by the small pocket of green where the road to my bank makes its hair pin turn, i saw for the first time early this evening, the angry glow of a neon white cross from what must be that of a new and aggressively proselytizing modern christian church. the dirty white burn of that gas turned light was heart rending; i shuddered.
down that road, towards what could be that self-aggrandizing church, are what used to be two competing bodegas, now both shuttered, and a neighborhood hardware store that miraculously stays open until tenish in the evenings. i’m certain there’s also a half basketball court somewhere there that remains unlighted after dusk.
this is not to fetishize urban blight.
this is a confession: it’s been years since i have been in a church. and to be assaulted by this image is as beautiful and somehow ought to be meaningful as—to quote the Surrealists—“the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”