Places where the land ends are pure—you can hear water like that a mile away. Oceans are perfect, even radical, in their isolation. You could swim out into the sea as far as you like, if what you wanted was to drown, yet this desire to be free is forever compelling.

It’s been five years since Blonde came out, and five years since I left home. That was the day I drove 750 miles south with a trailer and my boxes of freshly cut shorts.

Primordial calm sinks in when I’m sitting on a beach, some cosmic swirl of instinct and shadowed memory. If I could, I’d crawl back through the yarns of time, ego sloughing off in the volcanic air, no longer cursed by the workweek or wifi.

I’m at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, which is the world’s largest cave system, so I made a playlist of songs that sound like the caves episode of Planet Earth (its best episode). There are also some songs that just sound like Kentucky.

We've started moving out of our apartment this week, so that nightmare is beginning all over again. That's just the way it is for the renter.