Elizabethtown North Carolina

I have, as of this morning, 39 mosquito bites, 7 red ant bites, and 2 hickeys. Everything in North Carolina is trying to eat me. It's hurricane season, which means it rains every 30 minutes, and the plants have become predatory, they are swollen with hunger and need, and they desire only to take over everything in that single minded way that all plants have, the personality of pioneers. Mine Mine Mine every tree and vine and flowering shrub is screaming. Walking down the street, it's easy to understand why we once conceived of sentient jungle vines that carried us away into the darkness. I think given half a chance, every piece of foliage I pass would happily strangle me and bury me deep in its roots for food. 

Rural North Carolina gives the impression of familiarity. Oh yeah, looks just like Ohio. Only something isn't quite right, something's off. The picture leaves an uneasiness in the corner of your eye, and if you look closely  enough, you'll realize that the trees are wrong. The leaves are wrong, the trunks are too skinny, there's a weird fluffiness on the pine trees, and the weeds are tinged with yellow instead of the natural Ohio blue tone that makes our greens so green. I think the yellow tone comes from being so close to the ocean, it's the suction of salt through the ground, the ocean air. If Ohio's greens have grown to match the deep glacial blue of Lake Erie, then these greens are made to match the lighter aqua gray blue of the ocean and lightest sand, a color that I hadn't expected to be different, but was in fact a shock, a blue brand new to the girl from the bluest state. 

It's best to not fight against the burgeoning verdure, it comes steady and creeping territorial, not a disease, but a super power, a mutation in the genetic code of the scenery, a latent metabolic push. It's greedy, selfish, devoid of care or hesitation. It takes over buildings before they've even fallen down, wraps them in thick vegetative walls that keep them standing even though they want to die. This is pure natural ambition. Taking the heat, the humidity, and absorbing it, letting the nutrition soak into every pore, letting nothing go, using every last bit. Someday there will be another summer drought, and unless you've grown as big as you could when you had a chance, you will shrivel and die on the vine, turning into mulch for the newer growths. 

I need to stop letting things bite me. That's 46 holes in my body through which the world sucked out blood to feed on. 

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.

Everything You Look At is Unfinished

She had a Little Sister the first generation they came out. Everyone who was cool had one. It kept your numbers and your pictures and told you how to get places. When she asked Little Sister a question, it gave you the simplest most factual answer possible. Where should I go for lunch Little Sister, she would speak to it. "This is the closest Mexican place." "This is the closest Cambodian place." "This is the most popular place among your social network." "This is the place your ex boyfriend is most likely to be based on charted dating habits from the last six months." "You should wear the red."

She woke up coughing blood. It was thick and dark, like it had dried and been rehydrated by the sheer exertion of coughing it up. Her head was also thick and dark, her hair felt heavy with lead and her skin glowed with raw material sweat. She had dreamed that night of being back in Phoenix, in the heat that lay on your skin like a sick and dying matted cat, and the lightning up above her in the common pool, sitting in the tepid water watching the apartment complex lights blink on and off and waiting for the lightning to hit her and set everything on fire in a short sustained chain reaction that incinerated her and all the water and all the weeds and gravel and every other identical colony of under employed over educated 21 yr olds populating that horrible dry desert outpost. When she woke up, cold and sweating underneath winter blankets, she was dying.

"Little Sister, what should I do, am I sick?"

"Your symptoms suggest the best course of action is to seek immediate treatment."

So Little Sister gave her directions to the hospital. But her car was broken, someone had stolen her alternator, wires running everywhere, and the buses never came, though she waited and Little Sister gave her the bus schedule. She tried to call a taxi, but the phone lines were dead. She went outside and looked around weakly, but there was no one on the street. She started walking. It was colder than it should have been for November, or perhaps she just always forgot what cold was like in winter.

"Little Sister, where are all the people?"

"Population of Cleveland is currently 245, 371"

"But where is everybody?"

And she coughed, and a little bit of blood landed on Little Sister, who scanned it immediately and efficiently for all known toxins, agents, poisons, bacteria, viruses, pregnancy, STDS, antibiotics, contagions.

"Big Sister, you should go to the hospital."

"I am at the hospital Little Sister, there is no one here. There are no lights on."

"You should go to the other hospital."

"Where is the other hospital, Little Sister?"

"Next closest healthcare facility is Mercy Riverside of Toledo, 116 miles, estimated travel time 1 hour, 56 minutes."

There were no dogs in the road, but she wished at that moment she had thought to get one earlier, and trained it to love and protect her.

Clarion: The Scrap Heap at the End of the Universe

It's possible we imagined it, in a mass hallucination brought on by fumes from the oil refinery. The fact that all the streets were named the same as the ones back home, and that they all looked the same, Broadway leading you into industrial areas always rusty old heaps of factories and corner stores, the rest of them named after the great tribes of the Lakes who had traded their existence to the French for beads and guns. Never assume they are going to give you the good guns. Why would they want you to have better guns than them? I'm sorry the exploration of the New World happened before mass communication, if there had been the internet maybe you all would still be alive. Maybe not.

So it's possible at some point on our drive there, the long autumn colored mid morning light falling across the highway and the corn fields, air rushing past our slightly cracked windows, it's possible that at some point we fell asleep in the sunlight and died. It's possible we were kidnapped, fed hallucinogens, reset, and released. I've often thought that a lot more of us are actually stuck in laboratories than we want to admit. Not all us. But probably a fair number. At least 30. I keep waiting for my life to turn into a story where numbers really matter, where the same set of significant amounts keep showing up again and again, a sign that there's an overriding narrative. Like, maybe there are 32 of us in sense dep tanks, and maybe we are all dreaming we are ourselves 32, and some research student somewhere picked that number because his apartment number was 32, the one he lived in with his now-ex, and the place he wishes more than anything to be back at. Whatever the reason, the city was beautiful that day, not gray and dirty as we had anticipated, but clean and bright and diversified. Poor sure, but not as poor. It wasn't a bad place, and we fell under the city's spell. Each city having a particular and unique spell, created out of rocks and raw earth from where it was born, designed by snowflake and fingerprint population mixes. Cities are playgrounds, they are boiling pots and scrap heaps and collages. They collect everything washing up in the gullies of the country, reservoirs of our lowest points and greatest activity. Marshes.

When we found the building, I drove into the wrong driveway three times, and finally just jumped a curb to park the car somewhere inconspicuous. We climbed carefully over the broken glass sticking out of window frames, and through the soon to be overgrown pool, into the dimmed recessed hallways of offices and kitchens, through the mirrored lobby and pitch black lounges. A series of conference rooms named after presidents held every bit of furniture scavenged; desks, mattresses, light poles, pastel prints of cottages, racks of white porcelain coffee cups. He found a corner stocked with blankets, saltines and mayonnaise laid out across stacked chairs, the vapid smiles of a Barely Legal laying open. I wonder sometimes if my male friends understand what alien places our individual fears come from, how girls naturally have a completely different reaction to the possibility there is a strange man hiding in the shadows of rooms, and frankly I have no idea what kind of fear hides in my friends chest. He is 9 ft tall, I wonder sometimes how he fears anything. Then again, being of a strange shape myself, I know how that alone can make you feel vulnerable over time.

The ground floor was the most interesting, full of objects and surprises. As we went further and further up, the rooms themselves were very similar. There was usually only one point of interest in each room, a pool of water, a conflagration of curtains, a spare bible. We got careless, he would wander ahead, I would lag behind in a room, we lost eye contact. Normally when that happens, I get nervous, I call out just to be sure, but it didn't seem to matter. We were lulled by the repeating pattern of the hallways and doorways, the sameness of every room. The warmth and sunniness of October's Indian Summer drifted into us from beyond the shadows.

And then suddenly, a door slammed in the stairway several floors below us.

Neither of us said anything about it, but we walked up a couple more floors and stopped. He picked up a large plastic pipe from inside one of the bathrooms and carried it with him. We walked down to the next staircase and up again. I stopped and looked down the dark shaft of the stairs, looked down just a minute, just to be sure. I felt that he had stopped above me, in sync as we were after all this time. So we stood there, together, separate, each looking for a long stare. Just as that spell was about to be broken, I saw it, a glint in one of the shadows of something moving reflective. It was 2 floors down, and could be barely made out from the bend of the stairs. I waited for it to happen again, but I felt him moving above me, and so I went too, quickly but not too quickly, into the next door the next empty hallway looking exactly the same as all the rest, where he carefully shut the door behind us and then quickly into another room, where we waited in silence, peeking through the peephole at the still quiet hallway. Minutes passed. We started to feel silly, making faces at each other, and just as I started breathing again, we heard the stairway door open. A creak like the building was cracking its knuckle in a movie theater.

It came slowly down the hallway, but it didn't stop to look in any rooms, giving each doorway only a cursory glance, as if it had assumed we had switched staircases again. We watched it walking down the hallway away from us. The thing was in the shape of man, and had the smooth practiced gait of one, but it had been living in the rot so long, patches of the fleshy shell had worn away, been eaten by moss or rusted by rain. You could see where once it had skin and clothes, and then the gleam of a lighting fixture it had used to replace a forearm, or the innards of a poached air conditioner sewn into it back. A metal scrap man. Junk Man. A walking trash bin. The rags it was wearing looked like they used to be a blue uniform, a polyester pants suit, a waiter maybe or a cook. It was a relic from a time we were both too young to remember, when mechanical men had been legal, which meant it had been a fugitive for at least 60 years, twice as long as either of us had been alive. In it's left hand, it carried a wrench. My panicked frozen mind saved itself by thinking "robots can be left handed?" and crunch crack we were both on track again, our muscles bursting into motion as soon as the Wreck went into the furthest staircase.


We ran up the rest of the stairs to the 12th floor, and from there to the roof, where we shut the trap door as securely as we could. Technically I guess, the roof was the 13th floor, the non-existent floor. We waited for it to find us and start banging on the door, braced ourselves for confrontation, but it never came. We stood there in the sky, as time ticked by, and waited. The light was warm and bright, the air crisp and cold. The colors of the trees far below us became vivid with the rich afternoon sun, and the city lay on the horizon so far away, on the other side of the forest, shining like silver, emerald and quartz.

The Ohio Harpsichord Society's Piano Retirement Community

Since the theme this week has been pianos (trust me, it has), I thought I would take a look back at some of the pianos we've met here.


First, the opera night at that French place in New York last year. When Cat was all like, "well, I don't know, we could go to this place where my brother who's an opera singer does like free requests with a bunch of other opera singers. If you want."



The church in Gary, my first exploration, when I dragged my unsuspecting sister from nice comfy Chicago for a day trip into (in retrospect) not the safest situation ever. I have to go back now that I know a little more about taking pictures. The piano is being dwarfed by the giants of air and sound.

The first piano in the Masonic Temple.

The second piano in the Masonic Temple. (the shy one)

The third piano in the Masonic Temple. (the polish one)

There was a fourth one in the basement, but I didn't get a good shot. Why do Masons hate pianos?

Wilson school piano, where a giant stuffed dog plays for a giant stuffed rabbit. Forever.

The Lafayette piano. Sadly, nobody likes it, everybody hates it, now its full of worms.

The Miles piano. Still staring out the bars hoping someone will take it home.

Pianos are our whales in the Wasteland.

The Amusement Park: No One Loves a Broken Rollercoaster

The difference between broke down places in the country and broke down places in the city is that in the country there is no one left to love you. When they leave, they leave for good. In the city, those former fortresses of industry, while slumming it, still have people who paint them and live there and use them. They have pets. What does an old country place have? Raccoons? Coyotes who pick through your bones looking for mice? Barking neighborhood dogs?

It's a lonely life in the country.

Maybe you have a few destructive teenage lovers at first, who burn parts of you down. But eventually there's not much left to break that isn't broken already, and they grow up and move to Akron. You end up settling for the few old guys that still come around out of nostalgia, and eventually one claims possession, covers you with barbed wire, and only takes you out once a month. Once a month you're supposed to forget the other 30 days of solitude and sloth, and be sparkly and interesting. Historic. Playful.

But the remnants of what you once were are weary.

And the elements encroach upon your face, creating skeletal shadows, carving lines into your structure. Time does not forgive you. The lake and fields do not forgive you. The clouds and rain do not forgive you. The trees spread like viruses in your bloodstream.

You become a collection of monsters, one for every decade. Passive sleeping monsters, but dangerous if disturbed. Tentacles of rust. Caves of machinery. All dreaming of the days when children ran around them unaware, and they hear the screams of happiness in their hibernation, and their cogs and buckles salivate at the memory of warm little fingers and dirty little faces.

If I tread carefully though, they sleep too deep to notice. I am a single sardine swimming by the fin of a great white, or a carp cleaning the teeth of a hippo. I am a hitchhiker, negligible tiny little beast. I walk softly through the jaws.

I admire the skull.

I marvel at the hollows in the hip bones.

I walk into the still breathing lungs, that move up and down at seasonal rates, with glacial snores. I walk into the snaking intestines, that twist their way through the woods, camouflaging the most vulnerable parts as nothing but more trees, more wood. The forest rises up to greet it's fallen, carved, varnished, cut, molded, used brethren, now back for a proper funeral.


In another year, if the bulldozers are kept away, it will become a forest dragon, with the eyes of a blackbird, the mouth of a coyote, the legs of a deer, the wings of an owl, the speed of a cotton candy machine.


It will hide away in the wilds, only to be seen on sunny days by children in their backyards, making up worlds.

More photos to be found here.

Westinghouse: They used to make lamps? Or chairs. Whatever.

When you start to actively search daily for places to trespass, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there are certain places everyone has gone to. These are like the novice levels, the wading pools of decaying civic gawkery. Westinghouse, for instance, will come up on everyone's Flickr page. It's like, the easiest place in the world to get into to. There's like, big open loading docks and no doors.

What the hell, I'm a novice. J. and I were going to try to get into this recently boarded up middle school first, but the only entrance was between some bars, walking a narrow ledge, then down a scary looking ladder, between some broken glass, into the pitch black basement. That would be what I would call intermediate level. I might have made the leap if I was wearing long sleeves and boots. But for now, maybe next time. For now I'll stick to the obviously open.

I love walking in these places. I feel like, with all this other stupid horrible crap going on in the outside world, nothing is going to touch me here. Except maybe a hobo. And I'll shank them if they try. It's so quiet and still. I mean, they are ruins. People go visit ruins all over the world. People pay lots of money to stare at buildings left behind. That particular sense of history you get from being in and around disuse and abandon, it's better than valium. I calm down instantly, but my heart also starts to race. J. called it "afterglow".




Architecture is marvelous to me, all exoskeleton and steel. The bones of the structure that poke out as the soft stone starts to peel away. And rust. Rust is amazing. I feel like if I get it on my body, it will eat me away too. It's looking to kill me with every step I make, I'm being hunted, I have to be careful. The rust is all around, a predatory fungus, winning. I'm the stupid bumbling thing in its lair.


And its great to run across good graffiti. Funny graffiti. It's a flag in the alien landscape. It reminds you to be braver. It's an important reminder to get every once in a while.


More photos can be found here.