went out to a mall that's been half empty since 2009. security guy found me crouched in the food court taking close-ups of the carpet. he wanted to know if i was with the demolition crew. i wasn't. i just wanted the carpet. 1970s orange and brown, that pattern that pretends to be geometric but is really just chaos with a ruler. it's worn down to nothing along the path people walked to the old Sears. you can literally read the foot traffic from 40 years ago in it. nobody designed that. it just happened. he let me stay. sat on a bench and watched me for a while and then said his wife used to work at the Orange Julius there. i got maybe 30 usable frames. most of it's garbage, the light was flat and the place smells like wet carpet and nothing. but two of them are the actual thing. the good stuff is almost never in the interesting place. it's in the hallway you walk past.
