The giddy sense of a funeral-in-progress.

The fire’s at the edge of town. We’re having a contest about who can keep going the longest. Some of us are making a show of collecting tinder - dryer lint, oily rags - and making it into neat piles. Others are gossiping about the piles.

In the mornings, before daynoise overpower the signal, a fine dusting of soot on the horizontals. At this time, in those smaller moments when the scene is motionless, a scent barely perceivable of woodsmoke. Eye contact. Feels like snubbing a ghost.

A feeling of relief, of confirmation, as the smells grow stronger over the mornings into the fall. Soon there will be bits of ash floating in on the wind, bit of grey-dust paperleaf that disintegrate in the dew.

Someone wrote “Paradise is…pervaded by an infinite melancholy.” (I looked it up later it was zizek).

This same pitch-of-paradise, this ghostly rheoscopic bile, it catches the ashes and it sticks to our boots.

I am enjoying thinking about a fire on the edge of town
town decides best way to make future decisions
is to symbolically/cryptically burn different buildings inside the town
to “prototype” the destruction / show

innovative band of scholars
[torches | burns down] the playground, kerosene this time
critics agog
audacious
tour de force
meanwhile soot covering everything in the mornings
birdbaths useless
/ cruel trick-on-the-sparrow
scent of woodsmoke
brushed aside like mosquitoes at a gala
eye contact, change the subject, share a joke

gang of venetians keep posting on the town forums
weird rhyming-couplet encouragements to arson
(venice is for lovers, natch)
weird relief when the datacenter goes up
more normal relief when the couplets reappear as graffiti