There’s a few nice spots I’ve found or people have shared with me that are perfect monasteries of late capitalist decline – mixtures of industrial decline, graffiti, and survival-based existence where the houseless find homes where society’s all-knowing all-judging eyes leave them the fuck alone. I try not to share these spaces with too many people, especially not online. Sharing shit online is essentially snitching, maybe not automatically to the police but definitely to people who don’t understand or respect the codes of illegal or barely legal existence. Just because places exist like this, and people go there, doesn’t mean you automatically should.
I think about this a lot with regards to the internet, how all this information is just right there for anyone to have a superficial knowledge about everything on earth (that’s been exposed to the internet). There’s no guidance, no teacher to say, “Well yes, it’s an old factory that’s been abandoned for decades, but some people are living in there too so don’t just roll up in there loud as fuck, breaking bottles and shit.”
Quarantine times have shown that electronic escapes don’t satisfy the same physiological urges that physical escapes do. I’ve been trying to walk more, like two hundred miles a day, and had posted a bunch of haiku to an Instagram story one time, but it drained the battery on my shitty old iPhone, and it died halfway through so that I had to finish it when I got home, which was kind of stupid. So I’ve been carrying notecards in my pocket instead, and making stories of tanka that way. The battery never dies. It has reminded me that electronic escapes are not necessarily escapes but re-routes where we are avoiding the path we probably should’ve been taking in the first place.
It’s such a blessing on a long ass meandering pilgrimage somewhere or another to stumble upon some sort of abandoned place that you didn’t know about, that nobody told you about, enter it, and get to know it. Every place has these fucked up accumulations of experience that stain it, positively and negatively. I was in one recently, in pretty good shape actually, and there were these weird prayer art things in one section, normal graffiti in other, and I went to a back corner of one outbuilding in this complex and left a couple dirtgod haiku scribbles as well. These have become my favorite poems I write, scattered out in the world, maybe not seen by anybody ever, or only seen by a few humans who could give a shit less. I wrestle at times with whether or not I’m a “real” poet or “real” artist or writer. I got a poem published earlier this year, even though I’m horrible at trying to publish anything, basically because a co-conspirator of the illegitimate artz specifically requested I send something. So I did. It was cool, I guess, to send out links on various social medias about “hey I got a poem published” and a bunch of people I don’t really know clicked little hearts to acknowledge they saw the post, most of them likely without even clicking the link to see the actual poem. I know without a doubt that even if it’s only nine people over the next two years, every person who sees those dirtgod haiku scribbles in that far corner of the forge outbuilding in the abandoned factory complex, each one of them will actually see that haiku. Without a doubt. No having to follow links to other spaces, or tapping a symbol to give me false data suggesting there’s a higher likelihood they saw it. Every person who goes in that room will actually have seen it. That’s way more real, whether I can know it happened or not. In fact, despite human’s consisted insistence we still have scientific dominion over the Earth, I’d say people can never know what’s ultimately real. Life gets a whole lot easier when you accept that shit.
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