A traveler in these United States is bound to come across some serious icons, and I don’t just mean Herman the Worm.

How can one not take a picture of Rocky Taconite? I made my wife do a huey and park across the street for this one. Who could have known that behind that smile lurked the quiet menace of global climate catastrophe? It would have been simpler to have grown up in an era when one could have an uncomplicated relationship with industry. Rocky asks, “What do you mean by ‘externalities?’”

“Et tu, Alex?” The A&W bear is not Caesar and I’m not Brutus. So why was he looking at me like that? To be American is to have a complicated relationships with things like root beer.

Does he look apprehensive? That’s what I was going for… January 6th, 2017. The day after Trump was elected in 2016, Linda and I booked a family trip to D.C. We wanted to take our children there before it was occupied by the people who would attempt to overthrow the government four years later. We didn’t know that would happen, of course. But it was the kind of things I was imagining in the waning days of the Obama administration. We need to remind ourselves that we were not wrong daily.

Horses are an icon of the West. I just like the color in this one.

The clown-cop complex, also complex.