MilesAstray | USA
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essays | places


USA

everything most

 

New York / USA · 2016   gray day

  

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   The great, the great divide. Two parties, black and white, everything political, everything personal, everything more, everything most. All or nothing drama, media frenzy, real life Hollywood. Some of the world’s finest thinking, some of its ugliest ignorance, one step forward, two back, three forward. Every landscape in the book, every character you can and can’t imagine, summit of modernity and culturegeddon. America has it all, even the claim to the entire continent’s name, but doesn’t know how to use any of it. Until it does.

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a glimpse

passages   A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE | Peering out their lofty towers, New Yorkers might be looking down on New Jersey – but who’s got the better view really? Of course, the concrete is always taller on the other side and it’s easy to confuse a place we see with the place to be. Ah well, that’s neither here nor there.  

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passages   LIGHTSPEED PROGRESSOR | All eyes on you, eyeballs shaking, vision scrambled, because you keep moving, forward, toward, and away, a lightspeed progressor, wearing your secrets inside out without giving them away, a transient nature yours and a smooth elegance that can’t be pinned down to be any one rigid, lame, binary status or static dynamic, for you don’t surrender yourself to the fully known, fully charted, fully caged.  

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Vermont / USA · 2019   julio's



 

It was a grimy and shiny Shangri-la, overrun by antique gambling robots and twitching with twinkling sounds and loud lights, a crystal cesspool of useless decadence, where the rich and poor could live in the same house for a couple of nights without disagreements and without shaking hands.

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Las Vegas / USA · 2007   Ceiling decor, what for?



 


Las Vegas / USA · 2007   the prize's price



 

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But the Grand Canyon is only grand in you. To any wordless creature it is just a hole in the ground. And the forces might have spat it out, but to put that whole thing back into one little mind, that’s an art.
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Grand Canyon / USA · 2007   grand in you

San Diego’s temperature was fixed in the sweet spot, and so was its cultural temperature. Maybe it was the world across the border, that Mexican down-to-earth soil pouring in with the carefree wind.
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San Diego / USA · 2007   beach temperature

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A patchwork of things that were only connected by their disconnect and a few freeways, LA was as nonsensical as the twists of a Hollywood B movie. But sunny. Like a monster princess.
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Los Angeles / USA · 2007   boulevard blur

San Francisco is one of my oldest back places. Ever since I’ve been, I wanted to be back, maybe even nest there for a while, but the older a back place, the more distant it becomes. The thought of wishing myself back while I was still there, is still within my mind’s reach – the information is there, the digits. But feelings are like balloons. They either take off, or they deflate. And that’s good! Can you imagine if feelings would last? One bad day and you might as well call it a life. My San Francisco balloon is fourteen years old and deflated. But you can always pick them up and blow some more air and dreams into them.
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San Francisco / USA · 2007   sun in the bay

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Falls falling, leaves falling, fall falling, me falling.
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Multnomah Falls / USA · 2019   falling in fall

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Portland / USA · 2019   underwater bridge

 

 

 

 

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places / stories

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New York / Dream Arrival: Jamming Untamed Imagination into Tight Realities

a story of a dream coming truer and a city that was smaller the second time around

 

...there was certainly something endearing in that city coming down to earth from its pedestal...

 

 

 

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Seattle / Table for One

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Seattle / USA · 2019   blue cement



 

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Seattle / USA · 2019   tech towers



 

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Seattle / USA · 2019   tiny's organ



 

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Seattle / USA · 2019   yum gum



 

Where big money, smart tech, gritty charity, a hipster, and Kurt Cobain’s ghost all sit at the same table for one.



 

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Port Orchard / USA · 2019   flying siblings



 

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Seattle / USA · 2019   still water under the bridge





 

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elsewhere

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