For years I’ve wanted to put together “The Worst American Road Trip™”. The stops fall into 3 main categories:
The tourist trap, roadside attractions we all know and love.The ones that are advertised on billboards for hundreds of miles but no one ever actually stops at. For years driving on Interstate 10 I’ve been bombarded with billboards for “The Thing”. What is it? The answer left obscure. All that can be promised is an unforgettable experience and clean bathrooms.
Some of the sights are the best and most beautiful monuments to American absurdity. I’ve never been to Memphis but I so deeply desire to take a trip to see the beautiful black Bass Pro Pyramid, an homage to the ancient Egyptian city turned into the rootinest tootinest fishin’ supply store this side of the Mississippi. What could be more American?
Weird obscure internet rabbit holes that I’ve fallen down over the years. I’ll leave you to fall down this one if you so choose1.
The roadside attractions are certainly the most dubious. The US of course is not the only place to have these types of gimmicks but our roadtrip culture is certainly the most susceptible to it. These are non-places, they are the artifice of something interesting to see. Any red-blooded roadtripping American knows the billboards that go on for 200 miles in any direction advertising a glorified gas station with a gimmick attached that has a $10 entrance fee to sell a $30 T-shirt. They are, in effect, attention absorbers and in modern life I can’t stop seeing them everywhere.
One of the most prominent ones that I’ve thought about recently is none other than the Times Square Ball Drop presented now by Lockheed Martin. An event that (purportedly) at one point was to celebrate the New Year but now is basically just in competition with itself to see how many ads can fit on screen at one time. An event that everyone, with the exception of those who dream of being filmed with a Planet Fitness advertisement on their head sucking face at midnight, unanimously agrees sucks fat donkey dick but nevertheless one that we, for some reason, continue to subject ourselves to year after year. It’s horrible, it gets worse every year, everyone knows this is the case and yet we can’t seem to look away. No lame lame New Years party is complete without it.
The Ball Drop is a simulation of a party the same way that a tourist trap is a simulation of a place. It’s one of those things in the modern world that begets itself through its own viral popularity. This has manifested itself in me seeing comments online along the lines of, “New Years is getting worse every year”. Now perhaps this is a sign of our cultural malaise and the idea that we can no longer imagine an optimistic future. But also maybe this is related to the fact that we keep watching the Ball Drop in Times Square.
Meanwhile, in LA the real party was happening. The Pacific Standard Time countdown happened outside the billboard which counts the annual deaths from smoking related illnesses. Of course, every year on NYE at midnight it resets to zero as no people have died yet from smoking in 2026…
… and probably no one ever will again.
Just like the Ball Drop the revelers countdown, as we roll into the new year there is much celebration and merriment. 0 smoking deaths. It’s at once optimistic and realistic. It is a tabula rasa showing that no one has died, while at once we also have the real understanding that the cancer will continue to spread. But for now:
Joy.
We can all come together with hope for a new year even as a car with a Marlborough ad slowly rolls in the background. What started as just a couple of people celebrating in this way has grown to a huge, grassroots event. This is culture. This is a real event that happens, not a simulation.
This morbid beauty sneaks its way into the culture of tourist traps as well. I present to you: The Rat Hole. A Chicago tourist pilgrimage, a hole that looks like a rat, though experts think it may have been a squirrel. Into its rodent silhouette is offered coins, flowers, Malort, cigarettes, birth control pills, hopes and dreams. The same way that the Times Square Ball Drop is a simulation of a party while the Smoking Deaths Countdown is a real one, so too is the Rat Hole a real place to the tourist trap’s simulation. The Rat Hole has affected the community, the little league team is now the Rats, marriage proposals have occurred there. It is a place of pilgrimage, of sanctity. It is a place of convergence, it is where culture is created. Where the Ball Drop and tourist traps existence is predicated on profit, the Rat Hole and the Billboard are centers for community.
To those who say that New Years is getting worse: perhaps it’s because we’re looking for good in the wrong places.
By the way, we’re Clyde and Henry! This is our new weekly comic and newsletter, Rodent Regime. We also recently collected the first print volume of STEPPERS which you can check out here:
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Clyde and Henry
If you don't have the time to do the walkthrough, this is a house in Louisville, Kentucky. The walkthrough starts out innocuously enough and looks like some kind of hoarders home. But quickly devolves into urinal and double toilet filled bathrooms and warehouses packed to the brim with DVDs, winding mazes of bootlegged retail goods culminating in what appears to be a baptismal room coopted into a multi person shower. The sorry is that it was a bootleg DVD operation in the era of bootlegged DVDs. Eventually it was found by the feds and shut down, the house liquidated and put on the market, as was, by the state.