The Illustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe

Laundromat in Kirby, Wisconsin.
Winter, 1980.

It’s warm here. Outside the snow has turned into a mixture of oily disgrace, frozen candy wrappers, crushed beer cans still partially filled with beer and old saliva; the snow had become a disgusting cold puzzle of sweat.

I’m sitting on a greasy plastic chair the color of a baby’s blanket which is linked to several other identical chairs, full of cracks and sadness, on either side. Somewhere out in the bleak landscape that surrounds this disgraceful little town, I can hear the howl of a train that has yet to let up. As the scene fades to black, after a horrible wreck, the car horn just blares on and on… Much like that, in the distance, I can hear the train’s horn, unceasing, but fluid. IT seems to fade in and out and move side to side.

A defeated woman wearing a thin, worn sweater that, like everything else in this winter world, seems to drained of color. A dilapidated beige basket sits near her into which she is placing neat stacks of folded clothes that seem as sodden and miserable as everything else here. I feel the overall repression of the gray sky, the cold outside, the large plate window behind me which hasn’t been cleaned for years, apparently. There is a decrepit loneliness that I find irresistible as well as nauseating. It can’t just be the building for I’ve felt a growing ennui and cryptic malaise growing in and around me since this trip began. I cannot be so shallow as to blame it on the locales for isn’t this the purpose?

How sick it it? The goal is to follow the coils of vomit, worthlessness, and the broken human condition down to the very bottom. It isn’t so easy because you can’t just rush toward the extremes of homelessness or addiction. When one lives in a chemically induced haze, it isn’t really the bottom. It’s when you’ve got enough to go on, a roof, money enough to pay bills, and worse of all, a static routine. This is where the bottom lies, when you’ve slowly drifted down through the wastrel sea, past the eddies and gentle tides, to where the water flows so little that it has become fetid and stale, the lives contained therein stagnant, from surface to core; helpless.

But I look on this sad, broken being folding towels flattened and worn thin with age, holed, and tattered, and I do not feel uplifted. I do not feel my situation to be any better than hers. I am not merely an observer, I have become a participant. And it was here that I found that there was something below the bottom, and with grim determination, I gasped my last breath of greater airs and dove into the depths.