Notes: An Object at Rest.

| 2025-09-12
Photo of an old-fashioned motel room key with an oversized orange plastic fob

I love motels.

In my adult life, I’ve finally graduated to an income bracket that allows me to upgrade my lodging options so I could, if I wanted, hole up in fancier digs, with niceties like a pool, all-you-can-eat breakfast, as many pillows as one feels comfortable requesting, and the holy-of-holies, a hot tub next to the pool, but my heart still stops for these old roadside resting places.

I’m on an annual mission, driving three hundred miles to perform for free for twenty minutes at an electronic music festival for an audience of fifteen to twenty people who are mostly the other musicians from the festival, and the drive this time was wearing, with a hour spent navigating the crawling traffic piled up behind a highway accident that the supposedly intelligent machinery behind the map application on my mobile device utterly failed to route me around (in the end, I engineered my own detour and saved a good forty-five minutes). So, despite leaving on time, I lumbered through the swooping byways through Pennsylvania mountains, alerted frequently to watch for deer by signs with a stylized jumping buck over a farcical number of miles that was computed…how, exactly?

I paused at a rest stop where a machine would dispense, for my utility, a gritty horror it labeled a “capuccino” (my options on the machine, announced after I’d paid, as instant or decaf) to me, which I managed to spill all over myself, but I credit it with enough caffeine to keep me alert and alive for the last hour and change where the road fatigue was properly kicking in. I listened to the remainder of the familiar radio drama that had kept me company for a couple hundred miles, and in the last moments, as the credits played, I pulled up into the forecourt of the old motel, laid out in the midcentury style, with a little office at the center of two low, sweeping wings of rooms, each door facing its own parking spot, parked, and and staggered into the office with all my road cramps in concert.

The office smelled of cabbage, which was made all the more clear by the presence of a large glass-fronted refrigerator filled halfway with those large, oblong cabbages you find in an Asian grocery store, and the rustling from the back room announced the hunched older gentleman who shuffled in and quietly answered as I indicated I’d booked and paid online. He had me present my ID, fill out a card with my relevant information, and sign the card and receipt for the four nights I’ll be here, and handed over what I was delighted to find was a proper old-fashioned motel room key on an oversized orange fob, and I headed back to the car to move to the slot in front of room .

In cheap motels, one always opens the door for the first time with a little hesitancy, a lottery not enjoyed by my husband, who prefers the dependable security of a room with no potential for surprises, as there will sometimes be a bilious cloud of aging cigarette stink even for a room officially marked as non-smoking, or the scent of mold, mildew, or sewer issues, but this one was a reminder.

I took a deep breath and it was all 1978, that sort of vaguely musty smell of settled air and linens freshly washed a couple weeks prior, and I was happy.

The room is vintage in all the ways I prefer, with old, but not rickety, furniture, painted-over paneling, and a bathroom that is functional and tightly screwed together, and if not for the flat television, the composite flooring in lieu of linoleum or the horror of ancient wall-to-wall carpet, and the spotted lanternfly flitting around the room it might as well be on of the motels I stayed in in my first ventures with a car, nearly forty years ago.

It is a nostalgic moment and I am comfortable with that, with a nice place to stop and stay for a while that brings back family trips in our enormous silver and purple Chevrolet Suburban, where we’d book in late on the road to Georgia, get a big room with a cot, turn the AC up, and turn on the TV, and I’d be home there, in a place that, for the moment, I could pretend was the world I actually lived in.

I love that feeling of settling in, even if I’m only staying in a place for a night, where I put my bags in the drawers in the dresser and line everything up neatly as if I intended to put down roots and live there forever, or just for a brief interval before moving on like a seasoned traveler of the world.

The bed is comfortable, the toilet is bolted firmly to the floor and the seat isn’t loose—the giveaway sign of an innkeeper that has graduated from caring about their work—and the water doesn’t stink of sulfur or fish. The toilet flushes with a peculiar symphony of clicks, hisses, and, at the end of the cycle, a combination of a bell-like sound and a last gloomph, and I am comfortable with that and the sound of the wall-mounted AC fan and the nearby interstate churning away like a fine work of the drone musician’s art. The side street traffic rises and falls, punctuated by the rumbling of trucks, and I note, looking out of the little bathroom window as I’m brushing my teeth and shaking a handful of pills out of the TH slot in my pill minder, that my room backs up to the scenery of a auto repair shop and a camper trailer rental lot. I spit, rinse the sink, slug down four tablets, and switch off the light.

It is just a place that isn’t really a place. I’ll be here for four nights, then leave, and it’s statistically unlikely I’ll ever be in this room again for the remainder of my life, but that doesn’t trouble me like it used to back in 1978, when I was ten and things and places had a life for me like the spirits in animist religions, where every object and place was haunted by little ghosts that I’d only just met, and then had to leave behind. I used to feel a terrible sadness when we’d pack up, load the Suburban, and leave, wanting to gently touch the walls and whisper “Goodbye,” and “You were a very good motel room” before continuing on the family travels, but pragmatism and a long-running pattern of loss makes it easier and easier to say goodbye to such things.

In the interim, this is my home away, at the industrial edge of a Northern town that’s showing its age and its own losses, and between my time spent with others on my same wavelength, I’ll hole up here, organizing the room as if it’s mine, and then head out again, on the trip with a destination that’s not as far away as it used to be, and that is as things always are.

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

The rain comes.

| 2025-02-01

footprints in melting snowI trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.

Soon all this will be gone.

Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.

I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.

It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.

It’s not that. (more…)

Behind the curtain.

| 2024-12-08

There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things.

I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why, exactly, something seemed so amazing to our younger eyes…but this feels less bad for me as I get older in the same way that opening a can of almost textureless factory-made “ravioli” in a sugary orange sauce loses its comfort and becomes more of a moment for a satisfyingly rueful chuckle at how low my standards once were.

I’ve been indulging myself with some comfort reads, as well, revisiting old and beloved books for a little of that satisfying feeling one gets from retreading old paths where great stuff lies, and I’ve largely been finding new details tucked into the old like little notes pencilled into the margins of a book that inspires such annotations. It’s a task intentionally not taxing, and a pursuit to wage a proxy war of the thought-out against a stretch of external idiocy, but I find, more and more, that I reveal more than just another strata of narrative in the familiar.

Ringworld, the 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, is a terrible book.

(more…)

Slower.

| 2024-12-01
Joe posed with Kodak Ekatar H35 film camera

There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.

I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).

We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

—Blaise Pascal, Penseés

But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.

So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.

The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.

I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.

Try to keep up.

© 2024 Joe Belknap Wall

Inexhaustible.

| 2024-09-06

I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head:

I am closer to 70 than I am to 40.

How did this happen?

But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t and done worse things to people I cared about, though I reassure myself that I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

It’s certainly the truth that, unless science makes a major breakthrough and quick, I’m in the last third of my life, or fourth, if things turn on me.

What’s it mean to age beautifully, to look to those ahead of me who somehow managed to slide this way in lush embrace of what life is, in its silky, spiky, wild wholeness, and not that mythical thing we all seem to chase for far too long—the imaginary, perfectly, finely-tuned life that we aspire to?

What’s it mean to look to the people who were our friends when we were just kids and they were where I am now and really seek what magic there was in that?

It’s where we live best, and live longest, slowing the swirl to the drain, when we can master what those people knew and I didn’t, except to be drawn to their energy.

(more…)