Watching the sun set over Coober Pedy, I found myself thinking of the double sunset on Tattooine.
The sound of distant chicken and sheep and dogs made me think of Gyantse in Tibet. And how in Chapter 80 of the Dao De Jing Laozi says everyone should just stay home:
Although the next country is close enough
that they can hear their roosters crowing and dogs barking,
they are content never to visit each other
all of the days of their life.
The junkyard look of the town and the people huddling underground made me think of Mad Max.
A plane flying distantly overhead made think of this passage from Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet, where the protagonist is musing about how he actually wouldn’t mind some apocalypse ending consumer culture, but with the following caveat:
If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet—with just one person inside even—I’d go berserk. I’d go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.