kansas
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities lays out how nationalism-- and, indeed, the concept of the nation-state-- is as much a co-morbid development of communication technology and mass media as it is a colonialist political project. It's a book that lodged itself in my brain and makes me constantly wonder how I and a person thousands miles away could share neither time zone nor biome but agree that there is such a thing as "the united states of america".
my first time in a properly land-locked state (Ohio doesn't count) in some ways answers my question. Kansas is not as cartoonishly flat as you'd think-- it's a lot like rural Pennsylvania if you photoshopped the hills out-- and when you get to certain areas of the boonies there's a lot of rich assholes with vanity cattle farms next to their mcmansions built next to golf courses, which is also exactly like here except we do it with horses and alpaca. they even have Amish making fucked-up frosted bacon pastries, just like at home (I kind of think they're pulling a long-con to kill secular heretics via heart disease).
freddy's
betrayal by the american experiment
america is pretty much just vibes. In London, England they have a chain restaurant for "american" food with an aesthetic practically air-lifted from any roadside diner in the united states: marylin monroe, elvis, burgers, milkshakes and french fries. what does it mean for us(americans) that the trappings of "americaness" are so easily mimed? is it an indictment of our vapid obsession with surface-level appearance? is it the soft-power arm of U.S. global military hegemony's effectiveness at littering the world with our pop culture like so much semiotic ejecta? something in between???
the freddy's near the Wichita airport is one such outpost of usamerica's self-induced anachronistic nostalgia. red leather upholstry and checkboard tile floors sopped up pensioners' grease stains and Diet Coke puddles. i was told to get the fries. i paired them with a chili dog(hot dog #1) and an unsweetened iced tea.
despite my N-95 I must have caught COVID on the plane, because when I tell you that shit was flavorless. the dog had no snap, the chili had no spice, the much-hyped fries may as well have been. I didn't taste anything but it was something.
salt mine
hubris and envy brine in the dark
who's fucking who in the salt mine museum? my bet is our charismatic enby tour guide is slowly force-femming the dark ride attendant with the rainbow pride and Fallout Vault Boy enamel pins on his hi-vis. meanwhile, the zoomer gift shop cashier-- cut off from from the surface world's 5g teat-- is so bored, i saw her wiping down the underside of the POS system. I bought a mug
at one point in the tour we were invited to step off the ride and pick a lump of salt from a pile. Unthinking, I took the first one I saw near me, shot through with intrusions, and secured it in the provided draw-string bag emblazoned with the museum's logo. I wont reduce myself to picking over this pile like a slack-jawed tourist, I thought. what an asshole. Bestie found a tiny, near-perfect cube of white salt, and I'm overcome with salt envy.
This is your sign to pick over the salt pile. 
other stuff
Here's some more stuff I did in Kansas:
- pet a stray cat
- got tipsy at a lame gay bar
- Had really good thai curry
- Found the stele of hammurabi at an antique mall
- Learned how to play poker
- I got hot dogs #2 and #3 from a gas station and they were wayyy better than Freddy's.
weeklies #7
what i'm reading:
I closed my eyes at the back of the bus. Tried to imagine where each of my polygons would start and end. Tried to forget the dire reality that I was made of quadrillions of fickle particles, held together by absurd forces and unknowable math. No, I'm different. I'm made of faces, edges, and vertices. Textures and armatures and keyframes. I visualized it all. The mental exercise worked just well enough to get me through, and no more.
— "Bridge to eQualia" by Blackle Mori
"eQualia" feels like a sobered-up update to Snow Crash: where the "Metaverse" fails to materialize, we instead have VRChat, Second Life and Minecraft servers, which act as the shady neonoir back rooms that "eQualia"'s agoraphobic gumshoe red-teams her way through. It's the neurotic net natives of B.R. Yeager's Amygdalatropolis passing through the capital-W Weird overlapping realities of Miéville's The City and The City.
what i'm listening to:
scribewolf passed away. I didn't know them but I knew about their music and I was really amazed by their playing. it's a really terrible loss.
what i'm watching:
carter amelia davis
Going to the salt mine reminded by of the inimitable work of carter amelia davis and their (hopefully ongoing) cave video series:
And their newest masterpiece Homemade Gatorate:
something i liked:
60s modernist horrorscapes by Jacob Landau
At a used book store in Wichita we saw a book called Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 which has a really gorgeous, gruesome cover. I took a picture of the cover, but didn't think to try to find the artist in the book's front matter. Miraculously, a scan was on Archive.org and I was able to find out about Jacob Landau
The 9th Circle, lithograph, 1975
Illustration for The Selected Tales of E.T.A Hoffman
I'm struggling to find hi-res versions of his work
something i hated:
Three different people were playing overlapping TikToks out loud in an otherwise silent plane.
a picture:
saturn devouring his bun