Prunella Vulgaris's compendium, or: A companion for the ingenious of either sex. The newest experiments in japanning, to imitate the Indian way, plain and in speckles, rockwork, figures, &c. The art of persuming and beautifying. Divers receipts in physick and surgery, with many other useful things. To make enamel of divers colours for gold, silver, or other metals. To which are added, many curiosities, and rare secrets, known to few, but very profitable and pleasant.
Showing posts with label rust in my veins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rust in my veins. Show all posts
One of my partners in crime loves the litgeekery as well and asked me about d.a. levy, our own homegrown beat writer who offed himself at 26 after a lot of police harassement and whatnot, where he lived, all of that. So we had homework to do, me a midterm, her papers to grade, so we got food and warm beverages at Algebra and then went for a drive in search of those fragments of past luminaries.
I still want to find a place inhabited by Screamin' Jay Hawkins but have had no luck, even trying to the appropriate channels of people who know such things. But I did have an address of a bar he performed at (his descendants, of which there are many, have a reunion every year I hear) that is now gone, and I know which apartment buildings members of Pere Ubu lived in, where Trent Reznor used to play, just like in Kent I knew where Devo and the Dead Boys hung out. We don't have as much history as other places, so this is what we cling to.
We drove from Little Italy down Cedar to where Langston Hughes used to live and the library he went to. We forgot the address of the house but I've been through there before, and we got an address from one of my coworkers of a place where levy used to live so we went there too, and cruised my beloved industrial flats belching out pollution still. She says the smell makes her nauseous, I say that was the smell of jobs and it used to be so much worse.
I still get some strange visceral pleasure out of these excursions that I can't explain. I don't like to be a cheerleader of provincialism, but there's a feeling when I'm driving the empty streets that makes me euphoric, inspired, and a little more alive.
In the slow boil of dystopian creep, there are no secrets, there have been none for most of my adult life, everything is out there, or easy to find, especially when one has all the power and the analytics at one's disposal. It's creepy and disconcerting and my heart breaks for the wrongfully ensnared and my mind rages against the willful obliviousness because as long as we have the right bones thrown to us, it doesn't matter that we're being robbed as long as someone else we don't like is getting hurt more than we are. I could write so much more, but I've said it so often already, and others say it better, and willful ignorance or justification of the unjustifiable will never be palatable to me. .
And as I continue to say, that is our fundamental problem, our universal common denominator of suck, a lack of compassion, a lack of love for God and fellow human and created beings and the ground we walk on and the air we breathe.
Yet I distract myself, because I can't believe in survivalism either, because I want to love my neighbors and because every era of life has had its dehumanizing factors that need to be overcome, and there is so much beauty here still even in the midst of so much wrong and the best thing to do is not live in fear but continue to live.
I'm having friends over for dinner tonight, I'm figuring out how to fix my side-view mirror and realize I'm bereft of useful tools. While I was taking apart the contraption, I saw there was a goldfinch trapped in the netting of the cherry tree who seemed to have given up on life so I got a pair of scissors and cut him free and felt so uplifted watching it fly away.
A homie from the station gave me some super amazing hot pepper plants and I provided him with cabbage and kale in return. There are flowers on my front porch now and vegetables on the back and I'm trying to figure out how to make my landlady's yard look less ugly in the front without really spending too much money.
I end up at a show last night, because this is my escapism, and there's not too many people there, a couple radio people that I don't know as well, so I get lost in the big riffs alone, amazed that I used to do these kinds of things without earplugs, or maybe it's just gotten louder. Like Randal, I dig the big riffs and the stoner rockery of Columbus dudes Lo-Pan. For those of us who grew up on classic rock and grunge in inner ring suburbs, it's satisfying and solid riffage with big excellent vocals that'd probably be on some modern rock rotation if the band was more photogenic and The Kids weren't all listening to dubstep. That being said, I'm glad they're getting love in the underground, and I enjoyed it enough to pick up a CD with a t-shirt thrown in.
Hipsters might disapprove of the accessibility but I'd go see these guys again and I infinitely preferred them to the next band that reminded me of the hardcore shows I used to go to as a teenager where it was trying to be intense and just ended up being uninteresting. The guys were young, so I guess I could cut them some slack, since it's not my thing at all. If it wasn't so cold and I had some homies with me, I would have loitered outside for most of their set because despite their technical abilities, it didn't do much for me.
Torche on the other hand, loud and sludgy and strangely poppy and exuberant, was a different story, as they were the last time I saw them, unpretentious and unrelenting and constantly having to retune, but damn there's something so satisfying about loud crunchy guitars and dudes who can sing in this world of twee milquetoast indie and metallers trying to out-brootal each other. One dude who decided this would be a great time to start a moshpit, shoved me out of the way and proceeded to pummel everyone within five feet of him before realizing that no one else wanted to mosh at all and just wants to watch the band rock out and I didn't see him for the rest of the night and was backed up by a pair of heshers who stood behind me to get a better view of the band and insulate me from any hooliganery. Thanks guys for being chivalrous, I guess.
They started off with the first four songs off the last full length and a smattering of cuts from the previous records and ended with 'Harmonslaught' which might be one of my favorites.
Drove home listening to a fellow DJ play Black Flag bootlegs, it rained this morning and watered my plants, I need more coffee, and life continues in its strange way.
It's the time of the day when I'm most tired, the blood sugar plummets, the caffeine starts exiting the system, and I've been feeling like I'm swimming in a fishbowl way too long, and everything just makes me a little more nervy than usual and I find myself trying harder to maintain this smile, which turns to scowling when crossed with too many space cadets and the usual clowns. I don't want to make conversation, your attempts at chatting up are as unwelcome as a middle finger. Those who don't know me very well think I'm happy and kind and gracious all the time. I wish I was. That mid-afternoon is always my low-water mark. I haven't been what I want to be, and the harder I try to not be a jerk, the more exasperated I get all around.
I am so tired, and maybe a little burned out. The world depresses me and sometimes it's hard to believe that God is good when I see what I see. I haven't been sleeping well, which doesn't help, neither does the runny nose, the stuffed-up brain, the ennui of winter and illness and not enough sunlight. So yeah, that double-whammy of emotional and physical and maybe some spiritual weariness thrown in for some good measure.
I am thankful, I guess, for divine intervention into my suckitude, for tuneage, for naps, for herbal tea, for coworkers who are honest enough to tell me when I'm wrong and kind enough to not make me feel worse, who put up with my strange strain of crazy and the fits of melancholia. I'm thankful for movie nights and friends and that soon the days will be longer again. I can't wait for those days.
If I could have gotten away with keeping the drums I would have, and judging from the chaos of my landlady's basement, maybe I could have, but my first memory of visceral musical pleasure as a kid came from my dad's John McCutcheon hammer dulcimer records. Something about those cascades of sound hit me in a good way (my other early childhood musical memories involve being creeped out by "Riders on the Storm," hating the song "Kokomo" after hearing it on the muzak at Marc's, and liking Creedence), and while I didn't quite get into music until much later in life, there was something I always liked about that instrument.
My dad's cousin played one and let me try it, and now that the student loans are paid off, I started trolling Craigslist for one that wasn't in some Ohiostan middle-of-nowhere locale and didn't cost a ton of money and ended up carrying home a very large one from the suburb next door. The guy I bought it from put me in touch with a friend of his who teaches, and last night I returned to the beloved homeland of Parmastan in search of him at a Ukrainian cultural center I didn't even know existed, nestled behind a small cathedral with a Holodomor memorial in front in the "Ukrainian Village" along State.
I walk in feeling all mutty with my mixed-Catholic heritage of Irish and Polish now somewhat lapsed, there are kids folkdancing in the hall, a bulletin board advertises church goings-on, as well as lessons in the mother tongue and the bandura, and a nice lady directs me up the stairs past paintings of saints and photos of bearded patriarchs. where it's not so much generalized "certain ethnic" as a very specific thing and I wonder if I'll be outed as a curious poser when I sit down in a just-vacated classroom upstairs.
He plays in a local ethnic music ensemble (clip below) and says he can give me lessons, that he knows the Eastern European tradition the best (I had no clue there are several ways to tune my new instrument, no clue about anything really) and what do I want to learn and I don't know how to explain "I just want to sound good and I find things like Dead Can Dance way inspiring" and I feel like I've just tumbled down some beautiful sonic rabbit hole when I watch him play the cimbalom that makes what I have look like a child's toy.
Every year I try to learn something new, and this is what it looks like it will be, and the slide into eccentricity continues.
Two huge cups of coffee in front of me, woke up to the dog whimpering last night, I don't know from loneliness or kidney stones, her family comes back today and I've become adept at administering medication through canine teeth but end up opting to sprinkle the contents of the capsules atop the kibbles and bits like sugar on corn flakes. If austerity ever really hits, maybe I can work at a kennel or something. It'll be nice to come home and sleep at my own place.
I think the cat actually misses me, because I hear her crying when I come up the stairs to check on her water and food while I've been gone the last two weeks. I'm sure we'll have a movie night soon because I'm still sleepwalking and while the weekend felt like a vacation, I don't know how I got through grad school taking a full load, working 30 hours a week and still finding time to go see bands every couple days back when such acts came through Clevelandia, Kent, and Akron on a frequent basis.
With the game cancelled, I took the other dog I watched down to the valley where the lush canopy of green filtered the sun like stained glass, the river sparkled, and we ambled through side trails down the side and if I was home more, maybe I'd get a dog, because I kind of like this companionship thing. Having another breathing mammal along for protection and accompaniment, with its drooling adoration for you are the one who pours the water and the food, and takes it on car rides with the windows down, it's something I could get used to.
There's a garden walk even in Clevelandia so me and one of my community garden people end up driving around parts of the west side I've never explored getting inspired by these green spaces created in other almost-hoods, these serene enclaves with spiraling wisteria vines and repurposed scraps as trellises. Her son isn't interested so we drop him off and drive out to the east side with a map that isn't terribly accurate, driving through the parts of the city where my relatives once lived before white flight.
She's not from around her so she has no loaded assumptions or fears of environs like St. Clair, Hough, Superior, and it's been awhile since I've come through these parts now that my friend who used to live down there now lives further down in the hood and would rather come to the west side to see me than have me drive over to his parts where drive-by shootings have escalated more to the occasional mortar round being tossed on someone's lawn.
We drive by a couple of gardens in vacant lots, and I think about all of the data that I pore through at work about the problems of the urban core, one of which was once overcrowding and now there are vacant lots everywhere, and where there are no vacant lots there are so many houses empty, curtains blowing in deglassed windows, crumbling front porches, because not only did white flight decimate these neighborhoods, the people that moved in get out if they can.
But yet, there is a greenhouse on the land of a deconsecrated church in the heart of a forgotten neighborhood, across the street from the Hell's Angels clubhouse, where the vast space has some people from the neighborhood singing soulful acapella renditions of Steely Dan songs and people playing piano in the former sanctuary and chalkboards scrawled with ideals, and the girl who shows us around shows us heating built with adobe for the greenhouses in winter and the former nunnery getting restored to be livable again and it reminds me of some hippie commune or crusty squat but the people were pretty friendly. I think about how I would have been all about this when I was 22 and idealistic and prospects for life were bleak, and I'm glad The Kids still have this energy even if I've more or less sold out to The Man.
I took her through the streets of the old Polish neighborhood, where St. Casimir's just reopened, and where my grandpa's side first settled, where he played tennis and went to dances, where his brother got mugged on East 79th, the house that my dad was born in, the house where one of my best guy friends lived where I'd sleep on his couch beneath the African mud cloth on the wall listening to the Fugees while he got ready.
And then we ended up in Hough, where there were race riots back in the day, and shiny new homes where the streets once burned, and an older lady there shows us and the cops who came through her massive gorgeous garden on a side lot, full of flowers from Alabama and vegetables and I wonder how she does it. We're all talking about what we're growing and I'm finding it kind of surreal that we're all here together with common ground that we otherwise wouldn't have if we weren't connected to the earth that we walk on. I'm also kicking myself for not having a camera with me even though that might have ruined some of these moments.
But I love driving these streets, getting lost in forgotten corners of shuttered factories and crumbling towers, to the amusement of the old men sitting on front porches at these crazy white girls driving through with the windows down and the Screaming Trees on the CD player in the beatup car with the front end taped together. She's of a similar mind, someone who appreciates the grit without romanticism, curious, friendly, and pondering. I feel so thankful that I get to see these places with her and that we're equally willing to explore.
It feels like a coda to to the end of the day when I pick up a former bandmate to go see Agalloch at the Beachland again. I wasn't feeling the opener all that much, but we got two hours of meandering alternately beautiful and heavy tuneage, and while the vocals will never be my thing, the songs hit me in that place I can't explain, those guitars and the bass lines and Aesop's drums. She wasn't as into it, but one of my fellow DJs was there so we enjoyed it together. I guess I'm not the only one who goes alone, there were a lot of solitary folk there. Once again, I wish I had a camera, but at least Randal was there to document a little closer.
Drove back to the house of my friends for one last night to get five hours of sleep, feeling like there were few wasted moments in the past days, and so much strange and surprising beauty.
Cancellations were welcome, instead of gatherings of folks, it was a nap on the couch and some leftover pasta, and then one of my former roomies with whom I bonded over tuneage our freshman year of college came over and we went up the street to see Elder and sundry local bands get their stoner groove on.
One of my fellow DJs plays in the first band, and I wasn't in the mood for the second, so we stood around outside and chatted with a couple folk and caught up on life and wandered back in for some great riffy rock and or roll. It's been awhile since I've seen a band that young play the hell out of their instruments ( I was amused that every guitarist on stage that night had one kind of red Gibson SG or another) and be that ecstatic in the riffing, the drummer pounding away, the bassist holding down the low end and rhythm with a wonderfully fuzzed-out bass tone, the guitarist with Cousin It hair soloing and powerchording through ten minute epics of sweetness. The set was four songs and then an encore that sounded very Om-esque, and I could have easily listened to another hour of it. Such is the nature of the beast.
The bros in front were completely wasted, but the crowd was pretty chill overall, and mostly dudely, me and K being the only not-with-a-guy females in the place except for one older lady and doubtless getting the what are they doing here / dude, chicks! glances. I felt short, and short-haired for good measure among that crowd but had a great time.
Not many of my friends dig the stoner sound, but I'm glad at least I've got one female in my life that does too. One of my other friends told me today he wishes he could find a girl who likes metal and I wanted to scream that yes there are some of us who like the power chords and riffs as much as you, it's just that most of us don't look like Suicide Girls, you know? We'd rather play guitars or digress about our favorite bands than spend our money on swanky tattoos or posting skank pictures in ripped 80's thrash shirts on the Internets.
But yeah, they were fantastic, and I at least contributed enough to fill their gas tank, snagging the new LP and the old CD and a t-shirt for good measure. I want to see them go far, and I'd go see them again. It's been awhile since I've seen anything that raw and rocking in the best way.
Apologies for the spamtasticness format here, but if this isn't signs of the times, I don't know what is. Houses cheaper than cars, get-rich-quicks coming back to haunt. Everyone trying to get one over, realizing they can't, and now they're trying to get out...
cheap 5 suite, three 2 bd, one 1 bb. and one effincy, needs some re hab,
,updated plumbing, needs finished. 54th and fleet area.might trade for a
big twin harly or street rod, have much more invested in this property,
just have no time to finish,...calls only....listing for a friend...NO
EMAILS....call or leave message...
54th
(google map)
(yahoo map)
Location: cleveland soulth east
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 3096424117
$6500 / 5br - 2000ft² - my loss is your gain (westside cleveland) (map)
The house is mostly rehabbed.Everything is brand new.All the house needs
is drywall a kitchen a bathroom & carpet.i updated the
windows,sidingreframed the whole inside.I have over 30 grand invested in
the house and i paid off all the property taxes & they were almost 8
thousand.I got in over my head in real estate & tried to take on to
many projects at once.so now i dont have the time to fix all of the
houses at one time.My name is erik you can contact me at .The house is still on the condemned list.Ive already brought most
of the sites up to code.thank you for your time have a nice day!
92
(google map)
(yahoo map)
Location: westside cleveland
it's ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 3003239413
Hello
I have a single family home and I'm willing to trade for a Truck or
Generator either or will do. It is a Handyman special, feel free to
contect me at 216- INVESTORS will be welcomed for anymore
question.
Thank you for time,
Date: 2012-06-20, 2:13PM EDT Reply to: 8dttj-3090018772@hous.craigslist.org[Errors when replying to ads?]
Bye a house for the price of a used car. This home is a great investment
that needs to be rehabbed. It sits between two newly renovated houses
owned by city programs. Its a 3bd 1bth with a ARV of $40-50,000. The
address of the property is... First cash in hand offer
takes it.
Call ASAP with cash if you want it
$1300 / 3br - $$$$$$PLEASE BUY MY UGLY HOUSE$$$$$
Date: 2012-06-20, 2:58PM EDT Reply to: excelldynamic@gmail.com[Errors when replying to ads?]
THE PROPERTY IS LOCATED AT AM LOOKING TO SELL FOR 1300 OR
BEST OFFER REAL UGLY HOUSE SOMEONE MIGHT SEE POTENTIAL IN I MIGHT EVEN
HAVE ONE OR TWO MORE UGLY HOUSES FOR SALE
or make an offer and its yours
LOOK AT IT CHECK IT OUT DEED IN HAND CHECK TAX RECORDS NO LIENS JUST BUYYYYYY........
2br - LETS TRADE YOUR COUNRTY HOUSE FOR MY CITY HOUSE
So THIS IS MY DEAL I HAVE A 2 BEDROOM 1 BATH GOOD SIZED BACK YARD,
THE HOME IS OLD AND WE HAVE OUTGROWN IT. ON A QUITE STREET WITH MANY
WONDERFULL PEOPLE LIVING ON THE STREET FOR YEARS.
THE HOME NEEDS COMPLETE REDONE BUT IS LIVEABLE AS IS A NEWER FURNANCE
HARDWOOD FLOORS LANDSCAPE THAT COMES BACK EVERY YEAR BACK OF YARD HAS
LOTS OF GREEN THE HOME IS CLOSE TO DOCTORS SHOPPING SCHOOLS CASINO AND
IS REALLY FOR SOMEONE ELDER OR COLLEGE KID ITS ON THE ORDER OF A LARGE
APARTMENT EVERYTHING ON 1 FLOOR MAYBE YOUR TIRED OF WALKING UP AND DOWN
STAIRS.OR CLEANING A LARGER HOME.
I WOULD LOVE TO TRADE FOR A LARGE OLD HOME ITS OK IF IT NEEDS WORK MINE
DOES TO IF ITS LIVEABLE IM GOOD WITH IT AND I WOULD LIKE TO TRADE TO
SUMONE WHO MAYBE IS THE COUNRTY SETTING LIKE DAYTON OHIO THAT WANTS A
HOME IN THE CITY I WOULD LIKE TO GO TO COUNRTY SETTING MAYBE SUMONE
DOSNT NEED THAT LARGE HOME ANYMORE AND IS LOOKING TO DOWNSIZE A BIT THAT
WOULD BE GREAT WITH LOTS OF LAND MY KIDS NEED PLENTY OF SPACE IT HAS TO
BE IN OHIO.
SO LETS TRADE JUST CAL I WILL ALSO TRADE FOR BUSINESS
ONLY SERIOUS TRADERS ) NO EMAILS) TEXT AND CALLS ARE OK ) OPEN TO ALL OFFERS)
Date: 2012-05-20, 9:04PM EDT Reply to: fbp5r-3027859509@hous.craigslist.org[Errors when replying to ads?]
4/1 Each Side
Needs $2K
Last Tenant Trashed House & Yard
Current Tenant Has Pit Bull (Not Allowed)
And Is Being Evicted
Drive By & Follow Up
If Interested
758-60 Linn Dr.
Will Entertain ALL SERIOUS OFFERS
Land Contract Or Cash
$500 / 2br - 1000ft² - Cheap 2 family house for sale or rent
Date: 2012-06-21, 3:22PM EDT Reply to:[Errors when replying to ads?]
Rent to own a 2 family home. Please be advised that the downstairs is
the most disgusting house I have ever been inside. The upstairs is
slightly better. The owner wants to sell this property fast and is
willing to allow someone to finance it for $1000 15 months, then you
will have the house free and clear, less any unpaid taxes. If you have
cash, we will let it go today for $12,000. The property gross rents are
$1,000, $500 each unit. If you can keep both units rented and keep the
taxes paid, in 2 years, you will be positivly cash flowing forever. I
am not sure if I mentioned how disgusting the place is right now. I
would love to tell you the smell is not that bad, but it really is.
Other than the gross smell, all the garbage everywhere, it really is a
terrble place. Oops, I mean great place. You may think you hate it
now, just wait till you see it. If you want to rent it, we will give
you free rent for 3 months if you will clean both units. Now that I
think about it, it really isn't that disgusting. Oh, who am I kidding.
Please call Jamie 216-773-4312. Please know that I do not answer every
call, I never answer restricted numbers, and I return all calls. My
advice to you is go drive by, if you come out of the neghborhood alive,
your doing good. I kid, it is quiet neighborhood, just disgusting
house. Don't be afraid, make us an offer. We will be nuts not to take
it, although you may be nuts to do the deal.
Wheelie bus in ten, an hour later I'll be on the way to Beautiful Akron Ohio, land of Devo and the Cramps and other weird folk, for the Howard Finster exhibit, and sundry other weirdness and opportunities for pithy social commentary and snark with the Queen of the Bondo. It's not every day yours truly gets to escape from Ye Olde Towering Slabbe, but I promised Randal pictures, and I need to occasionally leave the county or the state so this will satisfy the urge for now.
This was my first time at the film festival for this flick, which was shot beautifully (though I am a sucker for neon signs, general urban wasteland, as it evokes melancholia of the cathartic and creative kind.It's familiar to me, I guess.
And I know I overthink everything, that the synapses in my brain are shooting off in a hundred incoherent directions, because honestly most of us don't see beyond ourselves and are often wrong. The policies of Bush and Reagan are blamed of course, and maybe for good reason, but NAFTA was a Clinton thing, and it's been four years since Dubya was in office. Reagan was 30 years ago. Union presidents are just as much profiting off the little guy's vulnerabilities as the bosses, which I see in my own place of employment and when my dad comes home with his blood angried up from Teamster meetings. Everyone boils everything down to the cost-benefit analysis to the detriment of all the people involved.
There is talk about the toxicity of capitalism but also longing for the glory days of big cars and of the glory days of the Cold War when things were good and we made war machines and everyone bought our crap instead of us buying our crap from China. If that isn't capitalism, I don't know what is, and is the answer to the destruction of our communities and souls really found in the making of fighter jets and Christmas garland? I find that hard to believe. There is talk that we lost our "exceptionalism" as a country but I don't know if that's such a bad thing. Now everyone's got the same standard of living as us and look at how great that's turned out.
China came up quite a bit, whether intentionally or not, and one of the people in the film wished that we peons had their same ability to take "collective action" but that kind of worked out badly for lots of peasants who starved, led to a lot of pollution and environmental havoc, heavy censorship and destruction of traditional and beautiful art forms, not to mention replacing one oligarchy with another. I don't know how much it benefits us to replace one kind of suckitude with another.
There's always someone bigger to blame, but as I gazed at a big screen full of crumbling towers and broken American dreams, I realize that we are all at fault here.It's no secret that the rich profit off the rest of us, but we are just as selfish. This lifestyle of fossil fuel consumption and urban sprawl was unsustainable. It was the town that Ford built (the film was financed in part by the Ford Foundation, so there won't be biting of feeding hands and there were quite a few digs at Chevy), and eventually the world changed. Technology made assembly line jobs obsolete, the cost-benefit analysis found ways to cut jobs and still maintain the same level of productivity while boosting profit margins.
So it gave me the sense of the waning days of empire. There were others that rose and fell before us, other cities that were once jewels of the world that are mere shadows now, due to war, environmental changes, or the shifts in commerce and power that led to eventual abandonment and disintegration. The list is endless... Samarkand, Timbuktu, Carthage, Cuzco, Mesa Verde, Axum, Thebes. It's hard for me not to look at these places and see our future.
“For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...
In the rust belt where I dwell, the academics ramble on about 'ruin porn' and suburban crackers finding joy in derelict surroundings, something I find a bit obtuse, given that my compadres from the hood are just as into this stuff, hanging out in the abandoned Glenville mansion playing the grand piano collecting dust in a forgotten living room, cutting class to climb the stairs in the now-demolished abandoned hotel by the highway, climbing up into a church built only in the last century but feeling so much more ancient.
I think there's a universal human thing for old places that are forgotten. I was enthralled as a kid by Egyptian pyramids, Mesa Verde, and Angkor Wat. My friends whose pets I watched just got back from swimming in the ocean and hiking through the remains of Mayan temples, the Romantics painted Greek columns and memorialized broken statues of long-gone empires. Perhaps the waning days of empire have something to do with the nostalgia and fascination with gloriously crumbling structures. The landed gentry liked to build 'follies' on the outskirts of their fields for the illusion of ancientness and days gone by.
My roommate and I explored an abandoned amusement park together that's now being torn down and dismantled in delusions of development in a part of the state that seems to lend itself more to methamphetamine production and feral felines. Others had gone before us through the human-sized holes in the fence, and the concrete path throughout the park had not been overgrown yet. I didn't have a camera then, but I had a box cutter in my hoodie in case we ran across any deranged psycho killers though I'm surely too chicken to have actually used it, but considering that we were knowingly walking into the plot of a slasher film, I wasn't going to stake a good outcome on virginity alone.
We hoped that the footprints we saw in the mud weren't too fresh, and that there wasn't anyone lurking in the old stands on the fairway or in the ballroom with the collapsing floor. The mosquitoes were dense and even though it was hot, I had a hoodie on with the hood pulled up and over as much as I could, hands in my pockets. It was the first of many trespasses, now more or less ended after the legal and societal implications of interracial friendship and private property meant some degree of hassle by The Man. Upon such hassle, I learned that most forgotten arteries of the city are technically off-limits from a legal standpoint, railroad tracks and riverfronts, all the places that me and my camera went.
Now, I've gone back to living vicariously, because there are parts of the world I will probably never see. Abandoned Russian camps, Italian villages and Khmer city states, forgotten utopias and playgrounds, catacombs and burial mounds and movie palaces succumbing to the elements, the debris of empires both collapsed and collapsing. Look on my works ye mighty and despair laughable, history as cyclical like Shiva's wheel, grinding down each generation's dreams.
