Have I Dropped

Off of the face of the earth?

Maybe a bit. You know. Happens. Busy. No sleep. At about 3 this morning I was working and I started hearing this really strange noise coming from my nose, but then the noise turned out to be a song by the Pixies and it was coming from my computer speakers, not my nose.

I promise some art related news soon. It's brewing.
There are big decisions currently being made, regarding my potential move into a live/work space in a new arts community type place. I'm not telling you anything else until it gets figured out. I'm also not well rested enough right now to use any creative or particularly wry language. And I'll proce it.

But for the hell of it, I'd like to share a few things that are strange, appealing and simultaneously distressing about Pawtucket, the town in which my office resides (and I'm using both "office" and "resides" loosely, as this joint is still more of a desk island amidst a sea of space heaters, plumbing parts, and indoor squirrels).




The first bizarrity is in the basement of our building, The Grant. I mean, the basement here is both eerie and wretched, and opens into dreadful dark Other Parts that should never be approached.




However, if you're unwise, intrepid, bored or dreadful yourself and you do approach the dark Other Parts, they eventually lead you to a heavy old metal door, and that old metal door leads to a cavernous, tunnelly space UNDER the city of Pawtucket itself.



Wherein, we can only assume, things lurk and loom.

And as if that were not creepy enough in and of itself, this is what it says on the door deep within the dark Other Parts and leading to the Terrifying Underneath:




As far as I'm concerned, there could be no more inappropriate (and therefore appropriate I suppose, in the world of the creepy) thing to see in such a place.
Especially as someone who has consistently been up all night recently, remembering the REM song "Daysleepeer",

I'm the screen, the blinding light
I'm the screen, I work at night

I'm sure that if I went online and Googled "day sleeper" I'd learn something about the etymology of the term that would deny it its power to terrify me. So that's exactly what I'm not going to do.

Also, across the street there is a mammoth old brick and stone building. It's an erstwhile furniture store and boasts some of the finest old advertising murals I've seen.



The building's been empty for who knows how long. The neon signs are long since burned out, and the loading dock is scabbing over. And on the far side of the building, built right into the original structure in terracotta, is this:





...And that is all I have to say.