disaster

I hear about things happening in Texas from people in Mass who read an article in the Guardian or the New Yorker. 

The bartender keeps showing me AI videos of animals walking around in Nikes, not knowing they’re fake. I go awhhh (to keep wonder alive).

My mom asks me on the phone if I know what’s happening in the Texas legislature, that they’re trying to bring us to our knees. 

I try to track each calamity. I’m spent by 2pm if I haven’t totally removed myself from the current. I smooth my days into zones pasteurized for unfeeling and getting work done. 

I’ve been writing about the spaces where imagined futures have begun to lay themselves over the ground in hyperreal acres. The way land gets held in wait– reserved for rocket launches and hyperloops, filled with temporary attentions and covered with a layer of cement so that nothing else can grow there. How these landscapes hustle promises. Lately this writing has been on Snailbrook, Musk’s “Texas utopia for employees”, or a company town depending on who you ask. Snailbrook is neither utopia nor town but a barren plot of land seeming sortof lost in the muted fields of central Texas, stained with metals and buzzing quietly with futurity. It’s land torqued to ground a not-yet world, a landscape dotted with unreals. 

I’ve been driving to the town-idea ever since a group of us ethnographers visited thinking it might be a place to feel out  what was going on. When we got there no one had a feeling of having arrived anywhere.   It was half-built and half-alive, a construction site hidden behind security posts. It was a blueprint for a future existence– mostly signs naming the location of things that didn’t yet exist, impenetrable factories and prefab buildings, modular facades chucked in the middle of a fallow field. When we asked where the visitor center was, people kept telling us to go to the website. We wandered aimlessly, peeked behind walls, saw nothing, roamed the nascent world like it was a stupid seedling, wondered what full-grown would look like, waited. 

On the trips I’ve taken since then, I think I’ve slowed time almost to a halt by paying too much attention to the place. It seems the town is getting pulled together one blade of astroturf at a time.

Cranes leer forever, yellow tape cordons off a nothing slat of asphalt for a year. Everything is paused in the middle of a wait, a partiality nearly stabilized. 

Between the present and the techno-utopian future are places in which life is suspended in wait. These places say that life is tensed on the verge of some other type of life. They dole out pacifying pleasures, making worlds out of activities like ping pong or hair cut, tiring out life until it goes slack. These are waiting rooms for what’s looming, made to keep future-dreamers busy with hope, made to feel like waiting is an activity rather than a stuckness. Snailbrook is one of these– a rehearsal for a point of contact, a point of triangulation with the actual. Here, days buoy in a gelatinous fog, time lulled into a beige stupor. Life and labor move among pale humorless walls, held in the seams of actualities, loose- drifting in the oblivion of undifferentiated time. 

Month after month, Snailbrook fails to arrive. It barely exists in space, occupying land but not quite existing in relation to the soil. If you’re there, Snailbrook seems to be somewhere or sometime else. It’s a place moving out from its own face, crudely escaping presence. A rough draft flaunting itself too soon. Everyone drops little promises into it. What it’s like doesn’t matter so much as what it might be like. There are rumors of an expansion. 

On each drive there I imagine for thirty-six miles what might have changed since last time. 

On each drive home I work for a blurry count to milk meaning out of my visit. 

I had hoped to find a person screaming out to the empty fields for release. I had hoped to watch wildflowers getting singed in the sun near the unshaded pickleball courts. I had hoped to overhear Snailbrook’s men rehashing colonial dreams over Starbase brewery’s lager named “the Terraformer”.

Really, it’s a hope that bad motives get instantiated in ways we can point to. That the calamity is composed of some nodes we can flag and tear into as densities, stick theory and thought into, string together as sentences bearing some connection to a reality. It’s a hope that a fugitive world can be tugged and tied into presence, that the right words could lure the belly of this thing right out, that we could give people something to read. 

I try to track each calamity. No calamities are really going on. There’s just slight bristlings of doom. 

Everything hangs between an idea and a reality, simmers there unset.

The chainlink fence surrounding Snailbrook is covered in fake ivy, some of it bleached by the sun into a gone color. I wonder what it’s like to drive past these vines every day, see them not grow. 

The northern edge of this fence runs into another, a rusty iron one containing a neighboring field of dry horses. The materials of the two perimeters hit each other in a confrontation about exposure, and weathering, and time, how life gets contained. 

A gate opens to let cars out of Snailbrook every once in a while. A silver Tesla’ed woman emerges and I can’t believe she’s acting like this is a gate and she’s on a road. Her turn signal goes on, professing the reality of the drive.

Nothing is a disaster. I think disaster unfolds piece by piece in a mosaic of small insults to life. Joy gets picked apart like fingertips.  

The news is a violent saturation of maybes. Much of the world is assumed to be hallucinatory, making it hard to feel something for. It’s better to steel oneself into an indefinite temper. All we can do is stitch together narratives about what might happen based on the little mirages we’ve gathered that day, anticipate the vague potential of a partial feeling, make intensities for later. Attitudes are had in a very adjacent way. A feeling rarely rises to a summit, a shared affect. People pretend to be cloudless to get through the conversation. 

At 6pm two women sit at the Snailbrook bar in fluorescent Boring Company shirts, each with three empty Bud Lites in front of them, pawing lightly at pleasure. The bar is made of a streaky teal and blue marble that doesn’t exist. One woman’s stool wobbles on three legs, its fourth always hovering half an inch above the phony stone floor. 

The place blinds me with unreals like an afterimage, eyes pulled into a sour recoil against the blare of incandescent ideals coming to exist or failing to. It’s hard to know how to focus. The cagy world only articulates itself through speeding enormities, a high-octane blur of vows, insistences, panoramic sleights of hand.

Outside the bar, the playground is covered in recycled plastic painted green to look like chunks of something alive. I’m surprised it’s not melting. Nothing looks as real as it does in a rendering, not non-grass nor duration nor the future nor all this quiet, catastrophic impermanence.