Here Goes Nothing
Howdy. I’m Kaleb Horton, a writer from Bakersfield. Not the metro part, which exists, but the dusty part at the edge of the desert where tumbleweeds roll by so often they aren’t cute and dust devils stab the horizon and people ride to corner stores on horseback. My earliest memory is of sitting on my grandparents’ porch, staring out at an endless field and big rigs going by on the highway beyond it. But enough on that. You’ll get plenty of that. I’m just saying Bakersfield is the reason why I write. It’s where the memories all go.
Now I live in Los Angeles, which is the reason I ever got paid to write. It has more in common with Bakersfield than you’d think. In both places there’s this ghost of the American West that announces itself the second you aren’t looking for it. They’re both ultimately cowboy towns, choking on dust and burning down every so often. I love them both, even though they make me feel like the loneliest bastard on the planet. But enough on that. You’ll get plenty of that too.
I should elaborate on the why of my writing. It’s to stare the loneliness right in the eye, kill it, and tamp the dirt down on top of it. I don’t do it for myself. I do it so that other people out there somewhere can feel something beautiful or funny or sad and leave the immediate reality of their lives for someplace else.
For about twelve years now, I’ve been a professional writer on any topic I think I can write about, for any venue that’ll have me. MTV News, Rolling Stone, Paste, Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, Vice, Vox, a bunch of places I’m forgetting. But I’ve been writing all my life and truth be told, doing it for big media companies made me write less and made me enjoy it less and made the muscles atrophy. I was most prolific when I self-published and just said “hey, look at this.” It’s time to get that back; to write as much as I can and every day. This is gonna sound like bullshit, but that’s what I was put here to do. I have asthma and I can’t swing a hammer to save my life but I can make people feel something.
Now, what to expect from this newsletter. I’m gonna write about what I care about and what keeps me interested in life, without the inherent limitations of editors or the news cycle or the house style of some place in New York I’ve never even seen. America, history, music, comedy, weird bullshit, old gas stations on the sides of bypassed highways, the sound of trains going by, the guy I met by the freight yard who told me Elvis is alive and living in the Virgin Islands, those dudes who escaped from Alcatraz and maybe moved to South America, whatever. Anything.
It’ll be mostly free for awhile, though you can donate if you feel inclined (I haven’t figured out the donating model of this site yet, but you can toss me $5 if you just want to support the project). Eventually, as the mission of this thing takes shape, I’ll have a subscription model where you can pay for premium feature-length articles and suggest topics for me to write about. I’ll also regularly post writing from my archive that has disappeared from the ever-shrinking ruins of the internet. Sometimes I’ll post my photography, which I like to think of as taking spy shots of the ghost of the West but usually boils down to snapshots of stuff I find pretty.
I thought about calling this newsletter “Lonesome Roads,” but who the hell wants to read a sitcom spec script at a place called Lonesome Roads, so instead I’ll call it nothing. It’s just me.
P.S. If you haven’t read my stuff before, here’s some of the work I’ve done and like.
The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping, the biggest piece I ever did.
My obituary for Merle Haggard.
On The Existential Beauty of Peanuts.
A piece about the ghost of Kmart.
My obituary for the great Norm Macdonald.
The Last Pioneer, a feature about a bygone Los Angeles chicken joint.