labors of love

We walked around Peace Valley to celebrate Teemo's birthday on Monday and to be around the holiday crowd and hurl anxiety into the lake. I started writing this Tuesday and got distracted by a bug in my build tooling. I've been working on planner/almanac/checklist development recently that had me rebase my workflow from wkhtmltopdf onto weasyprint, which required upgrading my entire laptop, which broke all of my virtual environments. I got moving again quickly except for one line of the blog compilation that was failing. I finally sorted that, patched my own tooling to get running, and confirmed somebody already filed a bug with the ruamel developer. I had in mind for an opening paragraph some reflective metaphor about love and giving and about how even an act of love can be a difficult form to pin down in the shifting folds of the fabric. There's only so much that can be given to either the doing or the writing, and there's so much to be done that for now the blog lives on cold cereal served in an ash tray with a side of prayer it doesn't get too screwed up.

I read about the Rittenhouse Round Up two weeks ago, which is how I first heard about the Anti Flower Show Movement. I read that the name was chosen to elicit curiosity and that the creator wondered who would be against a flower show. And I thought about three cedars sitting on stained wingback chairs around a table covered with scale models of all the flowers in the garden in a dark wallpapered room smoking cigars they grabbed by the handful from a glass bowl on a gas station counter next to a handwritten sign that reads "Five For $25". Cedar Center remarks about the barometer and thinks the pain in his knee is an omen. Cedar Left emits a short, monotone "Hmm." Cedar Right swirls an oaked wine and can't stop thinking about Jeremy. Outside the window 13 sparrows with signs stomp in a circle shouting slurs in exchange for seed. On the sidewalk behind them two pairs of cardinals sit at a bistro under the shade of a lilac all feeding each other. A mysterious bird in a top hat, sunglasses, and trench coat stands just inside the alley beside the cafe under the shadow of the building and goes unnoticed by Tyler walking by, who waits outside the convention center for Andy, who never shows. Tyler curses the flowers and leaves.

I made a trip to check out Dharma Bums and chatted up a mythical guy from the mythical land of Central Jersey while I was there. We met up in Doylestown the next week to walk around and visited the cemetery, the Presbyterian graveyard, a record shop, and an open mic night. On the train home I read the history of Ancient Toilstown, around which the Titan of Industry cast his mighty lasso. The rope cut into the bellies of the Toilstowners as they walked, and so over generations they designed the System of Rotation to determine who'd suffer the lead. One day Some Guy argued that the rope is cruel, and quickly the Titan loosened his grip sending slack into the length. Those who had been balanced against the weight of the rope fell and were trampled by those behind, which some said proves the need for the rope. As they picked up the slack and resumed their walk some argued for knee pads and back braces, and others said the rope should be made into smaller pieces. Just as the lasso tightened again three families began to feud over the rotation schedule. All attention turned inward to the center of the circle and again the rope fell slack. Then the Titan stumbled backwards and the lasso dropped to the ground entirely. Distracted from the fight the walkers started hopping over the edge of the rope, lifting each other out as they did. Some wanted closure on how the fight would have ended and stood in place, some grabbed the legs of those leaving and kept them put. The Titan regained his stance and pulled hard on the rope until the lasso was even tighter, now held only inches from his face. Those who remained looked up to see his crooked teeth, bloody tears, and fiery hair. Embedded in his pockmarked skin all their childhood fears were lurking, and in his terrible roar all the embarrassing secrets they hoped everybody'd forget were sung in perfect pitch. Those nearest the front picked up the rope and resumed walking, and after some time the people behind them took over, and after some time the people behind them took over.

I renewed my GPG key last month. There was a moment where what was published had expired, but I've updated what I host here. I went to Arts Fest in Lansdale the next day and gave a Founders Day walking tour down Main Street with the historical society. The crowd ballooned so big we mitosed, which was scary and fun. General Stores were the general craze until the 70s when the mall siphoned life off Main. Now the mall is dying, and as that black hole implodes some slack might ripple back to feed the stars buried in the boro. How should they shine, though? Not all preservation or restoration is worthwhile, and even the Tremont knew neglect. I complain about consumerism and catalog shopping, yet Geller's seems indistinguishable from Amazon and Costco. The trains used to pollute, strangle, and enslave just as surely as the delivery vans do now. There's an implicit, ineffable line drawn when attempting to summon only the good parts of the ghosts of the past, and nostalgia for a thing that never existed is the cast in which form the imaginal discs of development. More of the same means more pavement and more profit motive. The same but different would be a basement bowling alley topped with a shared market and performing space sheltered by a rooftop community garden. Local bands would play a lunchtime concert that the high schoolers would broadcast live on WNPV, and all of us in earshot moved by some frequency that rings over asphalt and setbacks might feel the world grow smaller.

I started my Labor Day weekend with a visit to the Tomb of Thaddeus Stevens and was a little surprised to find that Lancaster is incredible apparently, and a city. I thought it was three farms and a highway, but it's so much more. I saw more architecture than cattle, though I did find that the baseball team is named The Barnstormers and that their mascot is a cow named Cylo, a pun on the silos that shaped the city's agricultural history, so I forgave my own assumption.

I visited a dispensary, passing through 30 chambers to the floor so the licensed salespeople can still get a taste of the experience of incarcerated dealers. I thought about putting wine behind locked doors plastered with warning signs then stopped for a bite on the way to the cemetery. While I was eating I read that Narcan will be distributed through pharmacies for $45. A spokesperson for Rite-Aid, your convenient one stop shop for both the sickness and the cure, said it "should be a medicine cabinet staple that is in all homes and first aid kits so that individuals are prepared to act in the case of an opioid emergency" less than a week after the company announced bankruptcy following mounting lawsuits over their role in sustaining the opioid crisis.

One of the stops on the Lansdale walking tour was Dresher's Arcade, which used to be Dresher's Garage, a Buick dealership and service center. The company moved out and developers converted the driveway cutting through the building into the arcade that exists today. I looked up what distinguishes an arcade and spotted one in Lancaster then I noticed a footprint in a wet section of sidewalk that I reported to public works, who said they'd report it to the contractor. I pulled weeds around the tomb and cleaned up around Sweeney's plot and reported some damage to the group managing the cemetery. I drove in because the Amtrak and SEPTA trains were off by five minutes and I felt a moral aversion to spending 55 minutes waiting. I thought I could sandwich the day in Philly, but personal responsibility seems like a devil in all this trying to latch onto those spirits I'm summoning. I picked up a biography of Stevens from the library on the way, which tied the emphasis on personal responsibility he was raised around to his later sense of social responsibility. Years later as Johnson chiseled away at what could have been a revolutionary victory and as the Freedmen's Bureau failed to do anything constructive, Northern Whites found themselves on board the S.S. Enriched Black People Would Idle sailing full steam ahead toward wage slavery. Anybody making the claim had to work twice as hard lifting their bootstraps the next day to prove that they themselves weren't the lazy one, that they're certifiably personally responsible and therefore not Incredibly Racist and Readily Duped.

I passed a billboard on the side of the tracks on the way to Brooklyn calling to fire Anderson, who's gone now so maybe it was effective, but it should be calling out the dingus standing in the way of me riding the rails all the way to Lancaster. I thought I'd write to both authorities to report the schedule misalignment and found the times swapped for the better. I considered my personal responsibility and started to doubt I'd actually double checked myself that day. The SEPTA app said it was downloading a new schedule before I looked today, so it is theoretically possible the schedules fell into place in the meantime. I could probably find archives and confirm one way or the other but living with the uncertainty is palatable, and costs far less time than having to paint my own face on that billboard. I did make a visit to the train station while I was in town, praying to all the gods at each of the crossings penetrating the downtown loop. I don't think there's a single entity I could call or email to report that treachery, but I thought if I could take the train I could at least shout poems about forbidden love to the heart of the city over the traffic from this side of McGovern.

The local ambulance concern is on a municipal fundraising campaign, and the Lansdale mayor is promoting "for-profit hospital systems". Rite-Aid simultaneously announced they're closing the Lansdale location on Main Street as part of the bankruptcy, a severed limb left to rot sacrificed in defense of hoarded wealth. Profit-motivated exploitation isn't a partnership. The hospitals are all non-profit and so is the EMS company. I'm a member everywhere and a customer nowhere these days. We could be discussing how a network of privately owned non-profits might contour the path toward a change of ownership and how to calm traffic and preserve, promote, and restore art and architecture. Instead the window was shifted so far to the right I got whiplash watching it zip by under the banner of for-profit hospital systems.

I hadn't found my words yet so I wrote all the ones I had on a poster and stood outside Rite-Aid before filling up on some of my favorite First Friday food truck food. Standing there with my signs I thought about the Hundred Armed Ones imprisoned in the tenth level basement below 550 Madison and its arcade. The three toil in turns managing the Internet switchboard by hand, routing every packet at the speed of light. A slurry of addicts and unlucky schoolchildren sustains them as their fingers soar across the planetary jacks. Every fragment feels like one more thread binding them to their position, even this website, even this letter to the mayor:

I'm confused about the promotion of for-profit hospitals in "The Promise of Private/Public Partnerships in EMS Funding". As far as I know all the local hospitals are non-profit. Is somebody looking to develop a for-profit? I also don't understand the connection between specifically for-profit hospitals and the current fundraising need, or why a specifically for-profit structure on the private side of a partnership should ever be welcomed so readily from the public side.

I made a weekend visit to the city to huddle close and bury myself underground. I met with friends for a backyard movie and after the birthday hike I spent the afternoon making potatoes, panzanella, patties, and pasta with peppers and parsley abiding a theme of foods that start with carbs. The dogs got a can of wet food in their kibble, and the birds got extra bread crumbs, seed, and nectar. We all walked some more through the boro and passed a Very Old Man teaching a Little Child what the Toads taught him a thousand years ago about how to jump in mud. Presumably Mother stepped onto the porch and pointed out that Baby is dirty, and Great Grandfather said yes. The Witch Next Door meanwhile had been sitting in her living room with an open book in her lap and a notepad balanced on the armrest under her wrist. She tapped her pencil to the page then stood and grabbed a smile from the coat rack on the way out the door. A cloud full of E. coli, speeding trucks, wild boars, and roaming gangs of ANTIFA conjured above Definitely Mother, ready to burst into reality as Baby leapt from puddle to pond. "Priceless!" beamed The Witch. "I wish I had a camera."