Seriously: Wyoming

Oil refineries, hidden just off the expressway from Salt Lake to Denver, which is the only road; ranchers and truckers popping out from the hills to mingle with outsiders from anywhere else at the cafes scattered randomly at stop signs given proper names, dozens of miles from any real town.  In these towns are houses painted in colors that are dull and bold at the same time like Greenland's so they may be seen in the blizzards or dust storms that come every day.  In between the towns; wind.  Rocks, rocks, rocks.  Oil, goats, Point of Rocks, Rock springs.. 

Earlier today I read a small bit about Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor,  a place artificially tacked on to Afghanistan in colonial days though to be fair it can not be said to 'naturally' belong to any larger place.  A blasted land, ice and wind.  Hostile to humankind, with the natives of the place suffering a truly apocalyptic death rate especially among the women and children, maintaining themselves only by literally fucking like rabbits, having twelve kids in the hope that one boy and one girl survive long enough to have twelve kids.  I read little on their religion; nominally Islam, something mainstream to advertise that they do in fact have enough knowledge of an outside world to desire a mainstream appearance.  In truth though I'm sure their real faith is based upon cursing the ancestors who were God-damn stupid enough to make them native to the Wakhan corridor.  There's such a thing as Native Greenlanders too.  We are all imperialists bunkered down against lands that reject our presence. 

And there are no roads to the Wakhan, none at all.  No way to deliver a phone call by either wire or air.  No means of delivering the most basic 2k medical care or gift cards to Lane Bryant.  I contrast this to the 4-or-6-lane Interstate 80 of South Wyoming; to the Subway restaurant in places where the zip code was the Subway, to the hundreds of millions spent to make it safe to drive through the endless series of spinal passes and wind at 85 mph; the 24 hour 'auto repair shops' consisting of nothing but a 30 year-old tow truck, a 50-year old shack, and the infantile dependence of their victimized 'customers' upon them.  The Interior West is far more obscenely strange than drag show you come across if you do somehow make the coast.  "Romantic" in as much as loneliness or knowingly futile defiance of the gods is romantic.  Mostly though it is only full of stories and obscenely strange. 

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In other news:  No leader of a major democracy in modern times; not de Gaulle, not Dick Cheney, has been more proudly and openly hostile to human liberty than Margaret Thatcher.  I absolutely don't mean to dance on anyone's grave; it's just that the sight of her name is always going to bring a little touch of cyanide taste to my tongue, you know what I'm saying? She was such an utterly vile elitist fool.