On the drive from Chicago to Los Angeles, we were rolling along Interstate 80 through the vast, wheat-filled void that is central Nebraska. Even more so than the desert, Nebraska gives you the overwhelming feeling of being in a very specific place, while at the same time being lost in a sea of all-encompassing uniformity. I imagine that if and when the apocalypse comes, the whole world will look like Nebraska.

Just up the road from the town of Pleasant Dale, Nebraska (home to 245 souls as well as the fifth-largest honey glazed ham factory in Nebraska) there is an abandoned gas station with a towering rusted metal sign which reads “GAS”. It was this sign which prompted us to interrupt our westward progress at exit 388 off I-80. Across the street from the gas station is an ordinary-looking house, except for the paint job—all hippie rainbows, flowers and

The notochord is a defining feature of the phylum Chordata. 

It is a stiff, flexible rod made of collagen that runs along the body below the hollow dorsal nerve cord. It functions as an anchoring point for muscles, enabling chordates to move their bodies by flexing their muscles against it. The notochord is the precursor of the spine found in all vertebrates, or members of the subphylum Vertebrata. Through evolution, a column of vertebrae eventually replaced the

I. You're both married to other people, to start with, heavily entangled on the quantum mechanical level with other humans (?) who could marshal considerable resources to rein you both back in. But there was that time at tapas where the tempranillo got flowing and there might have been non-ritual skin-to-skin contact? Twice? and you think about this while waiting for the squat machine to free up sometimes.

II. This other person is long dead and