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sign for airfarers such as myself, I would have been surprised. That was quite a closed episode. I set up with the sign and the flight and closed with a nice return to the initial image. But I am still on the plane. We must be taking a different route back because we are flying over a fairly large city. On the flight in we saw nary a bulb or auto. It disturbed me. The blackness. I believe this might be Fargo, ND. Let me look for a planted monogram. I have no clue. I haven’t seen the film recently enough to make a judgment. The clouds have thinned out so I can see the ground. Although my internal gyroscope is thrown off by the haze at the horizon. I think I feel out of control‡ flying. I have a helpless sense that were I to see something amiss. As we took off from Bismarck I noticed that the flaps were down. I had a fear that this would not allow us to accelerate fast enough or it would drag us to the ground shortly after takeoff. I wondered whether I could shout to get the flight attendant’s attention. Or whether I should. I did not. And here we are twentyseven thousand feet (27,000′) over eastern ND, and I am about to order a tonic water. I have drunk the following things on this trip,
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air it was clear how much of the city the hospital monopolized. It was an incredibly utilitarian city. I would call it gritty but it was meticulously clean. It was gritty in the sense that it was quotidian. There was no affectation or posturing to appeal to anyone save the people who needed it to survive. The folks popping in and out of Coffee Break buying their regular flavoured drinks held a small town familiarity on their sleeves that, as I watched them silhouetted against the glass storefront, not the pane that was covered from head to sill in flavoured syrup, contrasted to the bleak wide streets with ‘For Lease’ signs and empty storefronts. Perhaps they chose this desolation as their town aesthetic. It would not be so easy to sell out‡. From the window of the hotel I could see a TGI Friday’s, Staples, and Pier One, crouching outside the perimeter, waiting for the last picture show to play so that it could smother the town in signs and seal up all the windows. Bismarck was not somewhere that needed more than one of something. The coffee shop we had sought out for our introduction to the city was long gone, Coffee Break was fittingly visible from that intersection. So if they had planted an additional ‘BISMARCK’
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humans not parasites? Of course we have civilizations, we are productive. But as I watch the bison spend the entire day eating grass I wonder what good the productive capacity is in us‡. When the ice caps melt and raise water levels by four hundred feet (400′), and EPCOT Center is under three hundred feet (300′) of water, and every coastal houses’ shingles are littering the surface of the embiggened oceans, what good is this notebook. Should I not have spent the whole day eating dry roasted peanuts? Or reading instead of writing? Or saying “yes” instead of “zuh?” There are trees planted on the top of a flat hill outside of Bismarck that spell out “BISMARCK.” The landscape of North Dakota is so flat that you could not possibly make it out from the ground. I just flew over it en route to Min/St. Paul. We are high above the clouds now that we raced from Medora along route 94. They closed in on the airport as we approached. When we were visiting the art deco WPA era state capitol on Friday after our Coffee Break, I saw a plane fly over the grounds. It looked low and it hung an east over the capitol office tower. There must be only one flight path out of Bismarck for that is the one we just took. From the
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the development and structure of the trip. Not the geographic or chronologic track, or the geographic and chronological for in a travelogue they track one another. The structure of the head trip. Which happens to unfold in a more documented fashion when I am actually documenting. There are of course tangents that my mind takes during the day which will never be documented‡. I see that my father is suffering from phantom tick, he has gone to sleep yet he keeps reaching up to feel around his hairline. The little bastards. When we were stopped by a ranger on the last leg of our hike, which followed the main road for some four (4) miles, which we chose because the ticks were getting so bad, he said that they will choose a spot on a stick or blade of grass and hold on with two (2) of their legs. The other four (4) float free and when something brushes past them they just latch on with those four (4) free legs. He had watched them do it. The part that is hard for me to reconcile is that there must be millions of ticks just hanging there by their two (2) legs until they die. Unless they can eat bison shit, then they might be saved. If not, well, they must not be able to survive that long without blood. We wondered what good they were. What good is anything, any animal that is. Ticks are parasites. Are
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I haven’t grown up much. I am not going to turn back the pages to see what the last real subject I had been writing about was. I will merely go back to Bismarck, Friday morning, momentarily. To our stroll around the little capital city. I was expecting it to be like Rapid City. A frozen in time high plains town, divided into blocks with utilities running up the alleys and Mayberryesque storefronts from all the eras until the storefront succumbed to the box. Why open your store onto the street, display your goods, if your sign is draw enough, BestBuy, Walmart, Target. Your logos say more than a pyramid of toilet paper ever could. I thought it would be pregnant with a satisfying nostalgia. Yet Bismarck is Rapid City without the self-consciousness‡. It doesn’t pretend to care that someone who doesn’t work at the hospital or the Provident Building might be passing through. I am dying to look back to how I started this and why I am just now getting to Bismarck. I sha’n’t though. I’m not sure if I made that pact with myself. I think it just started at the top of this page. Although there is a sense, with the pen, the misspellings, the general formlessness of the text, that it is seeking an analogous relationship to
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summary or rehashing of its form and content, even when it is bound into something that has the illusion of being transformed into a new entity. That is the costume of style. Certainly I can have a voice, but, here, in this vomit, it is untempered. I am not even attempting to communicate anything, or even use correct spelling. My handwriting is growing appalling. Slower I can’t get it out so I speed. Where am I going, back to Bismarck? No. I keep thinking I feel ticks exploring beneath my underwear. After, no, during our hike, we were under attack by wood ticks. We each flicked at least fifty (50) ticks from our clothes and skin. They would just appear. Even after I felt that I had eradicated them one would appear in my chest hair, or even if I knew them to be gone, I would still feel them stealing through thickets of my hair. I need to stop, my wrist is sore. No wait, that is a weak way to leave a seam to stitch onto. Shall I talk about how I remember nothing of Swann’s Way‡? It is humorous that. No. I keep thinking my father’s eyes are opening. He is putting his feet up and I am listening to Darkspace.
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to structure this text and how to make it lofty and critical. That word is so hollow. People at Georgia Tech used to talk about ‘critical architecture.’ I found myself as an impressionable kid beginning to feel like I could form an understanding of what that was, what architecture would have to be to be critical. I felt that I could even begin to recognize it, as if the forms and materials of someone like Thom Mayne were somehow thumbing their nose at something. What good is that? Here on that walk, and perhaps in this writing, in the Medora, ND Americinn‡, which is becoming less critical by the college ruled line, and certainly in the days I spent in LA, forgetting what architecture looked like, I can perhaps understand what those Tech guys were talking about, or what they should have been talking about. And I refuse to use the word critical. There. I will choose another adjective. I choose ‘productive,’ and it modifies ‘practice,’ not form or style. Productive practice. For what you are reading is clearly formless, see, I am writing to ‘you’ again when I should be detailing the historic center of Bismarck. But making the practice of your life productive is to turn it into something other than the
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take a room at the non-Travelodge, even if the Travelodge had a pool and the others didn’t, for I do not care so much about pools now. Even though that is all I can write about. In Bismarck you, or I, it was I after all, who could see out the window of the Radisson, the edge of the city in all directions from the ninth floor. The gridded streets petered off into scrubby prairie or fell into the Missouri River. I could also see an old Spanish colonial train depot and the ‘Provident Building’ which in the dark had a barrel on top of a post on its roof which lit up red like a, well like something red. I am very tired and my similies aren’t flowing, I can’t even spell simile. We hiked quite a ways today, twelve (12) miles and change in the north unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. It was a bizarre hike. We were bumped from the trail, or discouraged from the trail by a grazing bison who lurched toward us‡. The trail and the environs were very muddy. It was a very deceptive mud, very thick. At times a dry crust would form over it and when I would step into it I would break through and begin sliding on the goo beneath. It was like hiking on cream cheese. That is a simile that I thought up on the fly. At the time on the hike I was more concerned with intellectual pursuits like how
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to turn on the air conditioner under the window and check out for the night. Who knows where I shall start again tomorrow, perhaps where I land, or perhaps I shall return to Bismarck, that is the beauty of such a French process, no? No, I just got out of the pool again. I tried to think about that other indoor pool but I guess you can only do it once, then if you write about it that pretty much kills it.‡ I did think, on the long walk today, about what I should write when I got back tonight. All I could think about was laying bare this process, and saying, no, writing things like “you see?” It always began to take on this didactic turn in my thoughts, addressing the readerly ‘you,’ but not in an inclusive way. Perhaps I cannot write inclusively, or ‘for’ anyone. When I did it last summer in South Dakota it sounds like ‘What did you do this summer?’ Like my travelogue to the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, complete with my autograph, no, not my autograph, complete with the autograph of the manager of the Travelodge in Slidell. They did not have a pool there. I remember that being tremendously upsetting for my sister and myself. I don’t think the Travelodge chain has ever really resecured, or recovered, rather, from that letdown in my eyes. If I were to see a Travelodge next to a Motel 6 or Knight’s Inn I would
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but I feel like those French bastards took away all the fun of reading their novels by laying bare the mechanisms, like, “you see, this is automatic writing” or “chronology is bourgoise,” and hell I even spelled that wrong, I can’t spell anything without the dictionary, no, without the internet, dictionaries are for Scrabble and bantering about what other animals are marsupials, the internet is where you find words to write with. I’m slowing now, I’m getting self-concious of the process, I’m letting myself hear the voices going up and down the hall outside the door. The children from the pool, go back to the pool children, you seemed so much to enjoy it. I also would like to state that a very clear sign that you are in a barren, desolate, and abstract land is that you can see definitive shadows of clouds on the ground. You see them ahead of you, their complete form, then you drive into them and then out, then they appear in their entirety in your rearview mirror‡. I believe everyone is here in this hotel in order to kill things. Except for the children and their mothers, they are here to enable their fathers to kill things. Or perhaps they are here to kill my night’s rest. It has been a long day of driving through clouds. I want
