walk: september 20 – october 19, 2020 (despite leonards november walk)
images of the suburbs taken at night during a 30–night project, based on the short story of the same name by ray bradbury. enough people have written about windows and bradbury does ample enough job to describe the ideas sought after in this 30–night. so as a statement, read the short story and maybe read the thoughts while walking.
it should also be said that somehow, in someway, leonard meads existence was channeled early within dylan flah. dylan flah only sometimes would go on nightly rituals.
sometimes the walks would take place devoid of a barrier between sidewalk and road and mostly right down the double yellow line, and sometimes they would take place staring into the stars and the beyond and letting the air guide body, and sometimes they took place waiting for a crosswalk signal unpressed for minutes on end while the turn signals cycled and cycled, and sometimes they would take place with body motionless in said crosswalk, waiting for a moving vehicle to light the way, and sometimes they would take place totally and completely wasted on alcohol, and sometimes the crickets were the only thing that guided the way, and sometimes it was knowing only the prying eyes even at night were the ones watching the performance of a body dancing to the silence the headphones provided.
notes while walking:
︎︎︎ leonard mead is alive and well in 2020, not 2053.
︎︎︎ the sun never falls, the moon is just a mirror.
︎︎︎ will the distant stars know where i am headed before i do?
and will they know if i find what i am searching for?︎︎︎ why is the moon encouraging me to use the compass?
will they know what the search is?
will i reach it before body cannot go any further?
why do i think the moon is the one doing the encouraging?︎︎︎ will i hit the heres and theres, at some point before the theres become nows?
︎︎︎ do the homes change speed with the falling of the sun?
do the lives?︎︎︎ will i reach the suns reflection as i zig and zag through these homes?
︎︎︎ obsessed with movement of body through stillness, maybe i am comfortable being restless within a cage.
︎︎︎ does breath occur if nobody is around to judge it?
︎︎︎ walking/moving through a space that i do not fully understand or fully grasp my own feelings of or thoughts or desires or whatever it may be as a way to figure out what those may be. motion in silence to mimic the mind, my mind, within a head. a body cutting through the stillness because everyone else is afraid to do so. moving body in an attempt to catch up with mind, to get them going at the same pace again, and to find the things i cannot connect together, or the words i cannot place one after another. being or existing as a tiny blip within a greater space that doesnt seem to change much when the lights are off.
︎︎︎ walking in darkness cuts off your vision, or most of it, forcing your eyes to look the only place they know: at the darkness they are more comfortable with, that is the darkness inside. this can be in heads or homes.
︎︎︎ amazing how you can just put a foot in front of another and somehow the place you started at is a speck up on the hill (very grateful and privileged to be 1. able to put legs in front of one another and 2. live in a place that has hills with structures able to withstand nature called homes)
︎︎︎ people are comfortable being undefined here, in the suburbs
︎︎︎ caught myself a few times wishing i was watching a movie, not to say im taking that away or doing this walk to break a habit, but maybe its just that i desire my own space again, or maybe its october and i like scary movies at night in the dark. in those moments, and few others because i enjoy the walks, the walks feel like a chore. like finishing my dinner before delving into a cookie... or pumpkin bread. so those nights i walk a bit slower a bit longer to “torture” myself into being accustomed to not getting what i want. and somewhere along the way, i get caught up in something else and realize i have to pee and head back to where i started.
︎︎︎ even this neighborhood thinks it is unsafe to walk at night, but thats purely because they have built a community less on trust and more on destructing the community and trusting the racist systems that support them instead
︎︎︎ i take the headlights as violence and i stare them down and i strut and fret under the streetlights, waiting for los angeles to take me away to puddles of money and cocaine
︎︎︎ if you can free yourself from shame within the suburbs you can do anything
︎︎︎ i looked up how long it would take to walk only one hundred miles. google says 24 hours. what a perfect number to come to. thanks google.
︎︎︎ walked because i am leonard mead and i enjoy walks, but did so when i was angry at a job leonard mead never had. this time instead of leonard mead trying to be dylan flah i was just angry at someone i no longer needed to deal with. found out that walking doenst really prolong rage, it just postpones it or amplifies it. walking isnt aggressive enough to let anything out. if anything, its just the amount of turmoil needed to boil the pot. walking is a passive exercise it seems, though it is one that if you walk far enough away or for long enough you can get lost within your own boiling just to realize you need to again go back to where you started. then it is up to the walker to decide to distance the walking from the ruin, in order to establish the task that brings them up versus the one that digs their own grave.
︎︎︎ well which one of these windows have i seen before? and, well, what even makes any of them different from the rest?
︎︎︎ was it this house? or the next one? or...?
where are they going? where arent they?
︎︎︎ watched people stand in the street looking at their house, looking at me walking down the center of the dark road as if i were the maniac. they were the ones making sure their nighttime facade was impecable.
︎︎︎ this sort of flail, this dance, with headphones in singing softly and motioning loudly, well its become a sort of performance. living inside one of these shells tells me how much watching from behind the curtains really exists, how much judgement persists for benefit of self actually occurs. id like this dancing or standing in the middle of intersections, this sort of axe murderer type behavior down the middle of the roads, to end up on the next door app. i want people who have no courage to simply say hello to me in return to report me as suspicious. to consider me a threat. one foot in front of another down a path is already so criminal around here.
︎︎︎ but who keeps watch on the neighborhood watch?
︎︎︎ walking here. living here. being here. its like screaming downtown. no matter how loud you do it, no matter how dramatic you behave. nobody notices. everybody notices. nothing changes. you just slowly become more mad together.