A note for Postrodent
Dear postrodent,
I've been driving around here, around this old city, post-industrial, post-economy, post-life, I grew up in, and thinking how much you would love it. Nothing's whole; nothing's clean. The great granite block of the art museum tries to be modern, but is modern in the sense Stonehenge is modern: timeless, featureless, a square hewn from earth. The Calder on its front lawn gently sits and rusts. Everything is cinderblocks, or brick with crumbling pointing, or void windows into voided buildings. The sky is the same color as the parking lots I can see from both my bedroom windows. The sky's reflection here leaches the color out of everything: roofs, homes, cars. The only shiny things are the ones lit up at night. There's a block downtown, now, with tinsel wreaths attached to all the lampposts; the light there glows yellow onto all the storefronts: a diner, the Catholic book store, the strip club, all cozied up together, huddled behind their security gratings at night like old homeless men. That's one block, the only one lit. That street must be 20 or 30 blocks long. The whole thing is like the ass-end of the apocalypse: a brownfield on the DEC list sits in the center of town; the only legible sign nearby reading "Dry Ice" as if that were the biggest commodity going for a mile square around. The old brick houses have windows half-boarded with plywood that looks wet on the outside, like it would give way if you left it until the spring and then came back and pressed, just a little, your hand over the graffiti which would be the most colorful thing on the building. The warm commercial heart of the city was built on a paved-over swamp; the orchard was cut down and a shopping complex whose logo is a tree put in its place. The only warm and well-lit buildings, the ones the cars and people cluster in around like flies, are the places where people can go to buy and forget and consume, and the whole thing named for that latter process, without irony. We'd wander around talking in the constant freezing damp that always promises snow and threatens rain and produces nothing, and you'd be astonished every fifteen feet, delighted, taking out your cameraphone, giving some rusted-out truss the bright sun of a camera flash, and the architecture would think it was summer.
- Eredien
I've been driving around here, around this old city, post-industrial, post-economy, post-life, I grew up in, and thinking how much you would love it. Nothing's whole; nothing's clean. The great granite block of the art museum tries to be modern, but is modern in the sense Stonehenge is modern: timeless, featureless, a square hewn from earth. The Calder on its front lawn gently sits and rusts. Everything is cinderblocks, or brick with crumbling pointing, or void windows into voided buildings. The sky is the same color as the parking lots I can see from both my bedroom windows. The sky's reflection here leaches the color out of everything: roofs, homes, cars. The only shiny things are the ones lit up at night. There's a block downtown, now, with tinsel wreaths attached to all the lampposts; the light there glows yellow onto all the storefronts: a diner, the Catholic book store, the strip club, all cozied up together, huddled behind their security gratings at night like old homeless men. That's one block, the only one lit. That street must be 20 or 30 blocks long. The whole thing is like the ass-end of the apocalypse: a brownfield on the DEC list sits in the center of town; the only legible sign nearby reading "Dry Ice" as if that were the biggest commodity going for a mile square around. The old brick houses have windows half-boarded with plywood that looks wet on the outside, like it would give way if you left it until the spring and then came back and pressed, just a little, your hand over the graffiti which would be the most colorful thing on the building. The warm commercial heart of the city was built on a paved-over swamp; the orchard was cut down and a shopping complex whose logo is a tree put in its place. The only warm and well-lit buildings, the ones the cars and people cluster in around like flies, are the places where people can go to buy and forget and consume, and the whole thing named for that latter process, without irony. We'd wander around talking in the constant freezing damp that always promises snow and threatens rain and produces nothing, and you'd be astonished every fifteen feet, delighted, taking out your cameraphone, giving some rusted-out truss the bright sun of a camera flash, and the architecture would think it was summer.
- Eredien