Can you smell winter yet? in anticlimatic

These two photos are over 100 years apart, though not a whole lot has changed. The Boat Works is long gone, replaced by a ball field- and that long brick wall you see in the background of the more recent photo is Sunset Boulevard, built in the 50s as a bypass for the congested older downtown streets.

Something about the coal smoke in the old photos gives me more of a chill than other winter scenes. Maybe because of how pronounced and inescapable it is. The way any heat escaping feels in the frigid areas of the world.

Do you remember what you thought the adult world was built to look like, when you were kid? When your entire conceptualization of it was modeled after the 5 places you had ever been in person and Sesame Street? I remember the hair salon I went to, routinely. It was on my list of 5 places. “A Cut Above” it was called. Large rectangular box of a room with red brick exterior walls almost up to the ceiling, but instead they stopped near the top and ended. Behind and above them some long short windows, set back in drywall and too high to see out of, let light in. There were two chairs. One on the left, and one on the right. The lady had a tight perm. I didn’t hate being there, though I remember one of my younger brothers crying like the mammas boy he is to this day when they started cutting his hair for the first time.

I remember sitting in my long rectangle of a bedroom at some point later, recreating the salon from memory to pass the time. Thinking back on it now, thoughts turn more towards my mother. Her mother, my grandmother, is still alive, but they’re both getting old. I love them dearly. I lost my dad, but my ma was always the one I knew I would have the hardest time dealing with not having on this earth. She always had these creative ideas of fun and interesting things to do, and she would put a mountain of effort into crafting these experiences, but people would predictably be uninterested in new things and/or preoccupied with their own affairs. I was certainly guilty of this once I became a teenager, though I have changed my tune in adulthood.

I realized at a certain point how similar I was to her, and what kind of feelings are involved in having an eccentric personality. I also learned how rare warm creative types are, in general. My ma was such a large portion of my world as a child, I assumed that’s just what a large portion of the world was like.

I was dead wrong. Most of the human world is cold soulless consumption or destruction- people who have that spark of creativity and audacity are literally the only sources of light that I can see- like a night sky with just a handful of stars.