slatestarscratchpad:

In Utah. Everything seemed weird and unreal for a while until I realized it was just that it wasn’t unpleasantly dense and crowded everywhere I went.

Went to the nearest building to my hotel, a gas station minimart. It was across about a city block’s worth of random desert nobody had built on. The minimart was called Terrible’s. It had five small aisles worth of food. Each aisle was separated by enough space for four people to walk through side by side.

I said “Hello, how are you?” to the cashier, and he answered “Terrible!” I was confused for a while until I remembered it was the name of the store. I asked him why they named the store “Terrible’s”. He said “Because they were honest”.

I feel like this is the sort of thing that would often happen in the Bay Area, but there I would interpret it there as somebody focus-grouping exactly the right amount of quirkiness to display, whereas here it was just weird.

Because Mormons, Utah still has a culture/counterculture distinction, so it’s like if Clerks was set in a universe where Dante & Randal grew up watching Kevin Smith movies with their parents

(and their clients did too)