Airports used to be a 1. I don’t know how it happened but now airports are a 3. This doesn’t make sense. Drugs are generally at a therapeutic peak at the airport, this is on purpose, and should keep fluttering butterflies off the wheel and see them safe behind the glass walls of a benzodiazepine bell jar. No more. Now airports are full of people who are even less real than what is generally referred to by that term. It’s profoundly upsetting, being surrounded by ghost-like philosophical zombies. Even seeing them physically hurts. It’s nearly as bad as dollar stores.

If everything happens at once temporally, so that they may both be there and not, but the 3, being discreet creates a touchstone, it’s ridiculous to expect me to cope with this in a way that could be decreased normative. I can’t change the order in which things happen. I can’t tell what’s about to happen, that’s been dead for years, a personal failure. I can try and push and prod all to maybe move the needle just a little, enough to get to the other side of security. And security, inscrutable. Signs describing requirements are smudged hieroglyphs. Standards from a federal agency are inconsistent whims. There’s no way to adapt, no way prepare for alligator wrestling, not when it’s a different alligator every time. I hate it there. They broke it.

Something has changed the utilitarian, earnestly navigable airport as a 1 into the worst sort of 3. With enough β-blockers it shouldn’t be possible to get constant high heart rate alerts. It’s a good thing though in theory, proof of life, at least. I think this is all related to a personal problem. Without being able to put a date to it, though it’s been months now, sketchbooks and watercolor blocks and pallets and pens have been abandoning me. That’s maybe inside, it’s my faltering regime of maintenance that’s the root of the problem. That might be good to write about later-for now tides.

Build upon a beach, or among the dunes, and in time be overtaken. Have you ever been to Kittyhawk? There’s a mini gulf there swallowed by dunes. It’s more meaningful than any corps of engineers flooded village. What to do about disappearing cotton paper and fake sable brushes, pages of effort suddenly gone forever? Cheap. Become cheap. Throw out the pretense and use the worst paper. Use a gel rollerball. I can’t pretend to have it figured out yet, they just seem far more forgiving when I suffer a lapse.

Yeah, of course I know, this is just filler, prologue. The next one will be at least a little practical, I promise. For now a poor attempt at presenting things in narrative form. It was described to me once what it was like to take a day off from school in the middle of the week. Car on the road and things on the sidewalks were all surprising. It’s a dissonance. Should be on school, so seeing the everything that still exists is strange. It’s how shallow graves and tarp-wrapped corpses are found; the depositor takes for granted that the out of the way corner of the field, the scrubby tree line, is remote. The solopists oversight.