What is beauty for?

To find out, notice anti-beauty.

There are places where people yearn for other places.

Where a traveling salesman calls his wife. Where a truck driver texts his son and waits for a reply. Where a cashier has a dusty photo of the family she sends money to back home.

Occasionally, I will get in my car and take off across the desert of California, heading East, back home to the swamps of Louisiana.

I stop in those forgotten places. The in-between realm. The upside down. Middle-America Purgatory. A random gas station in Luddoxburg, New Mexico. One guy, clearly high on something, sits behind the counter at 1 am, watching you decide between sugar-free Redbull and regular Redbull.

The decor is perfectly hateful. Someone who didn’t want to be there designed it as cheaply as possible. You really shouldn’t be there if they have any self-respect. This is a place of lesser demons.

Opportunist businessmen built these places with no intention of ever going there themselves. Just a much-needed stop on the way to somewhere that matters.

They are the most aesthetically hateful places I have ever encountered. But, like a horror movie, I seek them out. I can’t look away.