The trace.

It's growing late on the West coast, and the neighborhood is filling with the shrieks and cracks of fireworks. These sounds have grown steadily, through the nights previous to this. Abita (my dog) has decided this is reason enough to invade the foot of my bed & occupy my left foot. This all seemed like reason enough for me to launch into things here.

As I typed and deleted & stalled, my friend Tynan sent me a message. We've both suddenly found ourselves on our home coast again, surprisingly & happily. He's just started a project, teaching computer mapping software how to read photographs. We used to work on a monitoring crew together, years ago, where we were the crew cartographers—among many other jobs. We worked by hand, sketching the shapes and traces of river/creek paths, active and extinct.

I've been working on a large mapping project for another old friend, as an epithalamion of sorts, drawing & laying in color on a globe in reverse—as it might look from the core. It's been surprising & useful to re-visit geography in this way, to get an alientated and intimate feel for the landforms and physics that underpin nation-building, ecology, natural resource management. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lets us know that Jacques Derrida wrote "one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it.”

I'd like to hold on to this way of considering & seeing for awhile, working and writing in my alienated & intimate home. Thank you for joining me here.