Weekend Guide: Out West

and back again ⛰

By some stroke of hippie mysticism I just back to backed road trip novels. Teenager by Bud Smith and A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison. Everyone’s always headed out West. Running from something. Headfirst into the ideal. I never got what was so fundamentally flee-able about the East Coast. I love it! But if you listen to enough Springsteen it starts to creep — maybe I should get the fuck out of here.

Let’s keep it crystal. I would never.

But even Bruce fell victim to the lure of the West. In the mid eighties he packed it all up into the backseat of some classic car and drove across country to California. He got the big house, obligatory tan, questionable style (shots fully intended - west coast style is bad) and even married an actress — only to find himself home, back where it all started, in the beautiful Garden State. The circle of life.

The West has been romanticized in road trip novels for ages. For sure, it’s appealing as hell, and could be considered a sexy topic to write about. Finding one’s self at 75 mph, hurdling through flyover states leaving only a cloud of dust in your wake, blasting your favorite songs while smoking countless cigs. This is surely the stuff of dreams. America the beautiful.

Heck, i’ve read a lot of these books. Really, they’re hard to avoid. Basically every book written by a man after On the Road was influenced by this type of ode to get up and go. But they always end the same way. Back where they started, or with one or more characters dead. Gunned down or flown off a cliff.

Maybe it’s less about the destination and more about the trip itself. Ah, what a tidy little stoic allegory for life.

If you are looking to take a trip. Teenager by Bud Smith is my book of the year so far. It’s a perfect story of twisted teenage love, a fresh take on the Bonnie and Clyde arc. Teenager is receiving all sorts of critical praise, and it couldn’t be more deserved. You will read it and think to yourself - fuck, this guy can write. Promise.

But while I was ripping through Teenager, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it is the exact same plot of Badlands. That’s ok. Badlands is one of my favorite movies. And we all know that great artists steal. If you are new to both, it may be interesting to check them out in tandem.

Bud wasn’t going to crack of the road trip novel — it can’t be cracked, it just is. It’s trapped. Nobody can outrun their demons.

In other news, thankfully cryptocurrencies are over, men don’t read novels, and AD toured Travis Barker’s house - dude is hanging a lot of Pettibon.

Thanks for tapping in. Let me know how you are doing. I am doing just fine!