Gary Indiana Part 2: Blood and Magnets

It's so important to feel safely enclosed when you are expressing private thoughts. Isn't that why we all want our own bedrooms? Our own offices and cars too. Maybe our aversion to communal living and this insecurity, that people around us might read our thoughts if they can see our face, is what led to capitalism? It's almost certainly what led to churches, right? Rather than ceremonies in open fields. A church is simultaneously the least private and most private place you can go. It exudes this very specific feeling of personal awe, the design of it's rooms and alcoves is meant to calm the eyes with the sedative of respect.

While we're talking about Gary hate (oh Gary least beloved of all and subjected to the kind of bullying and intimidation that even Cleveland has trouble conceiving of), Gary just got a new mayor. And there's lots of talk, very resigned and condescending talk, about how it's a hopeless cause, Gary the city. That may be true. Gary may never again be a viable and healthy city. It may have just lost too much, bled out, and there's not enough left to support any kind of growth. So why does it have to grow? Why can't it just shrink? Who says it's required that you somehow maintain the same importance always? Nothing can maintain a peak forever, and so maybe Gary should shrink to a village, a township, a suburb. Sadly, this new mayor will probably knock this church down, since it's right in the middle of downtown. She should, I suppose. What, you ask me, would you want them to do with it? Well, I don't know. I guess if it was an ideal world and everyone had large civic budgets and unlimited land use, I would say turn these places into parks. Clean them up, knock down the dangerous sections, and make it a public place people could wander through, maybe sit down at a table and hang out.

Driving back home, Amanda said something to me about how it used to be a human body started decaying 3-4 days after dying, but now thanks to all the preservatives we eat, our bodies start decaying somewhere around Day 100. I have no idea if that's true and I don't feel like googling it to find out, I'll leave that to you Internet, to fact check that before you start throwing it around willie nillie. But for buildings, the opposite has been true, they decay faster and faster now. So maybe we eat too many preservatives and it causes us to feel a squirrelly cracked out need to tear down and build new new new things. We itch with the desire for change. I guess what I'm saying is we live too long and so things around us die quicker.

We don't always need to be cities ourselves. Sometimes we have to admit defeat and build ourselves up again as villages. If we do it right, then someday we might be small cities again, medium cities, the places in between coasts. If we're really smart, we might even be able to peak again, and people will write about our comebacks. But the important thing is recognizing exactly what size we are capable of being at this moment.

Blood is on my mind. I'm going to tell you right now, this is gross what I'm going to say here. But it's true and it sticks in my gullet. Periods are of course very important to all girls, they are a very spiritual thing, even if you only believe in your own spirit. So I have this cat who goes nuts for the smell of my blood. That sounds creepier than it is, probably cause actually it's pretty creepy. Anytime I am on my period, this cat tries to get at my used pads in the trash. This is also the cat who earlier this year wanted to eat the peeled skin from my sunburn. I promise she is a very sweet animal, but it's true, we are living with tiny little monsters who would eat us if only they had ended up being the larger creatures. We try so hard to forget that, feeding them dry nuggets of cereal and turning them into surrogate children, but the truth remains, they have teeth and claws and they like the smell of blood. So then the question is, what kind of creature does that make us, the owners and masters of these millions of little monsters, but also the people who built churches?

Perhaps my cat is trying to ingest me in order to get some power back from me, an ancient predator magic? We used to do that, eat lion hearts ect. I guess then we built churches and started only symbolically eating the flesh of the unknown.

 This place reminded me very much of my cat's blood thirst, and of my own. I wanted to eat meat immediately after being here. I wanted to bleed and ingest and fuck and kill and love, all in a very quiet calm determined way. We weren't even here that long, it was too cold and the light was fading fast into the lake. But the emotional jolt still hit me like a powerful drug.  I can feel it even more looking at the photos. I guess in the end if we made a park of this place, it might be dangerous. A lot of people prayed against evil things here.

 What was it Jere said once, about how totemic caves were to women? Women and churches are caves. They provide shelter and mystery and darkness and emergence.

There is a certain guy who every time I see him, my period starts. This is entirely coincidental, just timing. It's a funny thing to think about though, that my body might recognize a powerful hormonal want, and respond accordingly. But I wonder also if maybe this place did it to me. To test this theory, I would need someone to pay for me to travel around the world, visiting all the most powerful holy places, temples and caves and ley line convergences. If we did this right, I might bleed forever, my body in shock from the deluge of universal energy, the Body and the Blood of the Magnet.