P003 → zine world

Driving past all the lights at night. It had the liveliness and density of a city. At some age, when I realized that it wasn't the city, I spent the rest of those rides pretending it was one. It was the Union Carbide (Dow) manufacturing plant. I really thought of it as beautiful and made a point to look at it every time we drove by it. I wasn't allowed downtown much anyways, so it felt like an extension of the places I didn't know yet.

Did I like that drive because it usually meant I was on the way to see my best friend? I loved the interstate, this one wasn't complicated. 2’ deep potholes, 2 lanes. I felt important being on the interstate, like I had reeeeal places I was going. Like I was heading north towards the ‘big city’ of Charleston, West Virginia. Closer to something more *important*. Although north was really south east, and South Charleston was really northwest relative to Charleston. Are these bureaucratic delusions the beginning of everyone's madness or is something actually in the water (even though we know exactly what's in the water).(4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) and if that's what we know then imagine what we don't.

I never really even noticed how directionally defunct it was. It is south by “river standards”

Blaine island is the land that holds the manufacturing plant. Surrounded by the Kanawha River, it leaches into the water, I never even once thought of the water as somewhere anyone were to swim. It's funny that we call it an island. It never crossed my mind that it was a ‘river’ either. Islands are untouched and fertile. Rivers in my mind were deep blue, flowing, something out of a Zoobook commercial. A black bear with a fish in its mouth.

This river was solely a backdrop to the interstate bridges and a division between ‘scary’ downtown and my few little places I know. It almost felt like a solid plane at times, that if I drove off the interstate I would land on something hard and shatter like a tom and jerry cartoon. The color so indistinct, only reflections of the moodiness of a post industrial rural region turned suburban. This was the type of suburbia where you don't get a cheesecake factory, you get seven burger kings.

When i sweat i have a chemical smell, like centipedes i was told by an ex boyfriend. Maybe it really is just biology and my gene pool sucks but my gene pool has been absorbing the fumes of blaine island and the toxic runoff of coal mines for generations and thats what ill say to make myself feel better. Absolved of being born into a lesser caste. Maybe you actually can smell poverty. There's ethylene flowing through my blood like a rite of passage to act the part. Do we get a pass because life was a little less beautiful for us and we were born into generational illnesses and a toxic environment?

Moving away felt sobering- the normalcy and resolute kindness I was suddenly surrounded by in Texas.. Everyone was so perfect in Austin. Do they have something else in their blood? High on the fumes from food trucks instead of blaine island and better access to psychedelics instead of prescription pills? As they drive their cars over the 100’ tall highways, do they think about how submergible they’d be if they flew off into the Colorado river? I do.

How can two places with the central point of water go in such different directions? People are more free in Austin but not wild/insane.

~analysis of both cities origins/indian tribes that established region.. Salt mines.. Boar hunting~~~~~~ initial settlement around river and how the cities diverged into different economies etc idk

The Future of Nostalgia (book) alludes to immigrants using nostalgia as a coping mechanism. Finding beauty in industrial, utilitarian infrastructure is probably a coping mechanism for overlooking the melancholy of a post-industrial, population declining town. Maybe not? There's something comforting about things with function and their reliability and unfussiness.

Appalachian fatalism trickling in from Irish ancestry? Environment induced? Or can it really just be the result of reality