Best Of

"I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists "a little room". The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space". It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there."
-C. S. Lewis

This will probably be a mistake later this afternoon, but I can’t resist.

I'm really getting good at this

Save your money, Calvin. vHerf!

Sunrise was once again incredible.




The ride along the border from Lajitas to Presidio was as beautiful as everyone on the internet said it would be. The whole stretch looked like this. There’s no reason for anyone to be “in the area”, but if for some reason anyone is, make sure to detour down there.


I think someone somewhere left the fence open, or there’s a repair that needs to be made.

Maybe one of these guys dug a post up?

It was pretty interesting being able to just look across the semi dry Rio Grande riverbed and see towns in Mexico. I could have walked over to a few of them if I was willing to risk it, which obviously I didn’t do. Here’s one of them.

This was Presidio. Unlike a lot of these small desert towns, Presidio was bustling and had almost no abandoned buildings.

After that it was north to route 90 and west to El Paso. There’s a random Prada store on 90 in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea why, but I think it was some new age artist making some kind of statement? Or maybe a form of viral advertising?


Going into El Paso, I kind of had a visceral reaction. After being out in the open desert for days, it just sucked going into a city. People honking at each other, noise everywhere, chain restaurants left and right. I just hated everything about it, and I don’t think it’s good for people to live on top of each other like that, surrounded by steel, concrete, and advertisements. It’s great for corporate America of course, since almost no one owns anything, and almost no one can save up enough money to be able to own anything, so everyone is stuck in the cycle. I already knew I didn’t like cities, but I’d never had that kind of internal reaction to entering one before. I don’t know why I reacted like that. Maybe it was just days of open land spoiling me? Regardless, I’m getting my oil changed tomorrow, which is why I didn’t just detour around it like I’m doing everywhere else. Gunna play some poker for the rest of the night, and then get the hell out tomorrow.

The LukenYak Cigar and Philosophy Consortium.