If you spend even a little time here, you start to notice something strange.

Not the obvious stuff—sunshine, palm trees, mountains that look like a painted backdrop—but the quieter questions that keep popping up when you’re standing in line for coffee or driving down Palm Canyon wondering why everything feels slightly unreal in the best possible way.

Here are a few of those questions.

Call it field notes. Call it curiosity. Call it what happens when a desert refuses to behave like anywhere else.