Jupiter-South Gate

You can walk from the 24-hour Donut Star to the library in your mind. You can walk past the refurbished scraps store again, if you like. If you wanted to.

There are girls lined-up, slouching against the pick-up truck in the Albertson's parking lot.

Past the lumber yards, the entrance to the State Highway. Buildings in hunches rise out in the distance when you drive away.

The ash of the former city is in the jackets of the men on the car lots, who wobble like the balloons above.

When you walk on the sidewalks in Jupiter, you leap, which can't be helped.

Occasionally the city animates your conversation. For instance, at the bus stop when the inquisitive elderly lady asks you where you are from. She is way too snoopy, but you answer her anyway, and you can't help it if you are gruff, aloof.

No one thinks about it anymore, it is just a town, really. Some people live there, and occasionally there is some horrific story on the late-night news, but who cares?

In the 60's, the malls teemed and the men wore brighter jackets. They looked like balloons and streamers.

Once, when you were a teenager, you decided to disobey the No Trespassing sign. Look what happened, look what your action has caused a man was wheezing in the bushes, and he cried piteously. What did he want and you ran back, nearly breaking your neck.

There is a reason signs are bright red, white stark letters, they implore and dare.

The Apple Tree Inn was erected in the 1957. By the late 1970's, it was on a strip that was considered 'trouble'. What makes an area turn into 'trouble'?

Draft of an essay

Memory of desire, the wanting, the knowing of its brevity, and that is why we do it again and again so it can be done again, to thwart the brief, to puncture what we know will not last, to pin the infinite on a moment. It is a moment that stays with me.

Let's say, for instance, the eating of cereal in the morning, when I am not really awake. And the way you walked around my room.

It is the sureness of a moment that compels me to write in the first place. An image is permanent like a wreck on the beach, an arrow hard in the ground. I remember images, that which becomes permanent, and I cling to the image, remembering again, again.

I can say,"Paddle" to mean "Passing" and in turn to suggest "Arc".

I think of lights you pass at night, when driving, or on public transport. The effect of man-made light, in particular, advertisements for establishments. In itself it suggests an indulgence in the fleeting.

EAT

or

RESTAURANT

AHEAD

TURN

3.5 MILES to EXIT 36B

A word becomes embedded in the surrounding environs. It is plucked like a dart from the mesh surface, not sinking, but suspended. Between the hours of woods, there are lights illuminating words.

Signs nailed to trees about Jesus, what fights the infinite more than that? In Gothic lettering, "Believe on the Lord.."

Further we climb into a dangle, unfurled. An argument about buoys, let's call this "Fen" and should you agree, we peruse further

A list on the way to Vancouver, B.C

Piles of lumber

Woodchips and sawdust enveloped by yellow

Old squeals

Rivulets in evening

"I see the McDonald's sign!"

Gray streets a whirligig

Eusx1 Coachmen Wagon

Worms are falling apart

Demonstration heaps

Was I not a town once? Granges and taverns, lodges.

(For Mount Vernon)

Grocery cart in the summer

Lost in a county
The pelt on the banister
We took turns going to a bar
In a county, a funny furry thing

Do I remember North Carolina

Man in yellow shouts

turning away from clustered trees

you gasped.

Puddles here and there

and many hesitations that drifted

sideways, you see I

have forgotten

the enormous gray of fields

no that wasn't it at all

no

grids, and trespassing

they sputtered.

An intersection removed

and somewhere, my glances

I don't remember cities well

In every dream home

When I was young, my parents took my siblings and I to see many model homes. There was always a possibility we would move, as my mother never seemed to be happy about where we were living. A tour through a model home would offer us a glimpse of the life we could have.

Model homes were often the first three homes you would see when you entered a new development, and usually they were the only homes there. Around those model homes, of varying designs, was the empty space of a construction site. I've been to many, and they are often exactly alike in terms of the interior design. This isn't surprising given that they are trying to appeal a broad range of consumers with traditional indications of "comfort."

I recall opening the refrigerator to see whether there was any food. There was none. The only food in the house was the plastic fruit in the bowl on the kitchen table. Sometimes there would even be plastic bread and other foods laying on plates. To my siblings and I, going to a model home was somewhat like being able to snoop through someone else's house. Sadly, it was nothing like people's actual homes, as the interesting details were missing. But it sure seemed as if someone lived there.

The decoration didn't vary much model-to-model. The real estate agent would lead us around, inevitably presenting the boys room and the girls room. The girls room was uniformly pink and unnervingly tidy, the boys blue and tidy. There were cardboard books on the shelf, or if it was an actual book, it would be something generic like a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. There were child-like scrawlings on pieces of paper placed on the wall. What was eerie was not only the complete absence of the supposed denizens of this space, but how dull and typical their lives seemed. All of the model homes seemed to house the same family.

The same detritus of family life is also present in different types of showrooms across the country - I have also been to many of these - and in my boredom, tagging along begrudgingly with my mom, I'd hit the tvs of cardboard, or fiddle with the cardboard books. Something disturbed me about the books, especially, since the books seemed the pinnacle of boring, made to look like the sort of tomes lining the wall of an attorney's office. What sort of contents would be in a cardboard book anyway?

From an article in the Chicago Tribune - "The right model can conjure the emotions and mental pictures that help a builder tap into a buyer’s needs, wants and dreams." It is clear what the intention of model homes are, but in retrospect, they have their own sort of beauty, both in the representation of the ideal home life, and the eerie silence of the invisible occupants.

New Westminster, B.C, late November

1. Faded Union Pacific Railroad sign
2. Various LPs in Salvation Army not unlike the U.S collections - e.g, The Moms and the Dads.
3. XXX 25 cent Peep Shows. I am still unused to such things.
4. Muddy environs around factories, smoke emitting from them.
5. Bookstores, including one in which The Magic Mountain was purchased.
6. A landscape not unlike the one seen in a dream I had about visiting New Westminster, in which I was standing on one side of the sidewalk and across the street a terrible gust knocked-down two apartment buildings.
7. A man collapsed in the Sky Train station. I looked back in concern, but ultimately carried on, Sky Train officials attending to him.