Bookstore Creep: Free Sublimation For Your Reading Pleasure
This column is written by a partial-earth creature and may be perplexing without context. Check out the previous columns in the Bookstore Creep series:
I - Love After the End, from Belmont Books
II - Hikuri, from Mother Foucault
III - Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, from Word Virus Books
IV - Free Association
V - Chain-Gang All-Stars, from Parallel Worlds Bookshop
VI - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, from Wallace Books
VII - Mona, from Powell’s Books
Preface.
Even partial-earth creatures are subject to the whims of summertime. Missions get derailed, books are half-read and scattered on the floor, fingers put on this planet to turn pages go off on a wild hare and start typing. I do proclaim that I, Rosalie L.H. Caggiano, have been writing more than I have been reading. The whole thing started when I was introduced to urges. Stay in these meat suits long enough and you start to feel stuff and things just like everyone else. Now I have all of these urges to do things that are very… not allowed. It began to frustrate me as a literary being, to not be able to play out pure creativity in the busy, rather drab and well-edited book that we call society. I had to actually stop my brain from doing something wonderful in the name of self-preservation… social standing…. Then I realized that I could play out every urge to its wildest finale in the sacred world of words.
*
I began volunteering for DePave Portland last summer, but to be frank I always had ulterior motives. Or, rather, I always had extractive ideologies. Sledge hammers, pry bars, even the occasional concrete saw glistening in the noonday sun with its diamond blade sprayed slick by water hose; my eyes lit up with love for these tools of perfect destruction. Don’t get me wrong - I am proud to have helped create greenspaces in the overly expansive parking lots of elementary schools and little extraneous triangles created by the diagonal speedy cut throughs of Sandy Boulevard. But I had my own angry street full of vehicles billowing gas into my front yard: Southeast 52nd Avenue. An error of Portland, with janky engines revving at all times of day to speed between one stoplight and the next, only five blocks away - who is trying to get from here to there just a tiny bit faster by avoiding 82nd or Ceasar Chavez? A bunch of fuckers. An infinite amount of fuckers, in fact. It is incredible, sitting there, attempting to play ukulele, the way my own emissions are lost to the sea of gas and noise.
How much more exhaust do I breathe in on a main road than if I were guarded by a block or two of tall buildings and broadleaf trees? It is a question that I ask myself often and occasionally late at night I find myself on reddit building up a google drive folder of studies that make my case, for example a study from the King’s College in London reading:
“living within 50 metres of a major road may increase your risk of developing lung cancer by up to 10%. The levels of recorded roadside air pollution stunt lung growth in children by approximately 14% in Oxford, 13% in London, 8% in Birmingham, 5% in Bristol, 5% in Liverpool, 3% in Nottingham, and 4% in Southampton.”
I’m not exactly worried about my lungs, considering I do lots of other things to harm my body when I feel like it. But in my cognitive dissonance I am worried about my garden - despite my adorable front yard with a sturdy fence, I cannot bring myself to grow anything that I want to eat there. I am saddened by the fronts of my neighbors houses, shuttered and curtained and abandoned, all of us scooching as far as we can towards the backs of our abodes, putting as much absorbent mass as possible between ourselves and the vehicles. I was saddened and saddened until somewhere in that deep well that I had excavated, fallen down, and clawed at the rough earthen edges of, I became angry. When I became angry I began to preach and preach to my friends until I had a team of people who felt my pain, who were willing to risk something to see a few ounces of better-ness.
We didn’t know what world we were setting about creating yet, but we knew it would be something better than this. We had faith in the experiment.
I had 30 people at my little house, brewing coffee at 10 p.m. while donning masks and gloves and high-res vests. I was out in my borrowed work truck with a little cloth over the license plate, doing laps around the city until I had accumulated enough unmonitored traffic cones and road work signs. Then I rolled gently up to the headquarters of Depave, popped open a window with as much care as I could muster with my shaking hands, and loaded as many crowbars, wheelbarrows, dollys, and walk-behind diamond saws as I could fit into the back of the truck.
Steele to Holgate, Steele to Holgate, and if we had the juice, a few blocks north. That is all I needed. That is all we needed, to really change something. By 11 p.m. on a sleepy Tuesday in the early spring we were setting up, blocking off, lighting flares, firing up walkie-talkies. It was misting rain and the moment we began a police car drove by lazily, gave me a wave, and continued on his way. I knew then that we would be safe, and breathed as deeply as I could. Another stroke of luck found us when we pried up the first square of pavement to find that the road had been paved twice previously, and that each layer was only a few inches thick. This would increase our efficiency massively, compared to some of the laborious afternoons with Depave where each square we lifted from the grateful earth was nine inches thick and weighed in over two hundred pounds. We sang songs back and forth on the walkie talkies, Steele to Holgate, as we ran the diamond blade saw in criss crossing lines, pried, smashed slabs that were too heavy to move easily, and loaded up. Two trucks making regular trips to dump under one of the less monitored bridges. No reusing and recycling this stuff - we all agreed it was better to call it forsaken. By sunrise we were cleaned up, the work truck was returned to its home 30 minutes away, the tools were re-organized in the Depave headquarters, and everyone went home to shower and try to get a few winks of sleep. I pulled the blinds in my own house, laid down in bed, and could not sleep in the slightest. Already I thought I heard more birds. My toes would not stop wiggling, my hands would not stop fidgeting, so I gave up on rest and got dressed in the most proper clothes I had, and went to walk down to Woodstock to get a coffee.
Way down the road I could hear it. The honking. The thudding. The sharp sounds of undercarriages grinding, of cars bottoming out. Before me, utter chaos was unfolding as a whole herd of automobiles attempted to follow google maps on their most efficient morning commute. I flinched a bit at the injury and expense that I had inflicted, and said a little prayer to the soil that these were only growing pains.
Eventually, things mellowed down. Word spread that there had been some sort of error, a company who lost funding in the middle of road work or something, maybe some corruption due to new leadership in the city. Word spread to “avoid 52nd ave between Steele and Holgate, unless you want to ruin your car”.
Behind closed doors and up higher than the average residence, Antoine Augustin of the State Bureau of Investigation was reviewing camera footage and work orders. Nothing clear yet. A few phones were tapped, a few facts were gathered. Did you know that about a third of the city of Portland uses every word on the flagged word list via text in a calendar year? He’d have to have something to show by the end of the quarter.
Meanwhile on 52nd, spring was budding in earnest and the residents were beginning to build the confidence to explore their new reality. It began in a form that could best be understood in a dream, because to them it still felt like something of a dream.
Could it be? Windows were propped open, garden beds moved out closer to the non-roadside. A neighbor or two got bold enough to make plans for a block party, and posters went up. I met those that lived on the other side, as they walked in the middle of the nonroad with their backpacks or pulled up on side streets. We paused for long whiles, discussing the future of our neighborhood or who nearby is in need of support.
At night on full or rather full moons the teenagers among us stole out to smoke or kiss out in the quiet dusty expanse, bringing picnic blankets and tapestries. At sunset the old ladies among us began to make a habit of bringing out little plants in pots. At sunrise the tech guys got together for calisthenics and sprints. I mustered the courage to pound in two dozen T-posts where the double yellow line used to be, and from there we strung spare bolts of cloth and whimsical flags and bells. The earth responded to the last rains before summer, and the love of soft feet, and sprouted. Plantain, mallow, clover… we began to seed little packets of native flowers over every square inch until we had something better than a meadow before us. We fertilized and trellised and added and added until there could never be room for a road again. Until none of us could imagine a road there again.
By that point, Antoine Augustin was among us, and we believed he was a neighbor from “just across the way”. By that point, he knew who I was and had almost enough data collected to make the arrest. It was looking like three years in prison, and a healthy round of questioning. By the time July came around, I would be going away for a while. Was it worth it? Would you write to me?
Rosalie L.H. Caggiano
Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.
