r/WRXingaround

What the Hell Is… Even Cowgirls Get the Blues?

Imagine a woman born with extraordinarily large thumbs who discovers that her supposed deformity makes her a magnificent hitchhiker.

That’s Sissy Hankshaw, the unforgettable heroine of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a 1976 novel by American writer Tom Robbins.

And things only get stranger.

Sissy travels across America, eventually encountering an eccentric group of cowgirls running a ranch, a mysterious Japanese philosopher, and a world where conventional ideas about beauty, freedom, sexuality, and happiness are turned upside down.

Robbins wasn’t interested in writing an ordinary Western.

His novel is a wildly imaginative mixture of feminism, counterculture, philosophy, absurdist humour, and the American obsession with freedom.

The title itself is a clever twist on the cowboy myth.

Cowboys are supposed to be rugged, independent, emotionally indestructible figures riding into the sunset.

But cowgirls?

They get lonely. They fall in love. They question everything.

And sometimes they get the blues.

In 1993, director Gus Van Sant adapted the novel into a film starring Uma Thurman as Sissy, alongside Keanu Reeves and Lorraine Bracco.

The movie received largely negative reviews, but Robbins’s novel remains a countercultural cult classic.

And those enormous thumbs?

They’re more than a joke.

They symbolize the possibility that the very thing making you different might also be what makes you extraordinary.

Perhaps that’s the real message.

Freedom isn’t necessarily becoming what society expects.

Sometimes it’s discovering that you were built for an entirely different road.

Spinoza… The Man Who Would Not Lie About God

Baruch Spinoza did something extraordinarily dangerous in the seventeenth century.

He followed his own thinking wherever it led.

Born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese-Jewish community, Spinoza began questioning some of the deepest religious assumptions of his world. Eventually those questions became intolerable to the community that had raised him.

In 1656, at only twenty-three, he was placed under cherem, a severe form of excommunication. He was formally cast out.

Today, leaving a religion might mean an argument with your parents or some awkward Christmas dinners.

For Spinoza, it could mean losing much of the world you knew. Religion, family connections, friendships, business and community were woven together.

And still he kept thinking.

God Wasn’t Somewhere Else

Spinoza’s most famous idea was Deus sive Natura:

God, or Nature.

God wasn’t an old man somewhere beyond the universe, watching humanity and occasionally interfering with events.

For Spinoza, God was the infinite reality of existence itself. Everything that exists, from stars and stones to human bodies and thoughts, exists within this one reality.

There is no place where Nature ends and God begins.

That also changed the meaning of miracles. Why would God need to break the laws of Nature if those laws are themselves expressions of God?

Perhaps the miracle was that anything existed at all.

And Then He Went After Free Will

Spinoza believed we feel completely free because we know what we want, but usually don’t understand all the causes that made us want it.

You know you’re angry.

You may have very little idea where all that anger actually came from.

Yet Spinoza didn’t conclude that human life was meaningless.

He thought understanding those causes could make us more free.

We may never escape Nature, but we can understand ourselves within it. The person dragged around by fear, jealousy, hatred and desire is less free than the person who understands what those emotions are doing.

Freedom, then, wasn’t escaping causality.

It was understanding it.

The Intellectual Love of God

This may be the most beautiful part of Spinoza.

He didn’t think our highest relationship with God should be fear, obedience or bargaining for an afterlife.

It should be understanding.

The deeper we understand Nature, ourselves and existence, the closer we come to what he called the intellectual love of God.

His masterpiece, the Ethics, was even written almost like a mathematical proof, using definitions, axioms and propositions to work through God, the human mind, emotions, bondage and finally human freedom.

His Theological-Political Treatise was just as dangerous. Spinoza defended the freedom to philosophize and argued, essentially, that religious authority should not dictate what a human being is allowed to think.

The Price of Thinking

And this is the part that makes Spinoza extraordinary to me.

He could have simply kept quiet.

Instead, he pursued ideas that threatened his relationship with almost everything familiar to him.

Later descriptions of traditional excommunication ceremonies speak of bells ringing and candles being extinguished. (We don’t know that Spinoza’s own excommunication literally happened this way, and shouldn’t pretend that we do. But excommunication was for a grave mistake and no one was allowed to buy or sell or even make eye contact with the‘excommunicated’ individual.)

But the image is almost perfect.

The community extinguished its relationship with Spinoza.

Spinoza refused to extinguish his mind.

He hadn’t simply given up on God. In a strange way, he had found a new conception of God, one so enormous that God was no longer something inside reality explaining it.

God was reality itself.

Centuries later, Albert Einstein famously said:

“I believe in Spinoza’s God.”

A God revealed in the order and harmony of existence rather than one personally intervening in individual human lives.

That is why I think Spinoza’s courage matters almost as much as his philosophy.

He risked belonging rather than pretend to believe something his own mind could no longer accept.

They could cast him out.

They could condemn his ideas.

They could extinguish the candle…

But they couldn’t extinguish the thought.

Nearly four centuries later, we’re still talking about it…

What the Hell Is… a Four-Stroke Engine?

Every time you start your car, thousands of tiny explosions begin pushing metal pistons up and down, converting burning fuel into mechanical motion. The remarkable part? This controlled violence happens thousands of times every minute.

Most gasoline-powered cars use a four-stroke engine, a design developed in the 19th century and still fundamental to modern motoring.

The four strokes are surprisingly simple.

1. Intake: The piston moves downward, drawing air and fuel into the cylinder through an open intake valve.
2. Compression: Both valves close as the piston rises, squeezing the mixture into a smaller space.
3. Power: A spark plug ignites the compressed mixture. Expanding gases force the piston downward, turning the crankshaft and ultimately driving the wheels.
4. Exhaust: The piston rises again, pushing burned gases through the exhaust valve.

Then the cycle repeats.

Each cylinder produces one power stroke for every two crankshaft revolutions. At 6,000 RPM, that’s 50 power strokes per second per cylinder.

In a four-cylinder engine, that’s 200 power strokes every second.

Your engine isn’t simply burning gasoline. It’s conducting a precisely timed mechanical orchestra of pressure, heat, combustion, and motion.

And your right foot is the conductor.

What the Hell Is… a Swastika?

What the Hell Is… a Swastika?

A swastika is much older than Hitler.

Much, much older.

Versions of the hooked-cross symbol appear across ancient Eurasia and beyond, thousands of years before Nazi Germany existed. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, it has traditionally carried meanings connected with good fortune, well-being, prosperity, eternity and the sacred order of things.

The English word comes from the Sanskrit svastika, related to svasti: roughly, “well-being” or “good fortune.”

Which makes what happened next one of history’s strangest acts of symbolic theft.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European archaeologists became fascinated by swastika-like symbols found on ancient objects. At the same time, nationalist and racial movements in Germany began appropriating the symbol and connecting it to increasingly dubious ideas about an ancient “Aryan” race.

Then the Nazis took it.

Hitler’s movement turned the swastika into the emblem of the Nazi Party: a black hooked cross, generally tilted 45 degrees, inside a white circle on a red field.

After the Nazis seized power in Germany, the symbol became inseparable from the regime surrounding it: dictatorship, racial persecution, conquest, concentration camps and ultimately the Holocaust.

And that association became so powerful that it almost erased thousands of years of earlier meaning in much of the Western world.

But not everywhere.

Walk into a Hindu temple in India today and you may see swastikas used perfectly openly. You can find them in Buddhist traditions across Asia and in Jain religious imagery. There, the symbol did not suddenly become Nazi simply because Hitler appropriated a version of it.

This creates an extraordinary problem in semantics.

Can one symbol mean two almost opposite things at once?

Historically, yes.

Context does enormous amounts of work.

A swastika carved into an ancient temple is not a Nazi symbol. A black swastika displayed alongside SS insignia almost certainly is. The geometry may be similar while the meaning is radically different.

There have even been attempts to distinguish the Nazi emblem by calling it the Hakenkreuz, the German word meaning “hooked cross.” That can be useful, although historically the terminology is more complicated than simply declaring that one shape is a swastika and the other is not.

What fascinates me is what happened to the symbol itself.

Hitler did not invent the swastika.

He captured it.

And within roughly one generation, a symbol that had survived for thousands of years acquired a new meaning so powerful that, across much of the world, it overwhelmed almost everything that came before it.

That may be one of the most dramatic examples in history of a civilization changing the meaning of a shape.

What the Hell Is… the Darién Gap?

Imagine deciding to drive from Barrow, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

That was once my plan.

On a map, it looked almost beautifully simple: point the car south and keep going until there was nowhere left to go.

Then I discovered the Darién Gap.

The Pan-American Highway runs for thousands of kilometres through North and South America, but between Panama and Colombia it simply stops.

For roughly 100 kilometres there is no continuous road.

Just jungle.

Swamps.

Rivers.

Mountains.

Mud.

And some of the most difficult terrain in the Americas.

On the Panamanian side, the highway ends.

On the Colombian side, it begins again.

If you are travelling by car, you cannot simply drive through.

You have to ship the vehicle around the Gap, usually by cargo vessel or container, cross separately, then reunite with the car in Colombia.

That was the first problem.

Then I started learning about vehicle import rules, temporary permits, insurance, customs guarantees and carnets de passages.

A carnet is essentially a promise to a foreign government that you will not sell your vehicle there. Depending on the country, it can require a substantial financial guarantee tied to the value of the car.

Which can make international overland travel feel suspiciously like buying your own car again and again.

At that point, my beautiful north-to-south road trip had turned into an advanced degree in customs law.

But the Darién Gap is fascinating for another reason.

People have spent decades talking about completing the highway through it, yet there are strong reasons it remains untouched: extraordinary biodiversity, Indigenous communities, huge construction difficulties, environmental concerns and longstanding security problems.

And in recent years, the Gap has become one of the most important migration routes in the Western Hemisphere, crossed on foot by people travelling north.

So this strange place is both a barrier and a corridor.

A missing road that stops cars.

And a jungle crossed by humans anyway.

I never made the drive from Barrow to Tierra del Fuego.

The Darién Gap helped kill the plan.

But in retrospect, the one place where the road disappeared may have been the most interesting part of the entire journey.

A Geometry of Knowledge and God

I’ve had this image in my head for years.

Imagine a cube inside a sphere.

The cube represents everything we can formalize: science, mathematics, AI, measurement, proof, the growing architecture of human knowledge.

The sphere represents something larger: the reality in which all of that exists.

For me, that larger reality is God.

I don’t mean this as a replacement for the Bible, or as some new theology. I still read Scripture as Scripture. This is simply a metaphor for something I’ve always struggled to put into words.

Science does not push God outward every time it discovers something new. That would make God merely the name we give to whatever we haven’t explained yet.

I think of it differently.

Science enlarges the cube.

God is not one unexplained object somewhere inside it. God is the reality in which the cube exists at all.

That is why I like the circle and sphere so much. Human systems tend toward grids, boxes, coordinates, boundaries. Nature gives us spheres, orbits, spirals, curves, fields.

Even the humble manhole cover carries a strange little geometric lesson: a circle can rotate without falling through its own opening.

None of this proves God.

It simply gives me a picture for something I already believe:

Knowledge grows.
Creation becomes more intelligible.
God does not become smaller.

A Canadian in All 50 States: A Reflective Odyssey

I grew up Canadian, and maybe that’s why the United States always shimmered for me with a kind of exotic allure. Not exotic like the spice markets of Marrakesh or the temples of Kyoto, but exotic because it was so close. It was across a river, a stretch of highway, a line on a map.

We lived near the border, and for our family vacations we crossed into America the way some people cross a threshold into a dream. Every trip south felt like stepping onto a vast stage set, where the cars were bigger, the soda cups endless, and even the motel signs seemed to hum with neon possibility.

For me, the U.S. wasn’t just geography. It epitomized travel. It was a country I could measure not only by distance, but by states, each one another chapter.

Long before I knew I’d become a writer, long before I wrote about Russia or North Korea, I was a kid staring out the window of our family car at American billboards, mesmerized.

That seed of wonder never left me. Years later, it grew into something larger than a vacation. It became a personal odyssey: to drive, wander and drift through all fifty states of the Union.

The Lower 48: A Long Road, A Long Dream

When people talk about traveling the U.S., they usually mean a handful of cities. Maybe a cross-country road trip. A taste of Route 66, a selfie with the Grand Canyon, a Broadway ticket stub.

I wanted something else.

I wanted the whole story, or at least as much of it as a person could see from behind the wheel.

So in one great sweep, a friend and I drove the lower 48 states.

Forty-eight states in one trip. About 24,000 miles in my 1978 Toyota Corolla, sleeping in the car at rest areas, beside closed roads or behind gas stations. We washed storefront windows for gas money and food.

It sounds ridiculous now.

It probably sounded ridiculous then.

But that was partly the point.

Jack Kerouac became synonymous with the American road. Bill Bryson turned wandering through America into literature. Steinbeck put a camper on a truck and went looking for his country.

We weren’t famous writers. We were two guys in an old Corolla trying to see everything.

To call it a road trip feels too small. It was a rolling classroom, a kaleidoscope, an endurance test and occasionally an exercise in spectacularly questionable judgment.

The Road Teaches You

On the road, America teaches you in its own accents.

It teaches you about hospitality in the South, where a stranger might still call you “hon.”

It teaches you about resilience in the Rust Belt, where factories can disappear without taking the identity of a place with them.

It teaches you about scale in the West, where the horizon can swallow you whole and the mountains look painted by a God with an oversized brush.

We ate in diners with menus laminated against decades of spilled coffee. We ran across the helipad on top of a Trump casino in Atlantic City. We snuck into a Kenny Rogers concert in Oklahoma City. We watched Misery in a theatre in Upstate New York.

We met people who sometimes felt like cousins we simply hadn’t met yet.

And through all of it, the car became a character in its own right.

There is something about driving thousands upon thousands of miles through deserts, forests, cities and empty interstate that fuses a person to a machine. My five-speed Corolla wasn’t just transportation. It was shelter, companion and mechanical passport.

In the years and roughly twenty vehicles since, my WRX has taken on some of that symbolic role, the drift car that occasionally appears to challenge theoretical physics. But the Corolla was the machine that made America unfold like a living map.

Alaska, 1999

The Lower 48 were complete, but two states remained outside the continental sweep: Alaska and Hawaii.

In 1999, I drove to Alaska.

And driving to Alaska is no small thing.

Alaska humbles you. The road begins to feel less like transportation and more like a narrow agreement between civilization and wilderness. Mountains remind you how small you are. Forests seem eternal. Rivers look less like bodies of water than geography itself in motion.

When I reached Alaska, I understood that this project wasn’t really about checking boxes anymore.

It was about scale.

It was about movement.

It was about the boy who once crossed the border with his family, fascinated simply by being somewhere else, now driving into one of the farthest corners of the continent.

And then one state remained.

Hawaii, 2025: State #50

Last year, I finally went to Hawaii.

Kona.

State number fifty.

There was something wonderfully fitting about finishing there. Hawaii is the one state you obviously cannot reach by road from the mainland, so after decades of driving across America, I had to fly thousands of kilometres across the Pacific just to continue the journey behind the wheel.

And I did.

I drove Hawaii.

The fiftieth state was no longer a blank space on the map.

Kona was wonderful, but there was also something slightly surreal about it. I had carried this unfinished geographical sentence around for decades. Forty-eight states became forty-nine in Alaska, and forty-nine remained forty-nine for more than a quarter-century.

Then suddenly there I was, driving in Hawaii.

Fifty.

No fireworks. No marching band. Just the road, the Pacific, and the quiet realization that something I had started when I was very young was finally complete.

Why It Matters

Why count states? Why measure travel in borders crossed?

For me, it is about continuity.

America had exerted a strange magnetic pull on me since childhood, and now I have memories attached to every state on its map.

Kansas. New Orleans. Hell’s Kitchen. MIT. Cape Canaveral. Hollywood. Chicago. St. Louis. Santa Fe. Miami. Memphis. Mount Rushmore. Dallas-Fort Worth. North Carolina.

Wyoming, still my favourite.

Names that once belonged to movies, business, history books and television gradually became actual places in my memory.

That transformation fascinates me.

A name becomes a road.

A road becomes an afternoon.

An afternoon becomes part of your life.

Travel, in the end, is a mirror. America has been one of the clearest mirrors I’ve ever looked into, each state reflecting not only itself but something about me: curiosity, persistence, restlessness and a lifelong delight in strangeness.

Fifty Stories

What I’ve learned is that the United States is simultaneously one country and fifty stories.

It is contradictions.

Generosity and suspicion. Beauty and ruin. Openness and defensiveness. Vast empty landscapes and cities where millions of lives occupy the same few square miles.

I’ve also learned that travel writing is not really about tallying miles.

It is about memory.

The eerie quiet of Pyongyang, North Korea years later can somehow remind me of the eerie quiet of a Nebraska highway at dawn.

The friendliness of strangers in Arkansas sits somewhere in memory beside the wariness of strangers in Manhattan.

Roadside barbecue in the Carolinas occupies the same strange mental atlas as a gas-station hot dog in Wyoming.

None of these moments seemed historically important when they happened.

But they stayed.

That is what travel does.

Closing the Loop

When I drove through Kona last year, I closed a loop that had begun decades earlier with a Canadian boy crossing the American border with his family, staring out a car window and realizing that the world was enormous and, somehow, reachable.

I have now driven in all fifty states.

But oddly enough, completing the map didn’t make travel feel finished.

It did the opposite.

Because after fifty states, 24,000-mile road trips, Alaska, Hawaii and decades of wandering around the planet, the lesson remains exactly what it was when I was a kid:

There is always another road.

And I still want to know where it goes…

What the Hell Makes a Joke Funny?

I recently came across a short guide to how stand-up comedians construct jokes. Here were the takeaways that caught me:

1. Setup and punchline
2. The setup tells you what the joke is about. The punchline delivers the turn.

Example:
“I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places.”
“He told me to stop going to those places.”

2. The rule of three
   The first two items establish a pattern. The third breaks it.

Example:
“I want a partner who is kind, intelligent, and owns a cabin.”

3. Comparison
   Put two very different things beside each other and let the contrast do the work.

Example:
“My apartment is so small, changing my mind counts as moving furniture.”

4. Simile
   Describe something by comparing it to something unexpected.

Example:
“He entered the meeting like a Labrador who had accidentally been promoted.”

5. Observation
   Point out how absurd ordinary life is when you look at it closely enough. jokes.pdf

Example:
“Nothing makes you feel more optimistic than clicking ‘Remind me tomorrow’ for fourteen consecutive days.”

6. Mimicking
   Imitate a recognizable person or behaviour and exaggerate what makes it distinctive.

Example:

“You kids are addicted to your phones.”

Five seconds later:

“Can you fix my phone?”

7. Callback
   Bring back an earlier joke later, but in a new context.

Example:

Earlier:
“My apartment is so small, changing my mind counts as moving furniture.”

Later:
“She said she needed space, so obviously the relationship was doomed.”

And FYI, the interesting part underneath all of this is that jokes seem to play with prediction. Your brain expects one thing, the punchline gives you another, and then suddenly it makes sense.

So maybe a joke is just a tiny ambush for the brain.

It teaches you a rule.

Then cheats.

What the Hell Is… Radiofrequency Ablation?

If you live with serious back, neck, or shoulder pain, listen up, because I genuinely couldn’t believe this existed.

I was critically injured in three car accidents. For years, pain became part of the architecture of my life. My back and shoulder hurt badly enough that at different points I was treated with powerful pain medication and Botox.

Then the pain clinic suggested something that sounded almost ridiculously futuristic: a medial branch block.

The idea was essentially a test. They temporarily numbed specific medial branch nerves that carry pain signals from the facet joints. If my pain dropped substantially, it suggested those nerves were indeed carrying the problem.

Mine did.

So about a week later, I went back for radiofrequency ablation.

Wait, WHAT?

A physician guided a thin needle to the targeted nerves and used radiofrequency energy to heat tiny areas of nerve tissue. This disrupts their ability to transmit pain signals to the brain.

They weren’t severing nerves from my spinal cord, which is how I originally understood it. They were creating very small lesions in carefully selected sensory nerve branches.

The procedure itself took only minutes. I was awake. There was some discomfort, but compared with years of pain, it seemed almost absurdly minor.

And then something remarkable happened.

Much of the severe pain across my upper back was simply… gone.

Radiofrequency ablation isn’t a permanent cure. The nerves can regenerate, pain can eventually return, and it doesn’t work for everyone. I may still need further procedures.

But think about what we’re doing here.

Pain is ultimately information reaching the brain. Modern medicine can identify some of the tiny pathways carrying that information and selectively interrupt them using radio waves and a needle.

No giant incision. No dramatic surgery.

Just: find the signal, interrupt the signal, reduce the pain.

Radical technology.