chase scenes serial #9
I haven’t grown up much. I am not going to turn back the pages to see what the last real subject I had been writing about was. I will merely go back to Bismarck, Friday morning, momentarily. To our stroll around the little capital city. I was expecting it to be like Rapid City. A frozen in time high plains town, divided into blocks with utilities running up the alleys and Mayberryesque storefronts from all the eras until the storefront succumbed to the box. Why open your store onto the street, display your goods, if your sign is draw enough, BestBuy, Walmart, Target. Your logos say more than a pyramid of toilet paper ever could. I thought it would be pregnant with a satisfying nostalgia. Yet Bismarck is Rapid City without the self-consciousness‡. It doesn’t pretend to care that someone who doesn’t work at the hospital or the Provident Building might be passing through. I am dying to look back to how I started this and why I am just now getting to Bismarck. I sha’n’t though. I’m not sure if I made that pact with myself. I think it just started at the top of this page. Although there is a sense, with the pen, the misspellings, the general formlessness of the text, that it is seeking an analogous relationship to
