Hello and welcome back to another edition of Rock Bookshelf. I have now kept this column alive for one month. Please clap.
As I mentioned last week, I took a few days off to head to the desert and get off the grid a.k.a. stare at my phone for seven hours a day but refrain from responding to anything. In case you’ve never been, the California desert is like an inverted world full of oddball characters. From what I can tell, many desert residents are Los Angeles defectors who found each other, got married, bought a house in Joshua Tree, got into flipping vintage shirts on Depop, took up film photography, drive an old impractical pickup truck, started leaning into Libertarian politics, and maybe developed a small meth problem.
Mostly I just holed up in the tiny house I rented and woke up early to watch the sun rise. Sometimes it feels like being on another planet out there. Here’s a photo I took in Pioneertown at sunset. Pretty cool if you like this sort of crap.
I watched the sun sink into the orange and purple horizon and thought it would be a good place to write a poem. I’m not much of a poet though so all that came out was this: