Neighbor’s new retaining wall, replacing rotting railroad ties.
Me: looking much better!
Also me: you know you caused this
Me: naw, the area’s been coming up in general!
Also me: and the specific mechanism of that here is you moved in and weeded and cleaned up this block every week for years so it doesn’t look like a goddamn wasteland
Those aren’t individual stones and not naturally colored that way, that was a big intact stretch of concrete from like a foundation demolished that was broken up into chunks, mortared together, and colored.
The Japanese word for bread is “pan”, reflecting how much Asian and African cuisine has really been Portuguese fusion for centuries now (well, I guess to the extent spaghetti and tomato sauce is Sino-Mesoamerican fusion, at least)
Neighborhood has exactly the right mix of small properties to open things in, medium properties to adaptively reuse for a decade then turn over, and big auto-service or for-construction-crews-to-pick-up-going-to-the-job retail (tile, carpet, plumbing fixtures, countertops, landscaping) that can turn over big intact plots for 4-over-1s, this area is really gonna be the future, won’t stall out like the closer Eastside like Belmont and Hawthorne where you’ve got to go narrow plot-by-plot cause there’s like one store in the middle with 4 apartments on the 2nd floor whose owner juuuust doesn’t find selling out worth it vs. that rent
Much in the way I respected the British left’s long-anticipated parties when Margaret Thatcher dies, I love how the American left’s been like “well at least Henry Kissinger’s gonna die soon” for several decades now
And my energy’s running down like some sad clockwork automaton!
But I can stick in the key and wind it by taking this powder that makes me thinner yet!
And this happens at the opening of every day, it’s like when they keep explaining the prince backstory in Utena. “But was that really such a great idea?”
More petty-ante backyard shit, also lately I’ve kinda been rearranging a few things and realize I’m not too far from completing the kitchen, which is the last room never-sorted, there’ll be some post-last-time cleanup in the other rooms too but still
Yeah so gentrification turns out to basically take exactly the paths I expected just first-time homeowners show up 7 years before young cool kid renters, apparently
“A 1920’s German New Objectivity art movement film about a small family looking out their window into complete darkness, knowing that the sun is never rising again”
every time i think this i feel like a stupid kid who must be missing somehting but it seems weird to me that the usual defense of solitary confinement is “they have to be solitary because otherwise theyll hurt other prisoners” because like. there are ways to allow people contact with other people, without them being able to attack those people. like. yknow. put people in adjacent cells with bars between them. or something. yknow? like this is so obviously not an insurmountable thing. its a very weak excuse for torture
I thought of it mostly as “the social and administrative order of prison is greatly easier to maintain if the prisoners can be directed to behave on threat of being sent more to prison”. Like, in much the way that the threat of being sent to first-order prison is important to the maintenance of order on the outside, only as applied against a population already selected on “may not actually obey under mere threat of imprisonment and need to be actually sent”?
