But when I moved there I was also the only human being under the age of 35 in the entire Coachella Valley - a region that spans from Palm Springs at the north, to Indio at the South. I was living in there because I’d been there once before and I thought it was a romantic place to write a novel - which it was. I don’t know what a one-way trip to Mars must feel like, but maybe I do: it feels like living in the desert around Palm Springs, California, in 1990. I’d drive through failed 1960s subdivisions surrounded by dead palm trees, their rat-infested fronds long-ago incinerated by bored skateboarders. In 1990, I lived in the desert around Palm Springs, California, and spent hundreds of lost days driving through the town’s surrounding nothingness in my old VW, which had primitive AM radio that was only able to receive geriatric ice-rink music on the local stations. The 80s, whatever they were, were over and we were collectively entering what felt like a blank sheet of white paper. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history and everyone believed it. The 1990s were a darned good decade, and everybody’s now coming to realize this, but people also need to know that when the 1990s began, it felt like anything but a decade with a unique tone and texture and attitude. He glared at me, for somehow I’d screwed up his script, and (and I love saying this, so indulge me,) I WAS RIGHT. I’m unsure if it’s going to last much longer and I think we should appreciate it while it’s here.” The bottomless goodwill of everyone here. “I actually think that future generations are going to look at images of today here in Minnesota and see them as a sort of golden age of American culture. “Because…” and I got to thinking about it. The entire setup was very old-school middle America in the most charming kind of way - all that was missing was a 4-H poultry competition or a barbershop quartet singing “The Michigan Rag.” The host of the local AM station had been the host of the local AM station for a long, long time, looked at me and assumed that I was probably some young smart-ass, and he looked at me (me in my olive green cargos shorts with an appliqué of Chairman Mao’s head on the front) and said, “I guess you must find it really stupid that everyone is here and having a good time and brainlessly shopping like capitalist robots.” It’s amazing how quickly that sort of regularized intrusion becomes invisible. I was on a book tour and in the early afternoon I spent 60 minutes with the local AM radio station host, seated in chairs on a small plywood platform smelling of popcorn and apples, and where every 62 seconds a roller-coaster car shaped like the head of Snoopy roared just above our stand at 547 miles per hour. On August 11, 1992, I was in suburban Minneapolis for the opening of the Mall of America, the largest shopping mall on Earth.

The nineties a book