I traveled extensively across the USA on Greyhound, Amtrak, car, and motorcycle, over maybe a decade. The America I saw on those trips felt so different from the America of living in SF as an engineer, or living in Houston as a student, or watching a tv show or movie set in America.
When I read Hunter S, or watch a Callaghan video, I think of those trips. Hari Kunzru said that Hunter S "makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him," and I think that puts it well. My chief takeaway from my trips across middle America is that America is ugly. It's thousands of miles of freeway with towns dependent on the local mcdonalds and gas station stamped around it. It's trailer parks and fentanyl and painkiller addiction. It's isolation, boredom, malnutrition, anger, untreated disease. It's violently masculine. It's unhinged conspiracy and functional illiteracy.
When I watched Callaghan's Q conference video: https://youtu.be/KYKOLwt8pwo all I could think was "holy shit I met every one of those people." Not actually, it's just, so many people I met on my travels were like that.