ONE NO ONE AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND Nicholas Albrecht
MAGICAL THINKING
ONE NO ONE AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND Nicholas Albrecht
MAGICAL THINKING
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He saw a house with nothing else around it for miles. It was a normal looking house, but
sphere. Storytelling is not a pastime, but a way of finding and closing boundaries. Talk
it was being swallowed up by the landscape. A landscape that was made larger, and eerier,
becomes elemental, words can land like blows, create tangles like a puppeteer’s strings,
because of its total monotony. It was as if the house was shrinking, receding from him, yet
or they can send waves of relief running through you like a breeze gently drifting over a
he was being pulled toward it. As the space grew around the house it sucked him in. The
desiccated landscape.
lights from the house at night. He wondered if this feeling and sense of being drawn into the house was a mirage. Not so much an illusion, like he used to think of mirages, as two
In the middle of the desert he was exposed, the light bending and wavering in the heat.
things that seem incompatible yet coexist nonetheless.
Figures on the horizon were blurred, shifting not so much out there but in his chest and all along what he thought was his body. The desert and its elements, its people and places,
Deserts are strange spaces in Western culture. We don’t really know how to be in them.
were confused. He drew closer to the house, whose confines grew larger and larger. A
There’s the deep Biblical history of the desert. The desert as metaphor for isolation,
man with a machete came out from behind a laundry line. An angry pit-bull lunged at
asceticism, temptation, placelessness and death. There’s an endless uniformity to the
the fence. The man and dog were part of a nervous system, sending signals, sensitive and
landscape for those — like American colonists, and unlike Native Americans —that don’t
sharp, that reestablished the boundary between him and the house.
know how to understand space there. In America they have been used as“sacrifice zones” where radiated plants and the uncertainty and surprises of nuclear contamination com-
He made his home on the road away from the house, in a trailer. Staying on the road, he
mingle with paranoid cultures obsessed with secrecy and shock. He felt uncertain in this
learned that it wasn’t unusual for dead dogs to turn up on the asphalt. Rumor had it that
space, and he learned to see the history of abuse heaped on the land in the bodies and
it was an easy way to get rid of a dead animal. Others told him that dogs used in dog fight-
minds of the people that he met.
ing rings were dumped on the road where it looked like they had been hit by cars, rather than mauled to death. He thought of dogs when he stepped out of his trailer at night,
Have you ever broken down on the side of the road? Maybe you were somewhere on I-10 or
onto the edge of everything he was used to.
I-40 or 80. You got the anxious sense, after 8 hours of driving and barely more than a blip of a town, that your car was a pretty fragile container. It created a sense of distance and
There were a few people there in the desert, and relative isolation makes for strange
security, locked up in your private room with windows, a scenery-machine, hurtling down
bedfellows. In the desert, you cannot ignore the people you come across, and he soon
the highway. But what if it breaks down? Then it does, and something closer and more
found himself in the company of a couple of Angels. They squeezed his hand and locked
viscous than scenery engulfs you.
him in their stares. Partly curious, partly defensive, he followed them further into the desert, further off the road. He made a friendly gesture and the two seemed to accept his
He sat there waiting for help but not sure whether he wanted anyone to arrive. His grand-
offer, offering their own trust in return. “You know what we would do to you in different
father picked up a couple of stranded hitchhikers once when he was a child. When one of
circumstances?” they asked.
them reached into their bag with a look on their face that he couldn’t read, his heart started racing. You meet someone you don’t have any way of knowing, in relative isolation.
They had set up camp next to his trailer, there was no one else in sight. The nearest
You engage, you talk, words are a thermometer for taking in subtle shifts in the atmo-
neighbors lived at an isolated spot at the junction of two roads, where one could see you
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He saw a house with nothing else around it for miles. It was a normal looking house, but
sphere. Storytelling is not a pastime, but a way of finding and closing boundaries. Talk
it was being swallowed up by the landscape. A landscape that was made larger, and eerier,
becomes elemental, words can land like blows, create tangles like a puppeteer’s strings,
because of its total monotony. It was as if the house was shrinking, receding from him, yet
or they can send waves of relief running through you like a breeze gently drifting over a
he was being pulled toward it. As the space grew around the house it sucked him in. The
desiccated landscape.
lights from the house at night. He wondered if this feeling and sense of being drawn into the house was a mirage. Not so much an illusion, like he used to think of mirages, as two
In the middle of the desert he was exposed, the light bending and wavering in the heat.
things that seem incompatible yet coexist nonetheless.
Figures on the horizon were blurred, shifting not so much out there but in his chest and all along what he thought was his body. The desert and its elements, its people and places,
Deserts are strange spaces in Western culture. We don’t really know how to be in them.
were confused. He drew closer to the house, whose confines grew larger and larger. A
There’s the deep Biblical history of the desert. The desert as metaphor for isolation,
man with a machete came out from behind a laundry line. An angry pit-bull lunged at
asceticism, temptation, placelessness and death. There’s an endless uniformity to the
the fence. The man and dog were part of a nervous system, sending signals, sensitive and
landscape for those — like American colonists, and unlike Native Americans —that don’t
sharp, that reestablished the boundary between him and the house.
know how to understand space there. In America they have been used as“sacrifice zones” where radiated plants and the uncertainty and surprises of nuclear contamination com-
He made his home on the road away from the house, in a trailer. Staying on the road, he
mingle with paranoid cultures obsessed with secrecy and shock. He felt uncertain in this
learned that it wasn’t unusual for dead dogs to turn up on the asphalt. Rumor had it that
space, and he learned to see the history of abuse heaped on the land in the bodies and
it was an easy way to get rid of a dead animal. Others told him that dogs used in dog fight-
minds of the people that he met.
ing rings were dumped on the road where it looked like they had been hit by cars, rather than mauled to death. He thought of dogs when he stepped out of his trailer at night,
Have you ever broken down on the side of the road? Maybe you were somewhere on I-10 or
onto the edge of everything he was used to.
I-40 or 80. You got the anxious sense, after 8 hours of driving and barely more than a blip of a town, that your car was a pretty fragile container. It created a sense of distance and
There were a few people there in the desert, and relative isolation makes for strange
security, locked up in your private room with windows, a scenery-machine, hurtling down
bedfellows. In the desert, you cannot ignore the people you come across, and he soon
the highway. But what if it breaks down? Then it does, and something closer and more
found himself in the company of a couple of Angels. They squeezed his hand and locked
viscous than scenery engulfs you.
him in their stares. Partly curious, partly defensive, he followed them further into the desert, further off the road. He made a friendly gesture and the two seemed to accept his
He sat there waiting for help but not sure whether he wanted anyone to arrive. His grand-
offer, offering their own trust in return. “You know what we would do to you in different
father picked up a couple of stranded hitchhikers once when he was a child. When one of
circumstances?” they asked.
them reached into their bag with a look on their face that he couldn’t read, his heart started racing. You meet someone you don’t have any way of knowing, in relative isolation.
They had set up camp next to his trailer, there was no one else in sight. The nearest
You engage, you talk, words are a thermometer for taking in subtle shifts in the atmo-
neighbors lived at an isolated spot at the junction of two roads, where one could see you
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