'What the fuck just happened here?'

I had a series of affectingly positive experiences on my recent trip to the American south. I have reflected however that if I were to try to somehow visualise them graphically, they’d all turn up disconcertingly proximate on the spectrum to some of my more negative experiences. As I think David Lynch has been at pains to suggest in his now-concluded Twin Peaks revival, there is a marked Jekyll and Hyde quality to many aspects of ‘Americana’. 

In the past I have tended to divide the places I have visited into those that are merely ‘interesting’ and those that can somehow be elevated into the premium category of 'deeply or even disturbingly interesting', to which nations such as Russia (the USSSR when I was present), Japan and Mexico belong in my notes. 

I’d add the USA, but as Lynch has demonstrated time and again, ‘interesting’ is far from being the most applicable adjective for an experience that more than occasionally teeters on the dreamlike, hangs the hyper on reality and which seems both so self-contained and yet at once full of worm-holes.