All The Visible Stars And The Majesty Of The Mountains

we used to live in brief sharp shots of fear, summer flash-floods that howled like oncoming trains and ravaged power lines, now all the trees have come down, there is nothing left to hold up the sky

now, terror is distributed in ambient humidity, the anxiety of an overcast day prophesying catastrophe: everything will go bad in ways that are slow and grey and wet.

the seas crawl inland slump ashore like beached whales, ancient and browning – rotting from the inside out, its heart the size of my body.

birds disappear; cicadas neuter themselves, nothing grows wings, in the dark morning there is no chorus of airborne voices, only the obscenity of our breathing.

and breath comes short, the taste of sweat and orange haze, the length of ever widening days, distance between sunrises slowing like the march of tectonic plates,

it is the end again. another week thrusts itself into the tar colored crevice of memory, and i prepare for sleep, address myself quiet in the mirror, unshowered and rationing water:

goodnight my life. goodnight my unibrow, my old stone bridge, goodnight river of my eyes. goodnight invisible fish swimming down my face, goodnight wet reflection.

last 2 weeks have been madness. my time at Touchstone is almost up -- and with it my reporting project -- but i've been invited to stay on for more writing opportunities, and i'll still try to help with setup & reception when possible.

being an arts reviewer is probably going to feel new and awkward for a while. getting to cover our own shows was great practice but the prospect of having to actually go to openings and stand there with a notepad and pencil in a crowd of mid-50s rich DC arts patrons leaves me apprehensive. i want to try and get art out to The Kids, see if the gap between the underground scene and the gallery scene can be bridged, but the kids don't read longform journalism. and i am not going to become a TikToker over this. for now, zine output will remain consistent, and i'll be trying to get articles into EastCityArt when i can. trying to talk about local art from a youth perspective is not the same as marketing arts reporting to the youth, but my stupid ass still wants to do both. so i'll spam exhibition news on my Instagram story and beg people to send their shit into open calls.

essays and misc. reportage will probably get posted here in the next few days. i'll try to keep the racing posts to a minimum but that's most of my backlog, so be warned.

been a few days. i got sick at the beach and it stuck. i'm home now, to my everlasting comfort; i can't ever be away for long. i feel a moral responsibility to stay in this place despite its problems instead of just escaping somewhere else. because other people without the privileges i have will never be able to leave, in which case i'm placing it on them to try and turn this city around. and that doesn't feel fair.

we're watching Love Island. it's 11:00 a.m. and we're late to the beach, and it's the best day we'll have all week. we're in a cheap vacation rental with extension cords and flyswatters everywhere, the bugs are trying to get in. well, i guess it's really that we pushed them out. i think a lot about what this place used to be like before we raped it. every surface is asphalt, gravel or sand, and the sand is going fast; every few years they dredge more up from the ocean and drop it back on the beaches. last year the beach was really steep, so maybe this time it'll have been filled up and flattened out. the same way the people are, and the air, thick with car exhaust and the low stench of salt marsh.

a few hours later & i'm watching a video about net.art and half-working on an article. i like the smallnet revival but we don't have time machines, we'll never be able to recreate that initial movement. still it's fun to compare these old projects to the new ones; i remember being fascinated by projects like cicada, terminal00 and op011 a few years ago. the crossover between internet art project and ARG is very wide. if i cared enough, i'd learn more html and turn this site into an absolute labyrinth of ugly pages with vaguely philosophical cryptic sentences. it's not so hard -- all you need are some ugly 3d gifs, patent art, stock photos and other prefab materials taken from online archives or old blogs. that reminds me, i never made that video project based off of my massive youtube playlist of uploads with under 1k views. fuck Premiere.

this is the poem i just ad-libbed to Teagan: view the triumph of white America: Wal-Mart weekends, wet asphalt, and a wide featureless sky, nothing beyond it or beside it; starless nights and unimpressed children.

the Eastern Shore will forever remind me of slavery. it's in the ground, the heavy air, the rainbow hanging low over Dunkin' Donuts. route 50 to the beach takes you right past Sussex Correctional Institution, and we watched its guard towers watching us. never have i been closer to history than that spot, a prison built on top of a prison, in a state where more than two-thirds of the incarcerated population is Black. i have walked through the White House, seen the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but i felt a much more profound concentration of America emanating like a miasma from that fortress in the middle of a soybean field than in any white marble palace.

time moves slower out here. i think everyone can tell. the buildings slump under a wide sky, humiliated by themselves, and the people are always leaving but never gone. i wrote this poem about it a year ago:

sunset over soybeans

it's a season of almosts.

the roads give way to water without warning,

the weather never really storming,

only shadow-lined clouds forming.

then absorbing–

back into blue atmosphere sun-bleached

and pale, scarred over with contrails,

another pound upon the scale,

but i don't feel heavy.

the wind slips like thin cloth

so quick against stone-still sand

that the birds barely bother to fly;

they glide against the sun's glare

suspended from strings in the air,

just hanging there

flapping faithlessly like props

aware of their own theater.

i dunno. there's a lot of dread here, but there's dread everywhere, isn't there. the sea levels rise at a rate that could eliminate this place in only a few decades, but the bay is so shallow. it doesn't rain enough. the salt marshes will be pushed further inland, and the trees will die and the ground below them will erode, and the birds will stop coming back, but none of that makes it special. i've never been any other place that felt like this because i haven't been to many other places.

a while back i started putting together an archive of google maps screenshots of this area. they're up on an unused Tumblr blog i had planned to submit to The Wrong Biennale '23-'24, but never finished.

i like google maps a lot, i think it's an underappreciated resource. you can access so many spots all over the world that simply cannot be traversed in real life. i started taking screenshots during the pandemic and never stopped.