My route, as planned, is via Augsburg. As usual, if you are around, reach out to me and we can grab a beer, or spend a day walking, or both.

The rest of my summer schedule is shaping up as follows.

• June 1- 7th: Las Vegas, for the Global McDonald's convention.

• June 9th -20th: Walking Estonia, via Helsinki.

• July 10th- 13th: Bruderhof Communities, Rifton NY, for the Another Life is Possible conference.

• August: Australia, where I will be taking buses from Perth to Adelaide, via Broome, Darwin, and Alice Springs.

11

Veronica is on the left. She’s my McDonald’s morning friend, sitting at my table during breaks.

It was an ugly moment in an otherwise charming town, which made it all the more memorable. It wasn’t much, just a drunk guy being weird in a bar, hardly a unique thing, but who he was and how it played out was. I’d only been in North Platte for ten hours and was already charmed by it — the tranquil get-things-done functionality, the wide-open low-slung beauty of the surrounding plains, the non-ironic kitschiness. Sure it had the usual stretch of banality, the franchises and strip malls orbiting a massive Walmart, but even that felt different, empty of the despondent. It seemed a town preserved in amber from an idyllic cinematic past. Not only did it have working grain elevators and mile-long freight trains, but it had the world’s largest rail-yard with good jobs that didn’t require a college degree from a far away institution.

I’d gone into the bar wondering why wouldn’t you want to live here? It was late afternoon and the only other customer was an African man, slumped over his beer, staring at me. He looked out of place in so many ways. I quickly pegged him as central African, probably south Sudanese, because although I’d not seen the meat-packing plant, I’d smelled it, and I’ve been around enough of them to know he was here for that work. Hard, dangerous, and degrading work that “even the Mexicans have moved on from1”, and was now a landing spot for recent refugees from central and east Africa and the Caribbean, and Nebraska had its share of the former.

The bartender was an affable middle-aged black woman, who had moved to North Platte from Georgia over a decade before, to raise a family in a ‘town where you can let your children play outside without worrying about them being shot or getting into drugs.’

She was spending most of her time monitoring her two children, doing their homework at the front table, eating their dinner of hamburger and fries. I nodded to the man, raised my glass to him, but he didn’t respond, and kept staring straight at me, then he got up and staggered over to the front table, standing inches away from the young girl, who looked up at him with a quizzical smile. He tried saying something to her, but between his intoxication and limited English it didn’t make its way out, not in any way anyone could understand.

That brought over the bartender, who scolded him, “Hey, leave my daughter alone.” He looked at her, didn’t change his expression, and tried again to talk to the girl, and again it failed, and he stood there for minutes, mute, just staring at her, and he tried again to talk, but again nothing decipherable, and then he reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, and that is when the bartender ran out from behind the bar, and grabbed him, spinning him around. ‘No. I said no. Do you hear me? Do you understand English? Do you know what no means? You hear me? Leave her alone.’

This repeated again, and this time she upped the volume and anger, ‘You don’t want to see the bad side of my black ass, I will go ghetto on you so fast. Now leave before I do. You’re done. Get out’ and she pointed to the door, and he stood there not saying anything, looking at her with that blank expression for far longer than he should have, and then finally headed towards the door and when she had begun to retreat back to the bar he turned around and again went up to the daughter and again reached out to touch her shoulder, her looking at him confused, not scared, trying to make out what he was saying, and then the bartender was between the two, grabbing his shoulder, and pushing him towards the door, ‘That’s it. I’m calling the police. You hear? You understand?’ she said, pulling out her phone and waving it in his face. ‘Get out. I’ve told you to leave my children alone. Don’t you understand? You’re not in Africa anymore. We have rules here. You can’t go around touching anyone’s children. You hear me? Leave now or I’m calling and will get you deported so fast you won’t know what hit you. You hear? Go. Don’t mess with me.’2

That didn’t phase him, didn’t change his expression at all, but he did eventually leave, standing in the doorway for several minutes, walked by a few times peering into the window, tried to enter again, before she went out on the sidewalk and yelled, before turning to her children, and me, exasperated, ‘Did you see that? Who does he think he is?’

“Have you seen him before?” I asked.

‘No. This is why we didn’t want the plant. You see who it brings here? They shouldn’t be here. They don’t know how to behave. This isn’t Africa.’

As I learned later that night in a different bar the plant had opened recently, and its arrival had been contentious. The primary reason was “who it brought here.”

The next afternoon, waiting with me for the bus was another South Sudanese, a polite young man, the single one of us who didn’t smell like weed, wasn’t glued to their phone, didn’t spend the rest stops smoking/vaping, and who spent the five hours to Omaha looking out the window or reading the bible. I tried to speak to him, but he kept to himself, out of shyness and limited English.

Days later, reading articles3 on its arrival to North Platte, a town with few recent immigrants, it becomes clear “who it brought here” was indeed the entire issue, either couched in bureaucratic speak about “additional educational resources”, or directly, and more bluntly.

That’s not surprising, because immigration is the most contentious issue of our larval century, dominating U.S. politics, and every other nation, either explicitly as in Europe and North America, or simmering beneath the surface like in Asia, fueling the rise and fall of politicians across the globe.

Who you allow into your nation, how many and where from, and the rules they must follow until they are given citizenship (if ever) varies wildly, and yet in no country is it settled. It is not, to the chagrin of the political class, a solved issue, and while they may want to act like it is, it isn’t.

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I knew what I would find in the East Colfax McDonald’s when a block away, while walking between Colorado’s Capitol building and the beautiful Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. I was walking in the middle of the road because it was six a.m., empty except for scattered orange safety cones, and the sidewalks dotted with people sleeping in blanket nests. Also, if I looked just right, I could glimpse the Rocky Mountains behind me and I wanted to see big snow-capped majestic mountains. That is what I wanted Denver to be, an idyllic gateway to the Rockies, not Trenton with thin air.

I’d intentionally booked a fancier hotel than I usually do, right in the thick of the downtown, hoping to see Denver’s better side, but I’d messed up and found myself in a hotel with the same name, but a few steps down the revitalization curve. I didn’t mind though, because I’d found a sweet brew-pub several blocks away with campfires, no tourists, and chatty employees, who made my first evening in Denver a reminder how friendly, and sanguine, people in the West are, a nice antidote to North Eastern cynicism.

The inside of the McDonald's was as I expected it to be — every table taken up by a broken person, each differentiated by sub-type. There were the all-nighters, sleeping off prior sins, the ranters, carrying on a dialogue with nobody, the twitchers and pacers, their bodies working off a stimulant, the schizophrenic flipping between calm and rage, and the physically broken, slumped into wheelchairs strung with colored plastic bags like a Christmas tree with lights, and then the actively-trying-to-not-doze-off-ers, at booths surrounded by duffel, garbage, and tote bags, milking their coffee, eyes vacant, except when a lime scooter passes by, because as I soon found out, that's the workhorse of Denver's drug delivery.

Keeping watch over it all was T, an empathetic security guard at the start of a fourteen-hour shift. T was unfailingly polite, knew everyone’s name, and only roused to action when someone did something egregious (shouting at an employee, curling up in a booth.) and even then he suggested more than demanded. He explained that light touch, a calculated grace, was because of his own complicated past, made more so when a knee was mangled in high school football (running back) and ended his dream of being in the Marines.

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I boarded the six-thirty a.m. bus to Davenport, which reeked of weed, with two Nebraska state troopers searching for weed1. After a cursory scan of my passport, they made a beeline for a young sleeping couple, woke them, pulled them off, and searched through their stored luggage.

I headed to the back and found Nemises2, a slight wiry guy trying to disappear into his seat, who greeted me with a fist bump, a gap-tooth grin, and some whispered advice, “Bro, if you got any flowers, hide them now, we ain’t in Colorado anymore.” Given he smelled like he'd been marinated in marijuana I figured he knew what he was talking about, which a few minutes later he proved, surreptitiously pulling out a crumpled blunt from his underwear, “Bro, I went out to smoke when we pulled in, and driver told me ‘you can’t do that here’ and then them officers arrived I’ve been waiting for them to pull me off but they went for them others. Guess I got that white privilege.”

For the next twenty minutes, as they pulled three more off, Nemises kept a running commentary, mixing humor with nervous anticipation, "Moved on to the Mexicans now, guess they will get to us white guys next." They never did get to us white guys, and when we finally pulled out of the Omaha station with everyone back on, and nobody arrested, he stood up as the entire bus broke out in a loud cheer, looked out the window at the police, shot them a bird he had enough sense to make sure they couldn’t see, and yelled over to Miguel, his bus buddy for the last few days, "Bro, no bueno Nebraska. No bueno Nebraska. Right?"

Miguel, across the aisle a row ahead, laughed, “You gotta get this,” holding up a vape he’d shoved between the cushions. “You gonna kill yourself with that fire.”

Minutes later, drama over, Nemises nodded off and slept the entire way to Des Moines, his end point, even though he was heading to Michigan and had to eventually go through the bus’s terminus of Chicago. Why exactly he wasn’t sure. “I been riding for four days bro, and I don’t know why I keep changing buses, guess that’s why it only cost two hundred.”

Nemises got his nickname because he’s a carney, a p’role who can work whenever he wants, with whatever crew, and does for eight months a year, traveling all around the US. His ride is the Nemesis 360, the fast-spinning, octopus-like contraption that promises vomit from the weak, after graduating from the Tilt-a-Whirl.

“Tilt-a-Whirl’s crazy, bro. Because you got to manually engage the tiler. So you got to stand there on a hot deck all day. And so, Joe Dirt was right, bro. You get high as hell, bro. You almost pass out. Job for the new guys, or the Mexicans who got thicker skin than I do.”

He was heading back to catch up with a crew after a few months doing petitions in California, collecting signatures for a few bucks each for voter propositions he didn’t know or care about, “You spin people, you get their john hancock. Same shit, different day.”

I was sad to see him go, because he was the perfect seatmate, small, funny, optimistic, and numbed by weed, and so when I asked him if he believed in the American Dream, I wasn’t surprised by his answer, book-ended with two huge draws from his blunt, “Sure I do. American dream is to own land, house, have a family, live free, and smoke a lot of marijuana. I got all that.”

He hugged it out with Miguel before flopping down on a bench, to focus on smoking his blunt, unbothered to find out he had to wait another ten hours or so for his next bus.

My next seatmate, Gary, a rather robust man roughly my age, sat in his assigned seat, right next to me, despite three open rows around us. When I politely suggested he could sit in any of the three, he didn't seem to understand, and within a few minutes I realized he was slow, navigating life the way he'd been told. I also realized he wasn't able to understand his tickets, so I walked him through his upcoming thirty-five hour two transfer (Chicago, DC) trip back to his home in Durham. I'd seen his type of tickets before, provided by a third party, usually a government institution, but I didn't press him out of respect, although he had the new outfit (low-end flannel shirt with tag, pressed thin khakis, generic white tennis shoes)3 and a duffel bag that suggested a recently released inmate.

The trip across Iowa was uneventful, with two brief stops in Grinnell and Iowa City, where handfuls of riders got on, until the bus was close to full. Miguel became my new break buddy. He had just finished seven years in a Western prison, (for dumb shit I did when younger. Gangbanging shit) and had been riding for the last six days, headed to Massachusetts. Whenever he wasn’t asleep, unlike everyone else watching movies on their phone, or playing video games, or scrolling Instagram, he was reading a mangled copy of 26 Beauties by James Patterson, and had ten more paperbacks in a sack above his seat. “Prison is boring as fuck man, you got to engage your mind on something other than how long you in for. I got into situations my first years and this older guy took me in, mentored me, and told me I wasn’t going to survive unless I found something solitary, and gave me a bible and a library book.” He claimed to have had anger issues growing up, but I saw little of that, although he had the demeanor of a man — tight, compact, intense — who if his focus somehow shifted from the novel to violence, he could rip me into tiny pieces in seconds.

By Davenport I’d changed my ticket to go all the way to Chicago, because what was another three hours after seven, and I’d moved to an empty row away from Gary and I was enjoying myself and excited about getting back to my now regular McDonald’s and chilling for a week, but that was a big mistake because in Davenport is where the trip went all wrong.

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I call the two women pictured above my Seoul girlfriends. They work at the 24시 (twenty-four-hour restaurant) I eat at every day, and when I come in, they immediately start to giggle, flash me big thumbs up, and sing out “thank you, thank you” as the woman on the right escorts me to my table with a big smile.

I see them every time I come in because they are always there, the red-aproned woman in the kitchen doing whatever happens back there, the other out front, dashing about with steaming bowls of soup and smaller bowls of banchan, usually kimchi, buchu muchim (garlic chives), and yeongeun jorim (pickled lotus root and garlic).

I order the same meal almost every time — ulkeun gukbab (spicy soup) and Namdo Tteok-Galbi (braised short ribs) — and like a mother with a child, which I have no doubt they see me as, the waitress slowly cuts up my short ribs for me chanting “Thank you,” followed by a half-hour-long round of exaggerated thumbs-ups, smiles, and more thank yous, before I leave, when the waitress follows me out the door into the street, waving wildly, with her sing-song “thank you, thank you, thank you” eventually getting lost in the clamor of hundreds of drunk Koreans.

After fifteen trips to Seoul, scattered over five years, I'm not sure exactly what they make of me, the man child, but I've decided they call me "Mr. Thank You," a phrase I realized after a few visits, when they started saying it back to me proudly, with a practiced flamboyance, I did say a lot, which is why it’s now "our thing."

When someone asked me why, with so many options, I eat in the same diner every day, a rather run-down, no-frills place with a limited menu, I said, "Because I can't let my girlfriends down. If I don't show up they might think I've turned on them, moved onto something better, and I can't do that to them." Really though, I keep going back because while I genuinely love my meal (it is top-notch) I much more appreciate the connection, however cartoonish. When you live a transient life, human connections become even more important, even if they're wordless.

The name of the restaurant1 is “The Real Broth — Sillim Location” (더진국 신림점) and as the name says, it’s part of a chain, but there is little chain-y about it, because my girlfriends are always there, and so it feels more like I’m eating in their home, albeit one with twenty tables and a steady flow of single older men reading horse racing forms, sipping soju, college students who have clearly been out all night somehow drinking more, and then that odd man child waegukin (외국인), Mr. Thank You.

My eating every day at the same 24시 isn’t a Seoul thing. I usually become a regular at some restaurant in every city I spend more than a few days in. While I go into a new town with a general outline of what I want to do, I don’t go in with an overly structured agenda. That’s especially true when it comes to eating out. Rather than getting anxious about making sure I find the absolutely best restaurants, I choose where to eat by a place’s friendliness as much as anything.

I do sample a handful of establishments, most chosen entirely randomly, but within several days I have a few that work for me, that I go back to over and over, to the point where I’m recognized, or at least known as Mr. Thank You. There are always better options I’m sure I’m missing out on, with finer cuisine2, but I’ve learned not to care. I like my places, because I like relaxing, watching the community in them, and most of all the moments of human connection, like with my girlfriends.

That’s one of my biggest travel tips — don’t stress too much about trying to maximize your experience. Give yourself room to let things develop naturally, and don’t feel you’re missing out if you fall into a rut. If you really like a restaurant, bar, or cafe, then go back!

When I look back on past trips, what I remember most are those moments that happened serendipitously3, and you can maximize serendipity — primarily by walking a lot, with a healthy curiosity4, which allows you to experience a city on all levels.

Last week I asked a friend, fellow Substacker, and author, Colin Marshall, to join me for my last meal at The Real Broth, because after ten years in Seoul, he’s so fluent in Korean he writes books in it, and I wanted to know more about my girlfriends, and give them a chance to find out more about Mr. Thank You.

I also asked Colin because I really like him, and almost everything I love about Seoul — LP bars, army base stew (Budae jjigae), Hoff bars, and 24시 (although not this one) — he introduced me to. I’ve been guided over the last five years in my Seoul explorations by Colin and I’ve been remiss for not giving him more props prior to this.

So below is a conversation with him, via email, that I hope helps bring more insight into Korea and gives him a wider audience, and I will also let him tell you a little about what we learned about my girlfriends, although I’ll beat him to the punch and say I like them even more now, because they are as sweet and warm as I’d thought, and really do work every day of the year, from ten to ten, with the exception of two national holidays. You can’t fake being gracious every waking hour of the year, unless you’re a psychopath.

Me: First, thank you for doing this. Hopefully we can capture some of the energy of our in-person conversations. I’ll start with, tell me about my girlfriends! I got a lot out of our conversations with them, but since it all came via your translation, I’ll let you describe it.

Colin: They’re two pleasant ladies, energetic if not in the first bloom of youth. According to the standard taxonomy of Korean social types, they’d fall somewhere in the much-disputed borderlands between the middle-aged ajumma5 and the grandmotherly halmeoni. Just as you call them your “girlfriends,” one of them told me that everyone there also refers to you as her “boyfriend.” She used that exact word, incidentally, despite not having the habit, common in her generation, of peppering her conversation with English expressions at bewildering random6. Though demanding, as she tells it, the restaurant has its perks, not least the daily chance it provides her to interact with her dangol sonnim, or regulars, a category in which she included you.

The other lady was once able to take at least enough of a break from that rigorous work schedule to travel to the U.S. for her niece’s college graduation7 and the full Manhattan tourist experience, Statue of Liberty and all. She showed us photos from the trip on her phone, a moment I imagined being incorporated straight into your ongoing meditation on the rest of the world’s enthusiasm for America — even though you then had me tell her that you think Seoul is better than New York, not that she disagreed.

Though I don’t necessarily put much stock in them myself, there are three emotions supposedly unique to Koreans often invoked in discussions of their culture. The idea that there exist uniquely Korean emotions at all is probably more relevant than the specifics of those emotions, but they are, in any case, as follows: han, the deep-seated and implacable personal sorrow inflicted by historical injustice; heung, the capacity to erupt into spontaneous demonstrations of collective joy (which I recently overheard someone in a coffee shop ascribe to my infant son); and jeong, the sense of affection and generosity, not without its obligations, that comes with interpersonal bonds that form through shared experiences over time.

It’s tempting to call the relationship that has developed between you and your “girlfriends” a textbook example of jeong, which I suspect actually benefits from difficulties like the language barrier or the months-long gaps between your Seoul sojourns. Hence the drinks and snacks we got for free — or rather, as seobiseu, a Konglish adaptation of the word service that refers to items provided on the house, usually to dangol sonnim. Such are the perks of your preferred form of travel, with its repeat visits to not just the same neighborhoods but the same businesses over a period of days, weeks, months, even years.

I do wonder if you can develop jeong with places as well as people. Years ago, I interviewed the novelist Lawrence Osborne about Bangkok Days, his nonfiction book on the city where he now lives8. We got to talking about the kind of relationship you get into with a city when you spend time there and time away over a period of decades, which he described as “almost like a love affair or a friendship.”

If you think about the way in which you get to know a human being in all their complexity, it’s something that happens over many, many years. You don’t meet somebody in one period of time and decide that they’re a friend or a lover. You do in some ways, but what you really do is drop in over and over again, you get to know that person over a very, very long period of time. And when that happens — ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years — the accumulation of those visits, the accumulation of that time spent, produces in you complex feelings.

At the time, I’d barely been anywhere, but I understood the truth of what he was saying on a basic enough level that it’s never left my mind. Now that I’ve been out in the world long enough to experience it for myself, I’m fully sold on traveling for depth in a few places rather than breadth in as many as possible. Not for me the twenty-countries-in-twelve-days Eurail trip, much less the “bucket list” attempt to set foot in every county in the world.

Me: Thank you so much, and what I loved so much about finally “hearing them”, was realizing we both appreciated each other for the same reason — I come in because they are always so happy and friendly, and then them saying that is why they like seeing me!

I love the concept of jeong so much I should just start telling people I am walking the world seeking jeong! You certainly have gone with depth over breadth. You’ve lived in Korea for over a decade and are so fluent you write books in Korean!

At this point you have been at the center of “English writers writing about Korea” for over a decade now, as someone who does that (in English and Korean) and as someone who knows almost all the works of others in the genre — what do they get right, and more importantly, what do you think they get wrong? I would include myself in that category, so feel free to push back on my own pieces!

Colin: Korea is definitely “having a moment.” Or rather, it’s been having a moment in Asia for a couple of decades now, which in recent years has made it to the West. Unlike the equivalent periods for Japan or China, however, it hasn’t produced a huge amount of inspired explanatory writing in English. To Westerners coming here for the first time, I often recommend Daniel Tudor’s Korea: The Impossible Country and Michael Breen’s The New Koreans, both of which were published in the twenty-tens.

As well as those books hold up, it’s still surprising that no new challengers have appeared since. Search Amazon for the latest books about Korea, and apart from the academic readers, you get a mixture of travel guides, cookbooks, puerile-looking romance novels, and rudimentary language primers. Most seem pretty low-budget, and increasingly many have the look of AI slop; the overall impression is of attempts to cash in on a trend before it runs its course.

Online writing about Korea, judging by what I’ve read, tends toward extremes: on one end the touristic, covering the same places and themes over and over again without attempt at insight, and on the other the obscurantist, honing in on historical or cultural details of presumably scant interest even to a specialist. (I here leave aside the political tracts inspired by North-South relations.)

Part of the problem is that so few writers inclined to address a general readership in English can speak or read the Korean language with any proficiency. When I first came to Korea, I’d been studying it on my own for years, assuming that every foreigner with significant time here would be decently proficient. That assumption turned out to be incorrect, as evidenced by the many Westerners who’ve lived here for five, ten, twenty years with nothing more than survival Korean to show for it.

In part, that reflects how many come not out of interest in the country, but to do some particular job, teaching English being the classic example. But it also holds true, if not without exception, even for the foreign press (apart from most Korean diaspora members, who in any case come with complications of their own). I often wonder what readers of Korea coverage abroad would think if they knew how many of the reporters are illiterate.

Not that the entire problem comes down to a lack of Korean-speaking Westerners. Nor, forcefully though I recommend it, do you need to know Korean to write anything interesting about this country. A literary translation, from Korean or any other language, stands or falls not on its faithfulness to the original text, but on the translator’s own writing skill.

To write about a place, by the same token, depends almost entirely on facility with not the local language, but the one you’re writing in. If you parachuted, say, Emmanuel Carrère into Seoul for a few weeks, he’d write something not only more compelling than what Korea experts usually come up with, but also more illuminating. At issue, not to put too fine a point on it, is the caliber of foreign writers this country attracts9.

All this strikes me as downstream from the reality that, unlike China or Japan, Korea hasn’t traditionally captured the Western imagination. Korean film seems to have had its time in the sun, but considerable interest remains, of course, in the “Korean wave” of pop-cultural artifacts like idol-group music and Netflix dramas. Whether a writer motivated by that interest follows such threads to the nature of Korean civilization itself is another matter.

In my experience, even the phrase “Korean civilization” has a slightly contentious ring; editors sometimes question my own use of it in English, as if Korea wasn’t distinct enough from the other countries of northeast Asia, or indeed from the West, to merit the label. In Korean, I tend to emphasize that most English writing on Korea doesn’t go very deep, in that it perpetually circles around the same few subjects: the North, the conglomerates, suicide, the birth rate, educational and professional pressure, BTS, and so on. While those do all exist, of course, there’s much more to Korea, albeit little of it easily perceptible absent a genuine fascination with the place.

Me: Two things strike me from reading this, and from prior conversations with you — both having to do with the idea that “Korean civilization has a contentious ring to it” and then the last line, “there’s much more to Korea.” I’ve adopted Seoul as my Asian home, and everyone finds that odd when Japan is right there, as if Korea is their lesser child, without a distinct civilization worth understanding on its own. I feel I have to explain myself, and when I do, I say something like, “It is less uptight,” which is my summary of “there’s more to Korea.”

You’ve mentioned that Koreans themselves have something of an inferiority complex, and a lot of recent history can be seen, perhaps simplistically, as being driven by a desire to step out of the Japanese shadow.

Is that true? And then I would love to explore those “more things” that make Korea Korea — to me first, and then to you. I like it as much, if not more than Japan, because of unique, almost Japanese but very different, day-to-day cultural things such as the Hoff bars, LP bars, army base stew, and 24시 (twenty-four-hour restaurants serving comfort food), all of which you have introduced me to.

Can you tell us a little about each of them, what makes them uniquely Korean and why, and then some other things about Korea you yourself are fond of that most people miss?

Colin: The English writer Clive Leatherdale traveled around Korea in the mid-nineteen-eighties, a time when he could ask around beforehand and get only the idea that the country might be a “lackluster Japan.” That phrase has always stuck with me, not least because I suspect that more than a few Westerners making their big Asia trip still come away with the same impression, though probably colored by an appreciation for a distinctive but hard-to-explain streak of vitality unique to this society.

Koreans have long been stereotyped as country cousins of the Japanese, and often unfairly, though as an American academic with extensive life experience in both places once explained it to me, the Japanese have had much longer to adapt to urban life. The Koreans, by contrast, remain in many ways a “rural people” even in an outwardly ultra-urban city like modern Seoul. I like to ask other foreigners who’ve lived here decades longer than me what they miss about the Korea in which they first arrived, and they often mention vanished qualities like the casualness and generally extended trust characteristic of village life.

I traveled to Japan with some frequency in my early years here. At first, I figured I’d concentrate on the differences between the two countries, but over time, I started to wonder whether they had anything in common after all. Upstream from a lot of what I noticed is, to my mind, the nature of their relationship with the wider world. Despite an apparent willingness to re-invent itself in subordination to the dominant power, its full integration with the global economy, and more visibly, its comically flamboyant enthusiasm for imported culture, Japan is still seen as the rare non-Western country that retained its own essence.

Pico Iyer, a friend and longtime Japan resident who helped give me my introduction to that country, put it well when he described it as “a froth of shifting surfaces and flashing images projected on an old, strangely shaped piece of wood that never moves.”

Korea, for its part, has long practiced aggressive, at times seemingly indiscriminate assimilation of the influence of foreign powers as survival strategy, to the point of occluding the nature of Koreanness to Koreans themselves. When giving talks here, I sometimes ask that, if we can tell when a car looks Italian, or German, or even Japanese, how come — despite the increasingly world-beating success of this country’s automobile industry — we have no sense of how a car could look Korean?

I once read a book by a Korean professor who asks his reader to imagine taking a vacation in a small African country, and as the plane lands, looking out the window on the approach to its capital and seeing only traditional Korean buildings. Then, in the taxi from the airport, the radio is playing a song by Cho Yong-pil, who, the taxi driver says in enthusiastically broken Korean, once came and played a concert there. That would be weird, wouldn’t it? So why isn’t it weird that Korea has done pretty much the same thing, but in relation to the West in general and the U.S. in particular?

Unlike you, I haven’t been to Mongolia, but from what I’ve heard, Ulaanbaatar is actually starting to become a bit like that hypothetical African country, with more and more Korean restaurants, Korean coffee shops, Korean convenience stores, and yes, even Korean-speaking taxi drivers. It would be worth experiencing it myself to get more material for a pet theory I have about the emergence of a new cultural-economic Korean Empire in Asia, contradict though it would Korea’s official self-image as always the invaded, never the invader.

What travel I can manage these days still tends to take me to Japan. Every time my plane lands in Osaka, Sapporo, or wherever it may be, I think, “Boy, it’s good to be in Japan.” Then, whenever I get back to Seoul, I think, “Boy, it’s good to be in Korea.” Going from Korea heightens my appreciation for Japan’s qualities like the feeling of cultural self-containment and the much-admired concern with aesthetics, which, even if somewhat oversold, becomes something to savor when you live in a country where the photos in restaurant menus are in the wrong aspect ratio half the time.

Coming from Japan heightens my appreciation for Korea’s qualities like broadly being “less uptight,” as you put it, which permits a certain rustic flair, as well as what it makes me cringe slightly to call its dynamism. Koreans used to ask me all the time how often I planned on staying here, a question I notice nobody ever asks new arrivals in America. On the rare occasion they do nowadays, I tell them that, even apart from now having a wife and family here, I can’t resist sticking around to see what dramatic change or other — social, cultural, technological, economic, linguistic, culinary — will come down the pike next, for better or for worse.

I’d hesitate to frame the notion of Koreans having an inferiority complex as my own. The first person to put it that way to me was a Korean friend, a fairly prominent economist, though I’ve heard it echoed by others since. Early in the pandemic, I published a piece about Korea’s being a more developed country in some ways than the U.S., a truth Koreans struck me as being strangely unwilling or unable to accept. A Korean reader e-mailed me in response, eloquently laying out his theory that, however impressive the country’s achievements, Koreans have trouble considering them their own. He saw the roots of that condition going at least as far back as Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule, which Koreans know deep down, yet cannot acknowledge, did not come about as a result of their people’s own efforts. “Our thinking and way of life were borrowed,” Michael Breen quotes a Korean official as saying in The New Koreans. “Most majors we study were not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat. Most specialists and experts study abroad. In their minds, the ideal destination is not here. They always refer to some other place, like the United States, where things are done better.”

Cultivated in part out of fear of being seen as parochial “frogs in a well,” as the local saying has it, this grinding fixation on the outside world seems unhealthy to me, and I always take pleasure in its relative absence in Japan. Still, there’s also something undeniably fascinating about the unlikely forms into which imported pieces of foreign culture cohere in the context of modern Korea.

You’ve named a few of them in your question. Hof bars emerged in the nineteen-seventies and eighties as a kind of adaptation of Western beer culture to Korean social forms: their décor tends toward Western-inflected kitsch (not that I’d have it any other way), and their clientele includes a lot of office-worker or college-student groups there to drink — never done in Korea without something to eat — until late into the night.

LP bars, usually presided over by one ajeossi (that is, an unrepentantly middle-aged man) and soundtracked by the selections he pulls out of his vast record collection behind the counter, descend from another institution of that same era, the eumak dabang or “music café.” There, young people could go to drink cups of intensely sweetened instant coffee while listening to the house DJ spin the latest foreign hits.

And “Army base stew,” called budae jjigae in Korean, got its name from its ingredients: not just Korean tofu and kimchi but also baked beans, Spam, hot dogs, and slices of American cheese, all of which could be illegally acquired by those with the right connections to a U.S. military PX in the aftermath of the Korean War. Like so much in Korea, it combines things you’d think would never go together, but in practice somehow do.

Seoul’s reputation as a 24-hour city does feel overstated to me, which could owe to its nightlife never having quite recovered from the pandemic, to the character of the neighborhoods in which I now spend my time, or just to how accustomed I’ve grown, after a decade here, to the idea that you should be able to get a decent meal somewhere in the middle of the night.

Even though I don’t have much occasion these days to get a meal of any kind in the middle of the night, I do appreciate the specialization of eateries in Korea, 24-hour or otherwise. Here, you don’t so much go to a particular restaurant as you go to eat a particular dish: a budae jjigae joint, for example, will serve several varieties of budae jjigae and not much else. This is as it should be, which I remember whenever I’m confronted once again with another punishingly extensive menu back in America. Increasingly, I just want to say, “You know which dish you do best. Just give us that, and bring enough for the whole table.” The custom of everybody in a group eating the same food, often from large shared dishes, is something else that soon came to feel obviously correct. Each person choosing their own individual dish (and worse, requesting their own individual customizations) drains the meal of meaning; you might as well not be eating together at all.

You don’t necessarily have to come here to enjoy some of these things, as long as you’ve got a robust enough Korean neighborhood within reach. Before moving to Seoul, I myself lived in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, in whose restaurants and cafés I spent years practicing the Korean language — and where my ability to place an order long preceded my ability to understand anything said to me in response.

Koreans today exhibit a great fervor for international travel, but they often say that they can’t go too long abroad without kimchi. For my part, when I’m outside Korea, it surprises me how much I miss conducting everyday business in Korean. That feeling bolsters my long-held suspicion that languages aren’t equivalent to one another; just as a translation of a novel is by definition not the same work as the original, life lived in one language has a different character from life lived in another.

When staying in foreign cities, I tend not just to eat at their Korean restaurants, but also to spend time writing at whatever Korean coffee shops they may have, during which I sometimes forget that I’m abroad at all. No matter where in the world you go, I’ve found, if everyone around you is Korean, you’re in Korea.

Me: There is a lot of insight in there, but for brevity I would like to focus on the idea of Koreans as still being a rural society. I think that’s very true, and while it might sound absurd given that forty percent or so of the country lives in Seoul, a sprawling dense megalopolis, but as I’ve found, it’s really a patchwork of small communities. Every big city is, but Seoul more so than most. I think that’s what I like about it so much. On my last day here we had lunch in my regular 24시 and I was finally able to “talk” to the two women who run it, who I feel I’ve become close to despite the language barrier.

What I realize I like about it so much is that it does feel like I’m in a small town diner, despite being in the middle of Silim, surrounded by hundreds of other restaurants, and lots of partying drunks at all hours of the day. From the outside there’s absolutely no indication the inside would be warm, welcoming, and intimate, but that’s what it is, as are all the establishments lining the street.

During our conversation with them, they both mentioned they work twelve-hour days, every day of the year (except two holidays) and when pressed, neither had a problem with that, because they like being there — they get to spend the time talking to regulars. I think a lot of people who look at that from the outside find it depressing, or see it as playing into the stereotype that Koreans work too hard without a social life, but that’s almost backwards. The work is their social life, and it’s a fulfilling one!

OK, that wasn’t so much a question as me going off, so I’ll leave you with two direct questions.

You just became a father of two. Congratulations! So let’s finally address what everyone wants to talk about with Korea, which is the falling birth rates. As a recent father of twins, how has that changed your perception of Korea, if at all?

Second, your car analogy is striking — we can recognize an Italian or German or Japanese car aesthetically, but not a Korean one. Do you think that’s changing, and if so, what would a distinctly Korean aesthetic actually look like? Would it be the subject of your latest book, Newtro?

Colin: You really can’t talk about Korean life without talking about work, which puts outsiders at something of a disadvantage. Or at least it puts at a disadvantage outsiders who don’t have a conventional job or business.

I, for example, came as a freelance writer and broadcaster, which I’ve remained in the ten years since, but that hasn’t stopped me from noticing certain telling phenomena. For example, when people who live in Korea — Koreans and foreigners alike — say they hate it here, what they’re usually saying is that they hate their job, but they express it through anger at the entire society.

I don’t know about you, but none of the many people complaining about their work whom I’ve met in the U.S. go on to declare that they hate the U.S. There, the latter doesn’t logically follow from the former; here, it seems more natural to see work, among other things, as a direct reflection or extension of the national culture.

One widely known manifestation of that are hoesik, more or less regular, all-but-mandatory alcohol-soaked after-work dinners with your boss and co-workers. People claim to resent having to go to them, and they probably do feel like yet another form of uncompensated overtime, but on occasion, when I notice a big table of office types getting loud at a local pub or restaurant, I feel a passing but distinct longing to join in.

I’ll certainly watch with fascination as our twins, now eight months old, find their own places in Korean society. Back in the U.S., raising a family somehow never felt like a realistic proposition, but it became more appealing in Korea. One reason among many was the chance it would give me to understand aspects of this country that I never could in isolation. Though I do plan to naturalize, I won’t consider my getting Korean citizenship “becoming Korean” in any but a technical sense, nor would I want to10.

Besides, as we mentioned earlier, few countries change quite as rapidly, or suddenly, as this one does. Its much-discussed birth rate still languishes toward the bottom of the global list — despite, I should note, a gradual rise over the past year — but as you’ve speculated during our conversations in Seoul, if any country can turn that situation around, it’s Korea.

That’s clear in the force with which trends take hold here, sometimes permanently: you yourself saw the way Koreans switched en masse from drinking tea to drinking coffee in the nineties; an even more dramatic example, in its way, is how practically the entire population has moved into apartments since the late nineteen-sixties.

I would hardly call this tendency of Korean society to move practically as one during times of change an unalloyed good, and in fact, I’m sure it’s played a part in the ongoing diminution of some of the desirable qualities we’ve been discussing. It actually gives the country something of a canary-in-the-coal-mine quality, which is what we saw with the birth-rate collapse: when Koreans got the technologies that enabled, and even incentivized substituting distraction for reproduction, they took it farther than most everyone else.

By the same token, an uncritical positivity about and consequently undiscriminating use of artificial intelligence, as we Americans might see it, has lately become unavoidable here. I recently saw a statistic that Koreans watch the most AI-generated video content — slop, in a word — of any population in the world, and I believe it; part of me expects to wake up surrounded by 50 million people in mass AI psychosis any day now.

My latest book, Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition, opens with a consideration of the word chonseureopda, which, like many difficult-to-translate terms, reveals something about the culture that produced it. Ask English-speaking Koreans what it means, and their replies will range from “outdated” to “tacky” to “old-fashioned” to “provincial,” but it breaks down literally to “village-like.”

People use it to refer dismissively to anything visibly associated with Korea as it used to be, a place they remember as embarrassingly out of step with the “advanced countries” of the world: one that, to cite a trivial example that pops into my mind, topped birthday cakes with halved cherry tomatoes. There are Koreans who would apply the word to the very hofs, LP bars, and all-night eateries we enjoy, to say nothing of the pre-Starbucks dabang cafés I frequent.

To put it more bluntly, chonseureopda has been applied to many things for their being too identifiably Korean; in a newly export-oriented economy and obsessively outward-looking culture, a “distinctly Korean aesthetic” was a liability. (Think back to how few pains companies like Samsung and Kia once took to correct the widespread assumption in the U.S. that their products were Japanese.) But now a generation or two has come of age here without experience of their country’s more haltingly and awkwardly globalizing phase, and they can look back on its artifacts with cringe-free appreciation.

Newtro, a design and marketing trend first identified by a Popcorn Report-type annual publication in 2019, tends to be distinguished from retro in its promiscuous revival of not one but many mixed-and-matched eras, from centuries and centuries ago up to the two-thousands, and its appeal to not the nostalgia of older consumers but the curiosity of younger ones.

Despite being at the older end of what Koreans call the “MZ” generation (a single cohort consisting of everyone born between 1980 and 2000), I enjoy newtro in a similar way to how a college student here would. Never having been to the Korea of thirty, forty, fifty years ago, I can surround myself with the aesthetics of those days without their triggering memories, personal or inherited, of the hard times that came with living under a military dictatorship and a grueling modernization process.

In a way, my fascination with “old Korea” began in high school. Growing up in one suburb of Seattle, I’d sometimes go over to another where many Koreans happened to live, and which thus had a decent selection of Korean restaurants, mostly in strip malls. Despite having no idea what any of the dishes were called, I enjoyed the flavors of the meals there, which had little in common with the Japanese or Chinese dishes I knew, at least in their American re-interpretations.

The language being spoken at all the other tables (even in those days, non-Korean customers were uncommon at these places), of which I understood not a word, sounded completely different from Japanese or Chinese, at least as I’d heard them in movies. Nor did the décor appear to have anything in common with Japanese or Chinese interiors, or at least with the images of them I’d pieced together in my mind.

What sticks with me most vividly, somehow, is taking home from one of these suburban restaurants a calendar with pictures of what I didn’t then know were called dakjongi inhyeong, a kind of handmade figurine made with traditional mulberry paper. Usually shaped of large-headed children and old-timers engaged in rural pratfalls, they’re about as folksy as folk art gets: to some, the very definition of cheonseureoum (to use the word in its nominal form). To me — far from the most worldly adolescent, as you may have gathered — they had a highly distinctive, strangely appealing look and feel that held out the promise of a civilization different from those of not just Japan or China, but also every other country of which I’d heard.

Ever since, you could say, I’ve been curious about just how different Korea is, and why. These 25 years later, I’m not yet an expert on the country, but then, I’ve never tried to become one; in fact, I seized the opportunity to declare my non-expertise up front in the introduction to my first book, 한국 요약 금지 (”No Summarizing Korea”), describing myself instead with a Koreanization of the word connoisseur. By that I mean that what accumulation of Korea-related knowledge and understanding I can manage primarily serves not a theory, and certainly not my status in the academy — which I doubt would have me in the first place — but to enrich my own experience of the place.

Even though Korean-wave pop culture (if sometimes of dubious Koreanness these days) has stoked an unprecedented level of foreign interest in this country, you don’t have to look far before you find stories of young people who come with stars put in their eyes by boy bands, girl groups, and TV dramas, then burn out within a year or two. Often, they simply had outlandish notions about the willingness and ability of Korean society to accommodate foreigners.

But they also tend to make complaints like, “You can ride the Seoul subway for an hour and a half and the neighborhood where you get out looks just like the one where you got on.” On some level they have a point, but then again, if you have trouble reading half the signs on the buildings, sensing the finer distinctions between neighborhoods is a hopeless task. As a saying that became trendy here not too long ago has it, you see as much as you know. Much like mastering a language, learning to see a place fully can take a lifetime.

Me: Thank you for all of that, and thank you for showing me over the last five years the Seoul I would have never seen without you. I want to end with one last question. Single word answers only. What is your favorite Korean novel, film, dish.

Colin: Thanks for the opportunity to work out some of these thoughts on Korea — here, and in the long conversation we pick up in the hofs and LP bars of Seoul. After giving the matter some serious thought, here’s how those three picks stand at the moment:

Korean novel: 칼의 노래 (The Song of the Sword) by Kim Hoon

Korean film: Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)

Korean dish: nakji bokkeum (stir-fried octopus)

Where you can find more from Colin.

His website

His Substack

His Twitter

His first book, 한국 요약 금지

His second book, Korean Newtro

PS: I leave for Denver Saturday, where I’ll be for a few days before hopping on a bus and heading back towards NYC, slowly, via Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, etc.

No exact schedule other than North Platte first, then Omaha, and whatever other cities I end up in when I need a break from the vibrant Greyhound aesthetic.

5

Chris: The ajumma is now a cartoonish stereotype, that has spawned a lot of discourse!

(I’ve written eleven prior posts about Japan: From Tokyo to Takasaki, A retreat to Niigata, A pointless little Japan story, From Akashina to Fuji, Walking Fuji, Playgrounds and manhole covers, From Fukuoka to Nagasaki, Burnout in Japan, Walking Hokkaido, In praise of Japanese small, Walking Kumamoto)

Part of the reason I walk is to maximize happenstance, and on this trip that paid off in spades, because I found the city of Satsumasendai in Kyushu.

Walking means you can’t fast forward through anything, including the dull middle sections, and on paper that’s what Satsumasendai appears to be. Another bland industrial town between long tunnels on the Fukuoka to Kagoshima Shinkansen, this one spread out in a flood plain near the mouth of the Sendai River.

It reminded me of hundreds of Japanese towns I’ve passed through as I walked into it: an initial band of small rice fields and detached homes, followed by boxy malls along a busy roadway, and then a downtown with pedestrian malls, apartment buildings, and a few flat, shadeless parks. Then all that repeated backwards as you exit. It was only notable for a distinct sour smell, which I knew from my childhood meant it had to have a paper plant in it.

This town immediately felt different to me, though, not in any obvious way. It had a charm that I couldn’t, and still can’t, exactly pin down or explain. I was smitten by Satsumasendai from the second I walked into it, a fascination that kept growing for the twenty hours I was in it, so much so that when I left to spend four days in the bigger and fancier Kagoshima I cut that trip short to return for two more days in Satsumasendai.

I liked everything about my time in Satsumasendai.

I liked the small sushi restaurant in the bottom floor of a home, with the waitress wife, sushi-chef husband, and grandfather who must have been close to a hundred, who between doing odd jobs (sweeping the floor, caring for plants, clearing tables) kept a steady stream of commentary on whatever was playing on the TV. That included that evening a report of the prior day’s meeting between Trump and their prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, a meeting where Trump made a joke about Pearl Harbor, which had brought a great deal of scolding on U.S. social media about being offensive, but here brought a round of exaggerated thumbs ups directed at me from both the grandfather and a drunk customer in the corner, who shouted, “I love Trump. He’s strong. America good. You love Trump?”

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(This is my fifth long walk in Japan. The prior ten posts from those trips: From Tokyo to Takasaki, A retreat to Niigata, A pointless little Japan story, From Akashina to Fuji, Walking Fuji, Playgrounds and manhole covers, From Fukuoka to Nagasaki, Burnout in Japan, Walking Hokkaido, In praise of Japanese small.)

I’ve long said Seoul is my favorite city, but when a nasty sinus infection left me stranded there with a miserable concoction of fever, jet lag, and an open schedule1, I realized Japan is where I really wanted to be. There is no country as interesting, comfortable, and fulfilling as modern Japan, which is peak civilization, and there is no place in the world I’d rather be stuck for a month.

So I booked a flight to Kumamoto, in central Kyushu (Southern Japan), because one of the other lessons of my last five years is that mid-sized cities offer richer experiences, with less stress and expense, than larger, heavily touristed destinations, such as Tokyo.

Almost everything a tourist might want from Japan 2, all the thin cultural experiences (food, fashion, nightlife), are available in Kumamoto, but without the opportunistic cynicism that comes with over-tourism. You also have a better chance of understanding what really makes Japan tick3, since Kumamoto retains its Japanese character in ways that central Tokyo, a global city, simply does not.

I also knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was explore the region by walking from downtown Kumamoto towards the small coastal city of Minamata fifty miles south4, one ten mile leg at a time. I could do that, while also staying in the same downtown Dormy Inn hotel5 for a week, because Japanese public transportation is the best in the world.

So for the last five days I’ve fallen into a comfortable routine. I wake each morning, jump on a train to my starting point, then walk through rice fields, past factories, past other train stations, always close to a convenience store with a clean bathroom, before taking a train back to my hotel, where I spend the next hour washing and resting in the public bath, then nab my complimentary chocolate ice pop, followed by an evening at an izakaya, or yakitori-ya, or kaiseki, for an exceptionally clean, fresh, and luxurious meal. Then I do it all again the next day, starting my walk where I ended it the prior day.

Those treks have all been through familiar landscape. Japan's geography creates a nationwide uniformity: three-quarters mountains, one-quarter floodplains, with almost every city in one of the plains, sprawling across its entirety, filling every buildable space with the built. Kumamoto is no exception.

A haphazard mix of agriculture, industry, and smaller cities. Walking ten miles across one of Japan’s cities means passing from one to the other, sometimes all three at the same time, with a rice field jammed against a factory, juxtaposed next to an apartment complex.

Built Japan, visually, is a mess, and can be downright ugly. A boxy, utilitarian, pulsating, over-curated mess that after days of walking through it begins to feel claustrophobic—It is rectangular to the extreme, and you wonder if the architects understood that angles don’t have to be multiples of ninety degrees. I’ve found myself at the end of walks shouting, into the void, “I want a curve, any curve, just give me a damn curve please.”

It also feels laughably landlocked for a nation with more coastline per capita than perhaps only Greenland. You are never far from the ocean in Japan, but you rarely see it, because Japan doesn’t embrace its coastline the way other countries do, certainly not by spending days lounging on sandy beaches. The shore is hidden behind huge and ugly concrete sea walls, a justifiable tsunami defense that has turned paranoid, resulting in a fortress mentality towards the seas.

I have tried many times to walk along the coast, but it’s never been rewarding, and Kumamoto is no different. Japanese culture might be intertwined with the ocean—both in its food and an island mentality that emphasizes cultural isolation—but when it comes to the actual physical part of water meeting land, it fails spectacularly. The sea is something to respect, utilize, but not embrace. An elderly relative with a hefty inheritance, but a contagious disease.

The mountains play a larger role in Japanese life, with a healthy dose of villages and homes dotting the long valleys weaving through them. There is still a strong inherited mountain culture in Japan. Ride any local train into the mountains and you'll find it packed with as many hiking hobbyists in their meticulously matching outfits as locals. They are also far more scenic than the shoreline, but I've personally found walking in them less rewarding because of logistical issues6.

Put simply, I’ve not fallen in love with rural Japan the way others have, and you should read their better-informed perspectives for balance.

So why do I love Japan so much? Because it has the most respectful, humane, and thoughtful culture, which also comes with an almost complete absence of public disorder.

Japan as a society works, and that’s because the thick glue that holds it together is the very concept of being Japanese. It is a religious level belief in the sanctity of citizenship, one they hold to by policy means that westerners see as xenophobic. Borders, and laws, matter in Japan, and that translates into a cultural integrity that is Japan’s secret sauce.

That means doing your best to be a good citizen, which means thinking about everything you do in the context of the public good.

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Two weeks ago, on the blue line to O’Hare, my car had two men smoking joints, a broken woman, her eyes dilated and blank, sitting in a nest of filthy bags smelling of sewage, and a man barking into the void, shirtless, who was washing himself with flour tortillas, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn't shock me, or anyone else around me, since I'd seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I'd ridden, every pedestrian walkway I'd passed through, and on most street corners.

Three weeks ago, in Duluth, half the riders on every bus I took were mentally tortured and/or intoxicated. The downtown Starbucks, pedestrian malls, and shuttered doorways of vacated buildings all housed broken people. Same in Indianapolis, El Paso, New York City, Jacksonville, LA, Phoenix, and almost every community I’ve been to in the U.S., save for those gated by wealth.

An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the U.S. in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.

That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder1.

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.

The canonical example of this is La Sombrita, the laughably expensive Los Angeles “bus stop” that was a single pole to provide shade and security lighting, but did neither. La Sombrita exists precisely because it doesn’t do anything, which is the end result of a decades-long process of defensive construction. If you build a nice bus stop it is either immediately broken or turned into shelters for the destitute, and so you stop building those2.

Another nice thing we don’t have in the U.S. is public restrooms. We don’t have them out of a justified fear of abuse, which is the same reason many Starbucks lock their restrooms. McDonald’s does this as well, depending on the location, and also even strips them of mirrors in the especially bad communities, to discourage people from using them for an hour-long morning toilet, as well as breaking the mirrors just for the hell of it.

This lack of public restrooms became an issue on Twitter when the latest round of debate about disorder in the U.S. was kicked off when a tweeter noted how offensive it was to have seen someone urinating in a crowded New York subway car.

This debate brought out a lot of absurd arguments, mostly from those trying to shrug it off or suggest it was simply the price of living in a big city3.

No, the rest of the world doesn’t tolerate the amount of antisocial behavior we in the U.S. do. If someone were to piss on a subway anywhere else in the world, and very very few ever would want to (more on why below), they are removed from society for a period of time.

We however let people who aren’t mentally competent continue to engage in self-destructive and aberrant behavior without removing them, which consequently ruins it for everyone else, except those wealthy enough to build their own private islands of comfort.

Someone peeing on the subway is not of sound mind, and it isn’t normal behavior by any measure. It’s a sign of distress that should cause an intervention—by police, social workers, whoever—that mandates them into an institution for a period of time, until they regain sanity and stability. For someone actively psychotic —civil commitment to psychiatric hospital. For violent individuals refusing treatment—secure prison facilities with mandatory programs. For severe addiction—medical detox and residential treatment without the ability to walk away.

They should not be allowed to do whatever they want because they cannot control themselves enough to have that freedom. Someone shouting at strangers, someone washing themselves with flour tortillas, someone punching at the air voicing threats shouldn’t, for their own safety and others, be out roaming the streets.

It isn’t fair to the public, especially the working people who have to deal with them on a daily basis. It isn’t fair to the person themselves. The idea that it is empathetic to allow someone to suffer on the streets tortured by their inner demons, covered in filth, high as a kite, is so backwards and immoral that I cannot believe that the activists and politicians who support it have spent any time around these people. They need help, and if they don’t accept it, then you must force them to get help.

I’ve been very careful up to now not to use the word homeless, because it’s become an overly broad category that covers families in motels with Section 8 vouchers, people sleeping on friends’ couches until they can get back on their feet, mothers with children in long-term shelters, and then those who live in tents under bridges or sleep in a soiled sleeping bag.

Eighty-five percent (or so) of those in this broad category are not causing problems. They are, like most everyone else, doing their best to get by and better themselves. Sure, they have more complicated and chaotic lives than most, but they try to play by the rules as best they can.

Our problems in public spaces come from the fifteen percent or so who fall into the last group—the stubbornly intransigent—which are people who have options for housing but turn them down for a variety of reasons, some driven by mental demons, some by an overwhelming desire to always be on drugs, some simply out of preference to be alone. Others in this category have been ejected from housing because of continual violent and threatening behavior.

They are not, by almost any metric, of sound mind, and shouldn’t be granted the full privileges other citizens have.

The cover photo is John, and he is in this category. He had set himself on fire the day before I met him, freebasing a perc 30, and refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to lose his favorite spot behind the garbage bin, since it was only a block away from dealers and perfect to piss in. He had a government room he didn’t use because catching on fire (something he did every now and then) set off smoke alarms. He also thought it was cursed and monitored by the same people who had held him captive on an island in the middle of the Pacific—an island he escaped from three months before by swimming the four hundred miles. He showed me an arm, covered with burns, that he claimed was where a shark had bit him.

John should be mandated into a prison, a mental institution, or a rehab clinic, until he is competent enough to be on his own, not out on the streets in mental and physical pain, setting himself on fire. It is as simple as that, although I understand a change like this comes with additional nuanced policy debate. As for costs, it is more a question of redirecting what we spend rather than finding additional money, because we already spend an immense amount on this problem—the New York City budget for homeless services is four billion—without 'solving' it

Even if you put aside the destruction this type of behavior has done to broader society, and your concerns are only focused on the health and welfare of the stubbornly intransigent, then our current system is still deeply wrong. We are not providing them justice by allowing them to choose a public display of mental misery, where the self harm they can do is far greater than when being monitored.

Beneath all this discussion is the additional question of why we in the U.S. have so many mentally unstable people, why so many are addicted to drugs, why so many people are OK with doing shocking things.

I walked twelve miles through Seoul yesterday, and I saw zero destitute people. Certainly no homeless. I did see the same group of drunk men I always see, playing cards near the river, because Koreans drink an immense amount, but as far as daytime drunks go, their behavior was exemplary. When they had to piss, they walked the two hundred yards to the bathroom, which they left as clean as when they came. When they threw away their empty bottles, they collected them and walked it to the trash can, even putting them into the correct bin.

Almost no Korean, as in not a single one, even the drunks, would ever think of peeing on the metro, even if they could somehow get away with it.

That they'd be punished is part of why they don't do it, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem: Which came first, the culture or the enforcement? Koreans are raised to be good citizens and not break rules, with public shame as enforcement. Legal consequences exist, but culture does most of the work, so laws rarely need enforcing.

The U.S. has a different model that emphasizes individuality over the communal, with our thick culture focused not on being a good citizen first, but finding our true self and exploring that, and hopefully making a lot of money along the way — Koreans are citizens, we are entrepreneurs. That is one of our greatest strengths, and has served us well economically and artistically, and it is why so many Koreans find the U.S. liberating and refreshing4.

Yet a result of the American model is a wider distribution of behavior, including fatter extremes, with a far larger amount of people prone to antisocial tendencies, and I would argue, mental illness. Some people need strict social guidelines, and without them, they can literally go crazy. We don’t have that.

If our elevated levels of addiction and mental illness are consequences of our culture of individuality, as I believe they are, then we have a moral responsibility to take them off the streets and care for them — for those broken by our celebration of freedom, like John, and more importantly for the working people navigating around them.

The empathetic way to do that for everyone involved, is the opposite of our current policy, and means mandatory treatment for the severely mentally ill, enforced norms in public spaces, and legal consequences for abnormal and threatening behavior that actually have teeth.

Because it is the just thing to do, for all of our society.

We can have nice things, we just have to decide we deserve them.

PS: Sorry this was late, but I’ve been dealing with jet-lag and continual dental problems. I hopefully leave tomorrow for Qingdao, if I get clearance from my dentist.

(I leave in eight days for Asia, where I will be for six weeks—Seoul, Qingdao, Taipei, Taitung, Okinawa, and hopefully Yangon if I can swing it. I’ve been sidelined by bad weather and dental problems, so this essay comes from a guy in a snowed-in McDonald’s with Novocaine mouth.)

One of the subtexts of my Duluth piece was that place still matters to Americans, despite our image as a nomadic people, moving at the drop of a hat for our careers.

I don’t just mean that place matters in a literal sense—in that the majority of Americans still live within fifty miles of where they were born because they like where they are—but in a deeper sense: where you live, the people, the nature, and the culture rise to a transcendent meaningfulness.

The simple summary of the last fifteen years of my work—ten focused on destitution in the U.S., five on walking the world—is that everyone needs to feel a valued member of something larger than themselves, hopefully something that is more than the material and will continue on after their death.

This is the same thesis of Bowling Alone—that physical community matters—but amended to say that for it to be genuinely fulfilling, the community should also be aligned with a purpose that is stable and transcends the physical world.

In my book I called these non-credentialed forms of meaning because they’re gifted to you at birth and so you don’t need to build a resume to be part of them. I identified four primary ones—family, place, faith, and your culture (more on this below). These are meaning-making institutions that you are born into, and you can stay a member of them for all of your life, unless you choose to leave or are ejected due to aberrant behavior. If these are working correctly (and they don’t always1), then they provide everyone, regardless of talents, with a pathway to a dignified life.

Of all of these non-credentialed forms of meaning, place (and your culture) is the hardest for highly educated elites (front-row in my book2) to see as meaningful, because we are so transient. We are cultural chameleons, whose primary identity is tied to our openness to the new and our resumes, so we cycle through physical locations like steps on a ladder. They are something to advance us, not define us.

That includes me, since I am a member of the front-row, and so it took me hundreds of interviews of people who had stayed for a lifetime in a town in open decay, that was crumbling around them, that by all I could measure had treated them badly, to understand how significant place can be.

When I asked them, “Why haven’t you moved?” the answers I received were a look of confusion, then a shake of the head that indicated that I was the one who was confused, and then a simple, “Because it is home.” If pushed more, they would then launch into an ode to the mountains in the distance, or the sandy beach on the curve in the river everyone parties at on weekend nights, or the barbershop down the block everyone hangs in, or some local restaurant that offered some local dish, or the high school teams, or their grandma’s garden, or their parents’ health, and so on. Why would I give up all that? I’m a Yooper. I’m a fourth-generation Hoosier. I’m an X, where X is a term once coined to make fun of the town, but that the locals now embrace because there is no greater flex than being proud of what your enemies call you.

I was reminded of those past interviews in Duluth, where I heard the same thing. When a direct question confuses someone because they don't see it as a choice—certainly not something to be adjudicated in a spreadsheet—then you have discovered an epistemologically foundational belief. It rises from a small-g good (directional, but not intrinsic) to a capital-G Good (directional and an intrinsic part of life).

As an aside, this distinction is why I believe global birth rates are dropping. Having children used to be a capital-G Good, but in the last few decades it’s been eroded to a small-g good, so couples now weigh having children as a utilitarian decision, and when placed under that type of scrutiny, the literal costs can outstrip the harder-to-quantify non-material benefits (meaning, transcendence, creating a human).

Place is still a capital-G Good for a large percentage of Americans, especially those in the back-row (low-educational attainment). Policymakers, especially in prior decades, have struggled to fully understand that because they are mostly members of the front-row, not attached to place in the same fundamental way. That disconnect spawned the whole two-decade cycle of “just move” and “learn to code” memes that bounced around politics and the internet when discussing what to do with our post-industrial declining cities.

That debate has largely subsided, but there is now a common notion that place can’t matter as much as it once did, or at all really, because the U.S. has been flattened into a uniform glob of franchises, box stores, and globalism. This has a ring of truth to it, but it is overstated. There is a surface-level uniformity to built America, but if you peer deeper you see how stubbornly resilient our regional differences are.

Some of that is about geographic realities—life in Upper Michigan will always be different from Arizona, which will always be different from Oregon, but the cultural variations go beyond ice fishing for walleyes versus cast fishing for largemouth bass. The U.S. is still rife with unique traditions and cuisine forged by historical pride—clam cakes in RI, pasties in Duluth, garbage plates in Rochester, Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Dyngus Day in Buffalo, town meetings in Vermont, and rodeos in New Mexico.

It’s also about temperament and people’s worldview. I’ve now been to over a thousand McDonald’s in the U.S., and if you dropped me blindfolded into one, without being able to look out the windows, I could probably tell you where I was in under half an hour, simply from talking to people, hearing what they do for fun, and what they aspire to.

Different parts of the U.S. have different cultures that manifest in how we deal with each other. Our regional stereotypes capture that (overly friendly Southerners, blunt New Yorkers, laconic New Englanders, etc), and they are largely true, although with the obvious caveat that not every citizen plays to type. There are still plenty of polite New Yorkers, especially outside of lower Manhattan.

So if there is so much cultural variation in the U.S., is there such a thing as a singular dominant American culture? This question bounced around Twitter last week, in various forms, precipitated by a political outrage3. I was less interested in the politics of it all, and more in how confused about “what culture is” everyone was.

Culture has two components, thin and thick.

Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?"

Most people when talking about culture are only thinking about the thin. When people travel, and say they want to see another culture, that is primarily what they mean. They want to experience different foods, fashions, and built environments. So you go to England to eat bangers and mash, drink room-temperature cask ale, and watch Arsenal choke.

Thin culture dominates the debate because it is easier to see, and honestly more fun to experience. You can go to Paris for a week and cosplay as a Parisian, eat extraordinarily well, feel romantic, and sit for hours doing nothing with your friends at a cafe, and then go home and feel you “get France.” And you do, at a genuine experiential level.

Thick culture is harder to see, and rarely acknowledged, even by those living in it, because it is the water we swim in, and you can’t really cosplay it, without some foundational life changes. It is akin to (and often is about) changing your religious faith, because it requires a change in your moral horizon— something a lot of people have without being able to articulate what it is.

Thick culture is the plot we follow, while thin culture is the stage settings4.

Almost all our regional differences are about thin culture, although they can be pronounced enough, and distinct enough, that place can rise to the level of meaning-making. A person can make his or her identity about being from the UP, and it can be strong enough to become a capital-G Good.

So if we have such meaningful thin cultural differences, do we still have a shared thick culture, and what is it? I believe we do and that it is largely inherited from Western Europe, mostly England, and is best summarized as Careerist Christianity—a prosperity theology manifest as the American Dream, which synthesizes a moral order built on the Old Testament, overlaid with a heavy dose of Lockean individualism and Enlightenment rationalism.

The U.S. is unique among nations (and arguably successful) because we have a high acceptance for a lot of thin cultural differences as long as you buy into the shared thick culture. That is, you can live how you want at a thin level, as long as you ultimately believe in making big money through hard work and playing by the rules. We are a federation of regional cultures held together by this American dream. It is our shared moral horizon.

Our tolerance for thin differences is also why immigration works better here than in other countries. That is especially true of front-row immigrants (highly educated), since they are leaving cultures they didn’t fit into at a thick level (entrepreneurial). They have self selected for being a natural American, at a thick level5.

For any country to work, citizens have to believe in a shared thick culture. When citizens don’t believe in it, then you will have social and political turmoil. The differences might manifest as disagreements about thin issues, because that is the easiest to highlight, but culture repair requires restoring a unified belief in the thick.

For the U.S. that means we need a strong shared belief in the attainability of the American Dream. A person needs to feel they can, with enough hard, decent, and dignified work, buy a home, have a yard, raise a family, and know that their kids will have a better life than they did. Having this unlocks the non-credentialed forms of meaning (family and place) as additional avenues to fulfillment.

I continue to believe that the political turmoil of our last decade is about a disconnect between the front-row and back-row over the availability of the American Dream. As our economy moved to post-industrial (at a pace accelerated by choices of the front-row), emphasizing intellectual work over manufacturing, a large gap opened up between the two in economic well-being, and more importantly, in the ability to make meaning. Non-credentialed forms of meaning became devalued, while careerism became ascendant.

Which is why I’ve been saying the educational divide is our most fundamental divide, because it is about different understandings of what the American Dream is and its availability. It’s a thick culture rupture, not a thin one, and those are always more contentious and harder to repair, because it becomes an epistemological fracture. That is, you get two populations with two different understandings of reality.

Which brings me to where I am writing this from, a McDonald’s in the Midwest, in Calumet, Indiana, to be precise. I keep coming back to the Midwest because there is a relaxed contentment here that I find refreshing. The American Dream is largely working here again for both the front-row and back-row, after a rough couple of decades, at least relative to the rest of the U.S. I saw this in Michigan City, in South Chicago, in Duluth, and points in between.

There are respected jobs in the Midwest for the front-row who chose to stay, as well as the back-row—all of which you can get without long resumes built on lots of schooling and accumulated debt, and that makes all the difference. Housing is also far more affordable, and housing is probably the single biggest economic factor in the American Dream. You can’t believe in America if you can’t afford a ranch home with a two-car garage. You might as well be in Europe, in a small Dutch apartment complex. F that, this is America.

The result is a vibe here that is especially refreshing because of the contrast to the cynicism I find in a lot of the Northeast, where housing is less affordable and jobs less fulfilling for those not in the front-row6.

The type of work available is important. Manufacturing is still a major employer in the Midwest and still respected. People build tangible things, and others understand and appreciate that, and so there is a dignity in that type of work here that is missing from places where front-row jobs dominate.

People here have careers that tether them to physical reality, which means a culture (thick and thin) can only drift so far. You can only get so many fancy (and absurd) notions about you, and your place in the world, and what it means to be happy, if you have one foot firmly on the earth.

The nasty and demeaning version of this is saying simple people need simple jobs, but that is front-row cope. Everyone, regardless of abilities and aspirations, is better served by being grounded, and the further you remove yourself from the consequences of your actions, the more likely you are to become supercilious, arrogant, and alone, and few escape that life without eventually crashing hard.

I’ve spent so much of my prior years writing about the decline of the American Dream, that my time here in the Midwest has been especially refreshing. It gives me hope that we've bottomed out and I can see the path forward—one where place is still a capital-G Good for most Americans, and a refined version of the American Dream unifies the country again. A just-industrialized-enough post-industrial America, where our shared thick culture binds us together.

Where people of all educational levels can find dignity in work, meaning in community, and home in the place where they were born. The Midwest shows it's possible to recover. Let’s hope the rest of America catches up.

PS: Here is my tentative schedule in Asia. As usual, happy to meet up with anyone who crosses paths!

• Seoul: March 5th -10th

• Qingdao (China): 9th to 13th

• Taipei and Taitung: 14th to 22nd

• Okinawa: 22nd to 30th?

• Yangon (Burma): 1st? to 5th ?

• Seoul again: 5th - ?