Sometimes I wake up and I still can't believe my profoundly good fortune. Wasn't that long ago that I was a bachelor with no prospects, broke, miserable, quite certain I'd die a recluse. Twitter changed that. You people changed that. So please accept my heartfelt gratitude: Without the support and encouragement you've all given me, God knows where I'd be today. This site led me to my wife, it led me to make great friends, and it allowed us to be hosted here and there in our travels with wonderful folks all across this country. It's also unexpectedly led me to a writing career. Those of you who've read my long-form work, subscribed to my newsletter, and become paid subscribers to Hickman's Hinterlands have made one insane long-shot of a dream into a reality for us. Because of you, I'm writing about America for a living -- we're living a life that everyone told us wasn't possible. Do you know what that means for us, as we get within mere days of our baby's birth? It's a blessing of absolutely surreal proportions. Now, we've got room to keep dreaming and to keep writing -- because of you. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart. And if you haven't gone and subscribed to Hickman's Hinterlands yet, I hope you do. If you can go "paid," I hope you will. You've got my word that I aim to repay your faith in us and in my work a hundredfold however I can. God bless you all.

I've used nicotine for 18 years straight. Used pipes, cigars, dip, chaw, snus -- and in the last few years, I started using ZYN. Enjoyed them all. But last year, I tried to switch back from ZYN to Swedish snus. Bizarrely, I suffered from immediate brain fog. Switched back immediately. My old friend snus just wasn't cutting it. It wasn't from a lack of nicotine: I was getting just as many mg of nic via the snus as I was from the ZYN, if not more. But the absorption was slower, I guess. That's when I started to get a little unnerved about these pouches, though I continued to use them heavily. Lately I've had brain fog, anxiety, shallow breath, just generally feeling off. Been going on for a few months. So I do a quick Google search looking into whether it might be the ZYN -- and I find a bunch of posts like this one. Suffice it to say I'm going to the Rez immediately and buying a log of General Snus. Will be switching back to real tobacco 100% of the time. Not gonna look back. No more pouches forever. Will slog through the brain fog or whatever. There's something bad about these things, and I say that as one who has been no less than a tin of 6mg's per day for several years. I suspect the unnaturally rapid absorption of the nicotine has some kind of negative effect, I don't know. Anyone else experienced this?

Pardon my French, but this site is a complete mindfuck the more I think about it. I gained a lot of followers chiefly by airing my niche views (and weird life) in public. But eventually, there came a point of diminishing returns to doing the very thing that made me popular on this platform. It's as if at a certain point in the growth of my account, I was supposed to "tighten up the act," develop a schtick, and stick to the script -- instead of doing the exact thing that ever gained me a substantial following in the first place. Like I should've somehow known that at 10,000, or 40,000, or at some particular number, it was time to rein it all in and "play the game." Like most cues, I missed that one. There's no handbook to doing this stuff. I continued to say exactly what was on my mind, continued to broadcast snippets of my fairly unorthodox manner of living, et cetera. But where once this kind of posting generated a great deal of wholesome interest, over time, it generated more opprobrium, resentment, reputational decline, and eventually just plain disinterest. This is because it was just inevitable that at some point, I would piss off basically every single one of my followers for some reason or other -- because I genuinely believe some very strange shit and always have. I've shared it without reservation here for the sake of discussion, and at times, it's been incredibly fun. Now, it feels like I'm "past date." Like the train left the station without me. Zeitgeist moved, algorithm changed, maybe I changed. Can't quite tell. Whatever the case, there's something extremely strange about this whole experience. I will never fully understand this place.

It's sort of crazy to think that the 1990's were really the last hoorah for genuine outlaw shit. When CCTV became ubiquitous and computerized interstate record systems became common -- the days when an outlaw was an even match with a lawman effectively ended. This was only the beginning. As the 2000's, 10's, and 20's progressed, thermal FLIR, drones, flock cameras, license plate readers, and so on were also added to the LEO arsenal. With them, old-school crimes like bank robbery fell off a cliff. It was the end of an era. Some reading this will say "good," and I don't blame them. Less crime is a desirable outcome from all of this. But the end of the "outlaw era" and the unprecedented technological superiority of the state has also effectively ended the era of bottom-up revolutions, guerilla uprisings, civil wars, and so on in the West. At this stage, the only conceivable avenue through which a major militant uprising could occur would be if some proportion of the US military defied orders and expropriated weapons systems wholesale. This is also "good" in at least some way: it objectively reduces the chances of a horrible, gory civil war. However -- it's also the death of the "a little revolution every now and then" idea that is so core to the American idea of freedom. Constantly, I hear rhetoric about how "if things get bad enough, the people will revolt," with the implication being that if they did, we'd see a "Second American Revolution" that would usher in a new era of freedom -- or something like that. So far as I can tell, that idea is now dead. The totality of state power has intensified and been made incredibly precise. State-sponsored mass surveillance continues to worsen. Your odds of doing anything major -- be it a crime or a guerilla revolt -- and getting away with it have never been lower. Because of this, there's likely not going to be a "revolutionary reset" for an abnormally long time. Now, when freedoms erode, there isn't really an outlet for reclaiming them by direct action. The technology now exists to ensure that every conceivable outlet or avenue for people-driven challenges to state power is essentially impossible -- and by my eye, it'd require a coup within the US military to change that.

Truly outlandish to realize that people are actually paying $58/night for a place to camp these days. I mean, that's more than half what a motel costs. And nine times out of ten, right down the road there's state forest where you can camp for free. Ridiculous.

If you see a turtle nest on the road, please mark it like this. I am tired of seeing turtles die on the side of the road this time of year!

July 4th is the last day of summer

Bismarck recently built their 19th and 20th elementary schools and both were instantly over capacity (Both of which are near at 0% poverty BTW) That was 3 years ago and hundreds more new homes are going up, most of which are being filled by young families. We’re a decade behind on roads, public infrastructure and schools to keep pace. City of Bismarck and State of ND are about 8-10% low on their growth forecasts IMO.

For most, the answer is frankly "not much." For the rest? The opportunities are utterly endless.

We quite literally live in an era where politics is less important that simply having lots of sex with your spouse. Because you could "win" at politics all you like -- but if you fail to reproduce, the future will not be yours, period. Truly fantastic time to be alive.

Young people are only facing a "housing crisis" if they don't want to move to the places that are cheap. I mean, if every time I want to go out for lunch I insist on a $200 steak lunch at Peter Luger and refuse to get a $2 McChicken, can I really call that a "lunch crisis?" Of course I can't. Just because I prefer the expensive thing I can't afford does not mean I have a "crisis." Prices are set by supply and demand. My own experience has shown me that it is not always easy to live in the parts of the USA that are cheap -- this is undeniable. Sometimes it is very lonesome. That's the price I pay for living the no-job no-mortgage lifestyle, where I get to play with my infant daughter, read, and swim in the river all day as I like. With a little persistence and creativity, you can do it too, if you're tired of sitting around salivating over lifestyles you can't afford. No sense sitting around waiting for some kind of commie-style real estate revolution -- it's not likely to happen anyway. Sure, it might mean learning to trap beavers, ride ATV's, and cross-country ski instead of having champagne rooftop brunches and dropping acid at the Guggenheim, but so what? There are many lives to live in America, and the vast majority of them are fantastic in their own way.

I hear this a lot, but I believe in operating entirely within your own locus of control. When life serves you lemons, you make lemonade. And when traitorous technocrats destroy your country, you learn how to survive and even thrive in a destroyed country. What else are you gonna do? Run for office? Your odds are abysmal. Vote for someone? No matter who wins, little changes. Do the "boogaloo" thing? Enjoy prison. Wait for things to get better? Not smart. The reality is, unless you are very wealthy and well-connected, you largely have no real choice but to learn to thrive and win within the world you are given. You can of course try to become wealthy and well-connected, but most peoples' odds are piss-poor. So if you are not rich, are uninterested in prison time, disillusioned with politics, disinclined toward LARPing and "political fantasy football," and tired of waiting -- what do you do? That's the only question I really care about, and this perspective informs basically all of what I think about and write. Some say the sum total of my ideas adds up to a kind of escapism, but I contend it does not. Ultimately, there are only two domains in which the average person has any real control -- the social, and the spiritual. In my view, Catholicism answers the latter better than anything else, and as for the former, it is only answered by groups of risk-taking types going out into low-cost-of-living areas and doing what they can to build something great. This is extremely difficult to do -- because 99% of young people today are either: 1. waiting for things to get better, 2. fantasizing about a revolution that will never happen, 3. voting and (mistakenly) thinking it'll change things, or 4. trying to get rich (even though they won't). I post for the incredibly small minority of people who are not engaging in these surrogate activities as their primary response to the problems this country faces.

From what I see Boomer Luxury Communism consists of drawing Social Security and working as a Walmart greeter. This is the life the Kill All Boomers covet? You should be glad you are not a boomer and that there is still time for you to ensure a different future.

Just tossing this out there for anyone in Eastern Canada who feels like they're running as hard as they can and still falling behind. If you have a trade such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical, welding, heavy equipment operation, or automotive repair, give Saskatchewan a serious look. Particularly rural Saskatchewan. I know moving across the country sounds daunting. Trust me, I get it. But sometimes the hardest part is realizing there are still places in Canada where a person can build a life instead of merely surviving one. Many small communities are desperate for skilled tradespeople. Not "we're hiring" desperate. Actually desperate. A good mechanic can open a shop and quickly find themselves booked solid. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, welders... same story in many areas. The housing situation is different here too. In many communities, you can still buy a starter home for less than many Canadians pay for a down payment elsewhere. Not a condo shoebox. An actual house. With a yard. Sometimes with an acre. The pace is slower. The traffic is lighter. The sky goes on forever. Kids still ride their bikes. People wave at each other. Your commute might involve more deer than brake lights. It isn't perfect. No place is. But if you're sleeping in your car, working two jobs, watching rent eat your entire paycheque, and wondering if you'll ever get ahead, it may be worth considering a place where home ownership, stability, and a decent quality of life are still within reach. Sometimes hope doesn't come from waiting for things to get better where you are. Sometimes it comes from being willing to start somewhere new.

There are not one but TWO generational business purchase opportunities in rural North Dakota currently. Both are famously successful businesses Ye Olde Malt Shoppe in Garrison Pastime Club Steakhouse in Marmarth

Once you've gotten a taste of the mortgage-free lifestyle, there's really no going back. I would do almost anything to prevent going back to making monthly payments just to exist. And from where I sit, it is truly wild to watch millions of people line up to enthusiastically give such massive proportions of their monthly income to a bank in interest. They structure their entire lives around it. They defend the practice of taking mortgages as if it were religious dogma. They 'work on their credit' for years, shop for bankers who are all-too-happy to rob them blind, and then buckle down to pay a monthly dollar amount that only rises for the next 30 years, and they celebrate when they sign the paperwork for it. As a corollary to this, they are reliant on their jobs -- and are therefore exceedingly nervous about ever getting laid off or fired. At the current NY state average of 6.5%, only 44% of total dollars paid will go towards the principal of the bankloan. 66% goes to the bank (and to taxes and insurance). If 30% of your monthly income goes to the mortgage, that means 15% of your total labor goes straight to the bank, every month. Because of this, during every workday you work for 30 years, one hour and twelve minutes of it will be for the bank. Honestly, from where I sit -- it's hard to watch. Hard to hear the defenses made of it. I think of the stress these mortgages are putting people through and the years it takes off their life. I think of the children who are sad they won't see their dads all day at work, or of the wives who get nervous reading headlines about recessions and layoffs. It all seems so dismal and nerve-wracking. From this point of view, living in an old beat-up singlewide in a desolate little village out in the frozen hinterlands don't seem so bad, does it? No shade to those who are into this stuff, but from the outside looking in, it does not look pretty.

The Tug Hill region of NYS very likely gets the third-most snowfall of any region on earth at the elevations of 800' to 1500'. Only Valdez AK and Niigata Japan get more, though some years, the Tug Hill has likely beat them. Yet in spite of its superlative snowfall status, the Tug Hill is almost unknown nationally. Few know that Worth NY got 324" this past year -- that's 27 feet of snow -- or that in 1976, Montague got 466", (38 feet of snow). It's like an alien world up there when winter's in full swing.

Ah, a large account posting about me, without tagging or quote-tweeting, apropos of nothing. Always another monetization dollar to be made by pulling a pot-shot at old Hickman. Then again, those high-dollar mortgages don't pay themselves! Poor fella probably needs the cash!

Once a man earns enough to become a net taxpayer, there are two types of men: 1. The type who says "wow, I need to make more money to offset these big tax bills," or 2. The type who says "wow, I need to make less money so that I can go back to paying nothing."