So here I am, suspended in that particular brand of urban purgatory, the Mission District waiting game, watching my reflection fracture across safety glass like some cheapshit Gerhard Richter that nobody commissioned. The car window becomes a frame, becomes a proscenium, becomes the fourth wall I’m simultaneously behind and in front of, performer and audience in a one-person theater of inertia.
Waiting… outside Limón, just me and the accumulating minutes and that creeping suspicion that I have little to no control, I’m just another prop someone else positioned here, waiting for a cue that may never arrive.
I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle cruising through Paradise.
Cruising Paradise
Shepard knew it. “Passenger in an evil vehicle cruising through Paradise.” That’s the whole fucking thesis right there. I think I’m making choices, building a practice, constructing meaning through lens and space and theoretical frameworks, but really? I’m just watching the scenery change from inside someone else’s automobile, and Paradise, whatever the hell that means, is scrolling past.
The Mission does this. It’s performance space and lived space colliding. I could theorize it, Baudrillard’s simulacra, Debord’s spectacle, some Artaudian cruelty of the quotidian, but my eye’s just sees the light failing, the reflection doubling, the waiting becoming the work itself.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the solipsism isn’t narcissism but recognition: that I’m simultaneously creating and being created by these moments, that the site-specificity includes my own displacement, that being a passenger is its own form of agency, the agency to witness, to frame, to say “I was here, suspended, uncertain, and I made something from the not-knowing.”
The vehicle’s still moving. I still don’t know where.