Travis Garrett's Blog

UNC is currently in the middle of a very large construction program. Every third building is being torn down and replaced or stripped down to a structural skeleton and refurbrished. Severe thunderstorms moved through late last night (presaged by a cinematic bout of fog that sublimated yesterday afternoon) - I was woken around 4 am by a giant roaring crack of lightning that couldn't have been more than fifty feet away, close enough trigger a cringe of existential fear as I was catapulted back into consciousness - and so today everything is wet. All the construction sites splotched over campus like a symbiotic blight are now mired in clay-orange mud. Squirrels toil among the gravel and exposed pipes. Walls of new brick ascending next to the bombed out old, sheets of dingy plastic blowing over old metal beams. And so I thought that this was a agreeably natural state for things to be in, phenotypes in flux, as opposed to a more naively picturesque and timeless environment. It reminds me of a forest with saplings emerging among mossy downed trunks, miniature landslides being swept away by streams of clear water cutting into their vertical banks, newly exposed julia roots tasting the air. As I am wont to do, I then imagine the cheerfull chaos as entire planets are dissassembled in order to make use of all their atoms, not just the thin shell on the surface. Doubtlessly there will be some humans, still enamoured of their cells, mucking about in the maelstrom of activity, like squirrels in the soft dirt, while their terrible children, alien as trilobites, pluck tiny strings and form sweeping enigmatic plans.