Do things really have to happen?
Can’t we just sit and listen to the music? (Does it all have to revolve around plot?)
I’d like to live somewhere on the equator, where the seasons don’t change. The changes, they accumulate too much memory. Spring comes round and I’m thinking of all the yard work I’ve done, and all that lies ahead of me again. Mowing the lawn. Clearing and burning the brush. And it makes me notice the decay and degradation that’s settled in around the place. A few less shingles left on the roof of the boathouse. A few more storm windows fallen out, the wood of the exposed window frames starting to rot. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place in my entire life, and it was meant to be a temporary measure. But with the other big change we’ve been seeing (inflation) it turned out staying put on one piece of property was the smartest thing we could do.
See: there’s something to be said about sitting still.
This ache in my lower back is telling me it’s time to flip the mattress again. In truth, it’s probably time to replace it. You only have to flip something over twice to be back where you started, and this thing is dizzy with flipping.
They’re gathering the hay in the fields north of the prison again.
Bundling it up in these cylinder shapes and wrapping it in plastic. It’s interesting how often we bundle the organic in the synthetic. Our food comes in plastic. The food for our food is bundled in plastic. And then when our dogs take a crap on the street we bag that up in plastic, taking something that would decay in a week or so and ensuring it’ll be preserved in a landfill for a decade. (Who am I to lament this? I was just going on about the change of seasons and how I’d like to see things stay the same for as long as possible. The problem is: the moments go by so fast, we never get properly acquainted with any one of them. The people that I work with at the tobacconists are surprised that I don’t collect more smoking pipes. I’ve only got a dozen that I smoke regularly. My boss owns several thousand. I struggle to consider: how can you properly enjoy a thousand pipes?) It's like we can’t help it. There’s something sexy in the synthetic. Latex fetish photography. Cyberpunk and Blade Runner and Brave New World were meant to be dystopian, but now we can’t wait to live there. We want to be strapped down and homogenized and packaged. Phthalates leak into our food and lower our sperm counts but plastic extends the sell-by dates of our produce. Spit into this Petri dish and have your DNA analyzed: congratulations, you’re 15% Scotch-Irish and 100% human. Tell me something I already know. No, that’s not sarcasm. Please tell me, so I know that I’m right to believe it. Charge me interest on my information; I’ll rent a space for my soul and maybe then it’ll feel like I belong..
I guess that’s all I have to say on that subject for today. (It’s strange, how often parenthesis bleed back into the main argument. I used to package more words in them but then I realized those are the things I really meant to talk about.)
Unless otherwise stated, photography is the work of the author. Feel free to copy, remix and share photographs from this post according to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International license.
Camera divider and signature illustration by @atopy.
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It's such a pleasure finding one of your posts in my feed. I never thought about synthetic as a fetish. I guess I always associated things like latex and futuristic gear with a semblance of anonymity that we're so desperate for.
When I start thinking like that, I think of rollercoasters (which I love, but am also terrified of), and how during the ride, I'll always try to savor it as much as I can, to remember every moment. And then I realize I'm so focused on remembering it all that I'm not actually living it - so how could I remember, afterward, something not even experienced?
In a way, "shut up and enjoy the ride" is a comforting attitude.
Not that I think you should. Shut up, I mean. I hope you don't for a very long time to come. :)
Maybe it's time to buy a new mattress :)
Yeah, when you start thinking about making memories for the future, it sure gets hard to be "spontaneous." Maybe it's better to just live, and let the memories sort themselves out.