The crossroads of america

Indianapolis, the city of conventions, a square factory producing metropolitan blockheads, but more of a fly-to place than people think, a container of multitudes, large numbers of the same kind of person at a time, not individuals with flamboyantly poetic contradictions; rather flocks, crowds, herds, fatty froth in churning waters, suitable for a place like this, with its everyman everywhere hospitality, its middle of the road charm, notwithstanding the ominous though mostly unremarked undertext of the phrase, raising the question of the type of road, because on a highway driving down the middle will get people killed. The center isn’t always safer; sometimes it’s a bullseye or a sinkhole.  

Gencon came to town last weekend. A nerd convention, something about comic books. I don’t know how many people and I won’t look it up. More than should gather in one place. One person chokes the life out of a room, tramples on delicacies, the one always harboring at least one more, if not a bustling cross section of selves then at minimum a series of reflected shards, a busybody shade, a dark gleaming skin always shedding, piercing membranes of silence and obscurity. No matter what, a person makes for an unsettling presence, but then add hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, all of coagulated mind, with the same mold, smelling of one basement dwelling blood. Looking like they fell out of the same damp low leaves of a tree, shaken loose and now blowing along, or flung like old tractors in a tornado. Whatever washes up en mass on a forgotten shore, drifting shipwreck mixed with sea scum, bio-mash.  

Crowd typology: the dispossessed, migrants, exiles, pilgrims, the ceremonial, the festive, the stalled in traffic, the town square idlers, the nomadic, the torch-bearing, the revolutionary, the riotous, and more recently in greater number, the commercial, the legions of fans, the entertainment worshippers, the experienceers, meat-seeking tongues, the downtrodden and rudderless in need of guiding stars, cardinal points, a little help holding up the horizon. They want to taste, they want to enjoy, return to their fixations and celebrate them with others; while we’re here we should go to this place, they have the best frimpanades, and in the morning we can go to servicide, they’ll kill you with their lattes, and then we can go to the booth/tent/camp/ amphitheater for a showing/screening/sale/raffle/wet t shirt eating contest and then after that I know a venue for 

Genesis of the crowd, its startling appearance, a strange growth, a big red boil on the back of a people. From the bond to the family to the band to the clan to the tribe to bigger groups with fewer adhesives. Proper social bodies articulate themselves internally, they create tendons and joints, networks of relationships with complimentary roles and responsibilities. Crowds consist of a single shifting and porous border, a reductive commonality, sloppy ephemeral enthusiasm. They act like touchy gorillas, one bad banana from smashing windows, flipping over cars; they need grooming, hair brushing, sonorous words, light shows, room to drag their knuckles but limits to their movement, a well-tended pen.  

Gencon weekend, a surge of sales, a frenzy of exchanges, bottlenecks and wide bottoms. Three different shops asked if I could work. They need extra hands for all the extra mouths, the lines around the block, the hirsute hordes, descendants of Genghis Khan, from goat milk on horseback on the blazing steppe to oat milk on padded seats in air conditioning. I worked six days last week and I needed one day off to pretend to recover, a Sunday in which painters operated a lift that beeped whenever it was used; a strange old couple outside my windows, commissioned by the old woman in the ground floor apartment who wants to own the building, the widow I should humor, invite to dinner and drinks, listen to her stories about her dead husband, the woman who wants me to be excited about all these renovations, the migrant workers on my walls, when I don’t care about the facade of a rental property, all I want is a break from power tools and work, blaring horns, roaring engines. The outside of this place could resemble the lair of a lich if the surroundings stayed still, quiet, free of groaning honking projects. Faded paint and rotting wood are fine, for the love of God give me a serene day.  

The desire of the old woman pitted against mine, against the landlord’s, the painters, the carpenters, the desire of the consuming public against the serving public, the owners against the workers, the workers against themselves, the individual against himself. Dissonant interests in all directions. Mortal enemies with friendly faces, a cheery veneer on rankling sores. Desire is the engine of hatred and discord, it can’t be tamed, appeased, harmonized. Not only is there desire to cause harm, to crush and humiliate, there are blackened moods and contemptuous acts spawned from impeded urges, conflicting good intentions. Love, attraction, passion: spurs to hostility, bellows of tension, not antidotes or balms.  

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Went into the shop this morning, the second one where I work an extra shift a week, normally the easy one, the day of slightly lighter labor. Overnight the pipes backed up and overflowed the drains. I walked in to floors coated in oily sewage, full-sized turds in the mop sink, pell-mell corn. The septic undercurrents of want and need erupt onto the surface of everyday exchanges, tainting the clean channels of commercial flows. Division of labor usually restricts me to handling the front end of cravings and routines, the input portion of sensory delights, but now and again, the obscene output, the flushed down outcome of little gratifications, spews forth and threatens the tenuous hygiene of mass market environments, and I put on my sagging plumbers pants and wade into the feculent way of all feasts.