SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE

Midwestern Death Trip and beyond. I am pleased and sort of amazed to tell you that my first book, MIDWESTERN DEATH TRIP, is out today! I started on it more or less a year ago, though a few of the chapters I’ve been kicking around much longer. I refuse to get all sappy and sentimental over what basically amounted to a rollicking good time; even the month of February, when I barely left the house and was crying all the time for reasons I won’t get into here.

"I always opted for the people who lived a sad life confidently." Some way or another, it all comes back to Florida, or at least that’s how it goes here at America’s favorite vibes-based newsletter. Whether it’s Spring Breakers, Jimmy Buffett, Thomas McGuane’s berserko Key West masterpiece Panama, or the smoking section of the Tampa International Airport, there’s something potent in the Sunshine State’s manic tropical depravity, a humid microcosm of American psychosis.

Photo by Charles Van Schaick. Dear party people, This is just to let you know that my first book, Midwestern Death Trip, will be out May 12, 2026. I do hope you’ll read the first and only excerpt, available for you here and now via Panamerica. A pre-order link awaits you there, too. In the words of Twin Peaks: The Return — let’s rock.

All photos in this post were taken by Barno. Social media feels like hanging out in a lunatic asylum at this point, but now and then I still get some great recommendations.

“I did not gamble, cared not at all about the Mob and even less about Howard Hughes. But there were other stories and other people, and there were days when I told myself that through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism.

It isn’t easy to romanticize the Midwest at the end of February, when Fool’s Spring has come and gone, melting the snowdrifts to reveal a dead world of dirty brown. But someone’s got to do it. I’d turned in the final manuscript of my first book, Midwestern Death Trip, an event I had imagined as a fireworks display of euphoric freedom. But to tell the truth, I felt sort of bereft — blinking in the winter sunlight, evicted from my cave. I’d come to like my cave. It was comfortable in there.

Happy belated New Year, one and all. I write, first, to thank you for riding with America’s favorite vibes-based newsletter in 2025 and beyond. We reached ten thousand subscribers in December! I appreciate it more than I can put in words.

“I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody, I don’t know who or what — maybe myself.” — MARILYN MONROE As a writer, I have two rules — don’t be boring, and don’t lie. The first rule is more important, or so I believe; for the moment you allow yourself to lapse into tedium, you lose the already distracted, overstimulated reader. Happily, since a good writer can make anything seem interesting, this is also the easier rule to work around.

These 7-hour drives were becoming way too easy, and I’d settled into a trance on Highway 53, northbound toward Superior and onward to Duluth. It was the end of October, the eve of Halloween, and the morning frost was thawing on what remained of passing cornfields. Sheets of fog over the fields parted for the sun to catch in silver ribbon rivers and lakes of mercury. The last of the maple leaves had turned to rust and burgundy, countered with the golden needles of the tamaracks’ last stand.

It’s hard to say how many people live in Moquah, an unincorporated community within the town of Pilsen (pop. 216), though my guess would be somewhere between 12 and 24. Here in the far northwestern corner of Wisconsin, amidst endless rolling farmland and miles of ATV trails, there are a few weather-worn houses, a Catholic church, a town hall, and the most infamous dive bar in all of the Midwest.