Editor’s note, 12/8/16: When Mr. Horton wrote this in April we laughed. We’re re-posting this now, because satire has become reality. On Saturday night, somewhere in South Carolina, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States. And he did it with all the triumphalism, arrogance and crotch-thrusting vulgarity of a Van Halen…
Conspiracy Theories Make The Void Look Smaller
Every old car has its rattles, but this one was different. It sounded like it was coming from inside the engine. My gauges were all fine, it wasn’t running hot, but it was like when you cough and suddenly realize you have the flu. Malaise. I pulled over at a vacant lot that used to…
Bernie Sanders And All Those Damn Millennials
It’s only February and already I have an election year mind. What was once a well-sorted filing cabinet is now a desk piled high with newspaper clippings, half-remembered scandals, embarrassing photographs, and spurious rumors from a thousand different strangers. Every day I confront this desk in terror, looking for the magic key that makes the…
Alright, So Who The Hell Is Ted Cruz?
The chaos has subsided and the news vans have driven away, so it’s time to sit down and ask the important questions about Iowa. For example, where is that? Do I even know anyone from there? Have I ever thought about that state before in my entire life? What does narrative mean and why do…
Things We Never Find: Photos From 2015
I’ve been taking pictures for about 20 years, but I never took a class in photography. I lie when people ask me what shutter speed I’m using. I only pretend to know what an F-stop is. And I never learned what a darkroom is or what all those chemicals do. In my imagination, darkrooms are…
Damn It, Ben Carson Needs To Just Get It Over With And Host A Late-Night Radio Show
As I predicted elsewhere, the Boomer Die-Off is in full swing, and earlier this year it claimed Glenn Frey. I readily admit to knowing nothing about the man except his eyebrows. You wouldn’t think this has any political ramifications whatsoever, but it does. Here’s how presidential candidate Ben Carson eulogized him: Now, here’s the thing.…
Places and Faces and Names and the Death of Red Simpson
Bad news, class of 2016. Beloved famous people are starting to die. I mean, sure, they always die. Lots of great famous people are already dead. But what’s starting to happen is that the ones we didn’t render up to antiquity are dying too. This isn’t Jimmy Stewart in 1997. This is the beginning of…
Bowie’s Perfectly Managed Exit
I was crossing a pitch black street and talking on the phone. Totally quiet, totally dark. Whatever I heard on the phone had one hundred percent of my attention. It was a little after midnight. “Wow.” My friend said this with zero emotion. If I know one thing, it’s that when someone says “wow” with…
On ‘The Hateful Eight’
I’m going to close my eyes and imagine what my grandpa would say. He has a big cut-out of John Wayne in his shed and all the collectible plates. Every time I go and see him, he’s watching some old western show. He’s seen just about every western that exists, all the way through revisionism,…
Rain On The Roof, Or Managing Depression At Night
It’s 2016, a new year, all the platitudes have been thrown in the air and trampled into the concrete and brushed away by janitors and street sweepers, and I’m sitting in my truck listening to the rain hit the roof at 2 a.m. It’s cold and late. Too cold and late to be sitting in…
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