The Endless American Road

Former liberal professor on a redemption arc. Strange sightings, long drives, and America from the margins.

I was born in Appalachia not long before the internet, into a town where old men sat on the courthouse lawn at noon and spat tobacco into Styrofoam cups. Time moved slowly there and I longed for culture, for learning, for elsewhere. Leaving that town, after barely traveling at all for my first 18 years, began my love affair with the road.

Before I turned 18, I found my way to Lexington for college, and five years later to Chicago for graduate school. Before 30, I drove across country to the Pacific Northwest, which transformed my love for the road into an obsession. In Oregon, I became a professor and felt a profound sense of purpose for the first time in my life. I loved my classroom, but the petty politics, leftist groupthink, and quiet elitism of academia eventually wore me down, so in 2016 I walked away from it all.

Now, in my forties, I’m in a new career here in Arizona with my dogs and a desire to keep writing well into old age.

I started this Substack after the 2024 election without a clear theme in mind. Over time, the Endless American Road emerged. The road, the one place where my restless soul finds some solace, is as good a metaphor for my writing life as any.

I write wherever my interest takes me: American culture and politics, the working class, dogs, music, literature, sexuality, belief and doubt, strange sightings in the sky, and the long stretches of road that connect it all.

As I get older, I’ve grown more comfortable with my contradictions and less tolerant of the labels others try to place on me. I’ve always lived betwixt and between.

This project is an attempt to make a map of America with words and images—to search for home, love, meaning, and adventure along the way. The truck is packed, the huskies are waiting, so let’s push play on that carefully curated playlist and see what American adventure is out there waiting to be found.

I’ll never intentionally lie to you, and I’m very glad you’re here.