Thu, 19 May 2005

eyestained
Nawadir was in town for a few days, and so I wanted to show him around the old neighborhood, only parts of the old neighborhood (like the internet) had vanished into the aether, shattering the illusion of permanence and leaving me uncertain that all the places I remember were ever real. For instance, the butcher shop where we used to get ice cream from those large Czech women is still there, still owned by the same two families and still selling ice cream which becomes just a little intermingled in the head with the slight salty smell, which I’ve always loved but Nawadir couldn’t quite get his head around. Also still there was the cafe consisting of at least a dozen small rooms connected with curtains, which always helped me to feel vanished and untraceable. The mural was still up on the wall, a kid-folk scroll depicting the return of biblical saints in the garb of superheroes not at end-of-time but around 1940, where they assisted in the spread of television and medicine. In fact, I saw a panel I had never seen before in which Ezra and Uriel (dressed in dapper suits) walk alongside the ocean with Rita Hayworth and pick up fish which had been washed upon the shore. Now missing, however, was the newstand where I was first read now-vanished zines like Alchemical Warfare (a sort of academic journal based out of the now-abandoned Richter-Goldberg psychiatric hospital out by the old highway), Neviditeln? Divadlo (a repair and modification newsletter from a local automated puppetry troupe), and Grand Theft Audio (crankrock zine I later wrote for until Dave and Michelle had a baby and flaked on us), and a couple of the old bars had now swapped owners and target audiences (all the old meatpacking bars had shifted over to more upscale sports bars and now thankfully reverted to meatpacking bars again), but most depressing was the loss of the Salter Apartments shrine, a sunken playground not visible from the street, where all the playground equipment had been pulled due to bullshit safety concerns and then replaced over time by local kooks (including me) with corkscrew antenna slides and huge scrap-iron gongs which were both oddly quiet and immensely satisfying to bang on. The playground was paved over for another parking lot, and I was tempted to break off car antennas, but Nawadir (to his detriment) doesn’t get displaced acts of vandalism, so I refrained.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #