The Blog

I write here when I have something to say.

2025-07-15

I went to Lowell, MA

I only saw a very small part of it, but it was incredible. I knew it had a history as a center of industry during the industrial revolution, but I assumed most of it would have been torn down. I was not prepared to stand in a square entirely surrounded by seemingly endless walls of red brick, green framed windows, and riveted iron. The city is like someone tore my wildest fantasies of Victorian industrial architecture out of my mind and pasted them into real life. I cannot put into words how vast they felt, and I couldn't capture it with any photos either. The sense of scale must be experienced in person. Just endless expanses of brick. And you turn the corner, only to see a larger, more ornate building. The cherry on top is the sky bridges, and while the wooden covers have long since rotted away, their iron skeletons are still beautiful and impressive. The only thing the place is missing is the endless thrum of steam engines and train wheels. But of course the buildings are quiet. I wouldn't expect any of that to still be around.

Of course some of it has been claimed by developers. While searching specific buildings online I found one that had been torn halfway down and built back up with a plastic facade. Redevelopments like this are depressing and alarmingly frequent in a system which prioritizes profit to real estate companies over any potential benefit to people who might want to use that space.

The historic society has done some incredible work in making sure this doesn't happen often. Most of these places have been converted to useful space for people to live and work. One, pictured above, bordered a canal, and had plenty of space in the wide street for the city to plant trees and build a walking path. It was a peaceful and beautiful place to be. At least one of the mills has been fully restored, textile looms and all. I will visit Lowell again, to see the mills, take pictures of what is left, and learn as much as I can about its history.

To my friend, who recommended I visit Lowell and knew I would love it, I owe you one.

2025-07-11

Yesterday I saw a piece of furniture someone left beside our house. People leave junk around here a lot. There has been a stripped out washing machine and a pile of scrap metal in our yard for a few months. This piece was a little different though, it was a wooden wardrobe, ornately carved, clearly very old. It had claw foot legs, fluted pillars framing the drawers, and decorative brass hardware. The wood was a rich color, and would have been very beautiful if someone had kept it polished. It was still beautiful in its own way.

I thought I would drag it over to the furniture store so it could be resold to someone who wanted it. But today I saw that someone had moved it onto the street, smashed the drawers so they could fit into trash bags, and tore apart the frame so it could not be repaired. I don't know what to think of this. It's hard not to see it as a reminder that no matter how much effort I put into saving something, it only takes one person a few minutes to negate all of it. It is so much easier to destroy than to create or preserve. And everything I care about will ultimately be thrown away, or burned, or lost, or destroyed in some random undignified way.

Despite this, I keep going, and keep trying to do whatever I can to archive and preserve anything I can get my hands on. It conflicts with the voice in my head that constantly tells me that nothing I do matters. But I don't really know what else to do.

2025-07-07

I've been miserable every summer for the past five years or so. I've always been more of a winter person. I love the cold, the washed out colors, how dim and gloomy everything is, the sound of the rain and the eerie quiet of the snow. It's all very comforting. But summer should be more complamentary to that, I think, instead of a horrible thing I have to prepare for each year.

I was reminiscing on the summers of my past, and trying to focus on what had changed. Being even a little too hot is an extremely uncomfortable sensation for me. I think I am far too sensitive to heat and light. And I realized that it's not solely that the summers were less hot back then, it's that I had more ways of avoiding the harshness of the season.

Allow me to draw a number of comparisons here. My house, when I loved summer, was old, and built with natural cooling properties, as electric air conditioning hadn't yet been invented. Not that we didn't run air conditioners anyway. It was surrounded by trees and shade. I was forced to drive everywhere, but the car itself did have an aircon unit. I didn't care about my appearance. I would frequently go to lakes and pools to cool down.

My current home is a landlord box, which was once beautiful, but has had its natural cooling features stripped away. I am afraid to run the air conditioner too much because I can't afford it. There are trees here, but they are separated by vast patches of burning concrete. There is such a lack of trees in the city, especially in the areas that suffered the most damage from 20th century road expansions. The aircon unit in the car has long since died, with an unbelievable price tag for repair. I now want to look nice, which means showing off as little of my body as possible, something that's not possible in the intense heat. I am forced to show my skin or risk heat stroke. I hate my body too much to swim.

While the summers have been getting hotter, objectively, I don't think that's the problem I'm having. The summer itself hasn't become unbearable, my environment has. Someday, maybe things will get better, maybe I can move to an old home with shady trees and a secluded river for swimming, maybe I will be able to use an air conditioner without financial stress. Until then I will continue to dread the season.

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