SONG OF THE DAY: N30N M00N (chopped and screwed)

I’ve been finding a lot of abandoned trailers lately – doublewides and old singles. They’re not as glamorous for the internet-minded urban exploration crowd, who eat up taking posed pictures of dilapidated old farmhouses. They’re just shitty fucking trailers that aren’t worth shit once somebody got sick and moved away or went to live with relatives or whatever. I found one the other week where the driveway to it had literally been ripped up too, so it was just sitting up in the woods, not shit around. Only reason I could tell it was there was a bunch of daffodils and other flowers in a planned cluster in the woods up above the railroad tracks I was walking, which is usually a sign that somebody had once planted them there in that fashion. So I hacked my way through the blackberry tangles to get there.
I’ve lived in a trailer before, multiple times in my life actually, and almost bought one brand new when my marriage dissolved, which felt like a horrible idea so thankfully fell apart before it came into full reality. Trailers are rip-offs, basically applying credit scams to people who can’t afford a whole house, and making them feel like they’ve done something rich people could never do because they live in a trailer. And there’s some inadvertent truth to that, because there’s a hardened psychology that comes from living in a trailer that’s unlike any other thing, because you’re really cramped in, but separate from everything else, like out in the country or even in semi-urban trailer parks. But you also never feel all that super protected from the world outside to be honest. So you get a weird psychology to yourself.
Anyways, due to the expansion of trailer marketing (as supported by famed wealthy investor Warren Buffet, who’s basically the driving force between the growth of new mobile home sales in America, through his fake-binary of Clayton and Oakwhood Homes, both of which use the same installation and credit companies, and manufacturing base, so are essentially the same company pretending to be two competing ones), there’s a lot more abandoned trailers. There’s also a lot more abandoned malls, and as the JC Penney’s nearby were all closing, I kept circling back trying to catch mannequins on sale at closeout prices towards the end. They never got as cheap as I wanted, but in all my obsessive searching, I did figure out a couple places where mannequins were getting dumped. They weren’t as nice as the shiny JC Penney ones, but they served my purpose, and for a while I had a pile of mannequins under the house I moved into last fall. It never occurred to me to do anything other than keep them on my compound until recently when they were relaying all the tracks on both the local CSX and Norfolk Southern lines. There was a piece where they cut off the old track, piece of track about 18 inches long, which I wanted to put in my yard. But that bitch was heavy, so I couldn’t carry it the mile and a half to my car in one trip. Thus it took me five or six trips, carrying the fucking thing as far as I could before my arms started cramping up, and then tossing it into the bushes in case the railroad workers came through to collect all the pieces for scrap before I got it out of there.
This heavy duty endeavor made me realize how far I could probably carry a mannequin, especially if just walking along railroad tracks like I mostly am. So I started putting mannequins up in the abandoned trailers I’d found, generally two but sometimes three or four if the dilapidated scene in the abandoned trailer demanded it. For example, in the one without the driveway, there’s a kitchen table with chairs still but also a really big couch, all in the big open main area with insulation and raccoon shit everywhere. So I put two folks on the couch and one at the kitchen table looking towards them. But there was also a queen sized mattress and box spring still in the master bedroom at the back of the house, and I figure I should always put a mannequin in a bed, just out of general lounge principles, so I did. So that one trailer took four mannequins, which I can only fit two at a time in the trunk of my car, and that trailer was like a half mile hike from the closest car parking point. So I had to make two trips by car, both times carrying two mannequins, which then required a trip with each one, because you can’t go walking down the railroad tracks with two mannequins. A short train spraying pesticides along the tracks actually came by while I was carrying one on the second trip, and you should’ve saw the worker’s face who was spraying the chemicals out the window when he was some bearded dude with a buck naked mannequin slung over his shoulder standing beside the tracks in the middle of nowhere.
All told, I think I’ve scattered about 17 mannequins in 7 different abandoned trailers at this point. It’s exciting to think of some other weirdo out looking for shit in the middle of nowhere, who sees a trailer and thinks, “Oh cool, let me go see what’s up with that shit,” and then they get there and THERE’S FUCKING MANNEQUINS SET UP EVERYWHERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. That’s gonna freak somebody the fuck out.
Sadly, I imagine eventually somebody who does it for the clout will find one of my scenes, and take a bunch of pictures, and go semi-viral on Instagram or some shit, for the mannequins in an abandoned trailer shit. Gentrifiers ruin everything, even out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t do it for the clout though; I do it for the art.