sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2022-04-04 10:50 pm

Or why the ghost's alive in this cave

The evening got off to a rocky start when I discovered QAnon propaganda in our mailbox on our way out the door to pick up dinner; it was printed like a political mailer, claimed to be the first-person testimony of a victim of the "Cabal," checked most of the traditional dogwhistles and [personal profile] spatch tore it to pieces as soon as I handed it to him. Duplicate materials were lying in the front yards of other houses on our street, suggesting that someone had come through and flyered the neighborhood with blood libel and millenarianism. I wish them nothing nice.

The better news is that dinner was waiting at the Smoke Shop in Assembly Square, so we walked there via the stretch of the Mystic I had last visited in snow. The water was still glass-blue in the late light. The willows on the far side of the water were yellowing with spring. No one was climbing the tree I had seen tracked around after the storm; no longer trapped in snow, its low-curved branch turned out to sway at the slightest touch like a porch swing or a cradle in a folk song. Naturally I climbed it, while it jounced slowly underneath me and I said things like, "Didn't people die this way in A Separate Peace?" It was not even my own height off the ground. It was good for settling onto.



Still masked, as there were passersby. I am told it gave a good effect to my eyes.



I look like I am tree-whispering. Fortunately, it decided to trust me.



In fact, it was extremely comfortable.



The photographer came in for a close-up just before I leapt down.

Walking through Assembly Square itself was my first exposure to a mall environment in almost two years; I looked at our reflections passing the windows of designer clothing and decided that if I was intended to feel like a second-rate reject from human society, I still thought I looked better than the mannequins. We agreed on a feeling of alienation. We quoted Gonzo and, when we spotted an outlet for Brooks Brothers, Sky Masterson. It remains such a weird space, like a downtown that turns to backlot within blocks. Its bricks sport pre-distressed ghost signs. We got home safely with our barbecue and discovered that none of the sauces we had asked for had made it into the bag, but there were still collards and cornbread and brisket and burnt ends and butter cake we had not ordered and the sunset was flaming out beautifully as we negotiated our path through brownfields and construction, scrolls and streamers of nineteenth-century light. Nothing is becoming any less exhausting. I am still glad that we got outside.

I just saw that Jordan has died. I never saw her outside of photographs and the films of Derek Jarman, but her constructivist makeup was iconic. I am going to have to rewatch Jubilee (1977), which I have not seen since the first time with [personal profile] rushthatspeaks, although I bought the DVD as talismanically as anything else of Jarman's I ran across and later the published script. "But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art."