EL ALMA EN UN HILO

Aldersgate was founded in the 1940s as the Methodist Home in Charlotte. It was a building for Methodist pastors who lived their entire adult lives in parsonages that belonged to the churches they preached at. Once they reached retirement age they had nowhere else to go. Enter Aldersgate, built on land donated by the Cole brothers. Over the years it modernized built a medical wing and opened older people of all previous occupations and religious affiliations. In modern day Aldersgate is a retirement community. My friends Lily and Darren are moving there. I feel bad because I should’ve spent more time with them. They take me and it’s actually really nice. They live in the independent cottages, but they have their meals in the building that was the original Methodist home. It looks like a hotel lobby— nothing like the retirement homes I see on tv. But Lilly and Darren are nothing like the retired people that I’ve seen on tv. Their house looks like my aunts house, but it’s smaller than their previous house. Lilly proudly takes If Charlotte is baby Atlanta, Boone is baby Asheville. Her plight became my plight. I really like John Wilson because I feel like we’re looking for the same things, real life and intensity within mundanity. I love how things always devolve from something seemingly normal and simple into something weird and irrational I lost a lot of time because of my stupid phone and visiting Boone that i should’ve spent with lily. I thought to myself that i might go to dc or Raleigh to see the cherry blossoms because i love them so now I realize it’s not gonna happen. I feel like you could just sit in a room with boxes full of National Geographic and get a better education I mean I saw so many issues about Botswana, central Japan, Singapore so many places I’ve heard of but never really had serious thought about. But I can understand— I mostly look at. Magazines on the Libby app through my library I can’t afford magazine subscriptions to all the magazines I like. Most people are probably doing the same. Lily told me that when she was young getting magazines was like getting the internet— it’s how you learned about things outside of your town, global news, fashion, history, advertisements. She had boxes full of the Saturday Eveneing Post, COllier, LOOK, Life, Our State and National Geographic, some of the magazines were even from the 50s and 60s I was learning a lot looking at the photos and reading the articles. I really love the National Geographic’s from the 70s and 80s, but they had issues all the way up to 2025. I’ve never told Lily about zines. I remember being at Newark zine fest last year which was being held at the Newark Art Museum and a docent came up to my table who looked to be Lily’s age— she’s in a room surrounded by zines and she asked me what’s a zine, but her tone was kind of funny I spent almost all of Monday and a couple hours of Saturday going through these magazines. My weird religious experiences aside, I don’t think I’ve ever been capable of believing in god. I learned about atheism at 8 years old and never looked back. But I’m glad my mom landed in the Methodist church instead of the ultra-conservative Catholicism. I mean she was raised catholic but i think she intimated how strict and confining it would’ve been, especially with the fact that my parents never married but lived in the same house and had three kids presumably out of wedlock. I really like the illustrations of the Saturday evening post, but not because i think it would be better to live in that time, but i think it’s important to reflect The ‘habana Hilton’ i wonder if it’s like how we started saying Kiev instead of Kyev when the Russians invaded Ukraine. I like the aesthetic of Easter, I like spring, I like renewal. Also I think Easter is super gay. I mean, the Easter bunny? Total furry. I would love to throw an Easter egg hunt where people find condoms or tiny bottles of liquor, fun [adult things AND candy for those who enjoy them. That’s one of my dreams for the future. Because to me Easter is one of the holidays that I have good memories of— I mean Christmas? I don’t think my Salvadoran parents even understood the concept of Santa Claus, my dad took me to the store to buy my own Christmas gift completely preventing the idea of a Santa from existing in my mind. I love Halloween too but I try to be kind, I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of it but my hope is that if I ever get to that age someone will humor me and my precious memories just as much as im doing now but it is stressful and like i mentioned before, the boundaries are not clear. They are a lot older than me and whiter too. We are not biologically related so there is no leeway there. It’s like if you had friends who you have nothing in common with and do not share any of the same interests. A lot of people would call this family but again, we are not neither us nor they have ever said that. Clearly we care for each other but Darren doesn’t seem to care as much and Lilly adds rules after the fact. All of a sudden she’s saying that she wants to give the schools 400 of the national geographics. which I wouldn’t have minded if she had said that from the beginning before I went through all the magazines to find ones I thought were cool and believe I was saving from the landfill because the schools didn’t seem to care or be enthusiastic about. From my perspective, this is classic Lilly— I don’t for a second think a school in 2025 is excited about physical magazines, I imagine Lilly shoehorned her way into the graces of some hapless teacher and got them to reluctantly accept these magazines they probably didn’t want anyways. if they are going there they’ll probably sit dusty for a couple years before they get thrown out. But what do I care? The lady is 80 years old she’s earned the right to inconvenience anyone even if it annoys the fuck out of me. I don’t want to make it seem like one wants these magazines Darren just wants to get all the magazines out of the house he doesn’t care where, and by this point I just want to get it over with because these two are getting on my nerves. So they drop them off along with me at my studio and it’s as unpleasant as you would imagine. It makes me a bit sad sure. But there are only so many times you can slight people before they start to resent them. And sure I feel bad about that but I also feel like I did what I could. I projected my own loss onto a loss that really isn’t the same. but it’s hard to know what they’re thinking, like I said they are a lot older and whiter, specifically southern white, than I am so we have different perspectives on a whole lot of things. I am a scientist - guided by voices Being a scientist. Water bean morecoffee Wallows. Shameless improv - 8 Victoria yards. Jazz fest - 2-10pm victoria yards