Fictional Pictorial History of Bangor, Maine

It's fun to stay at the...

I floated in on an outgoing tide from New Orleans all the way to Bangor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It was time for a change, so I just let myself get uprooted like that, I didn't even resist the flow of the water at all. Nobody else around here looks like me in any way, but I'm fine with that. My bright facade and Louisiana wrought-iron flourishes were needed around here, and now they're appreciated around here, too. I just pretend that I fit in perfectly with my neighbors. And so I do.

A DeLorean sped right through here in a flurry of lightning sometime around 1985. Or maybe it was 1955? We can't remember. Way too fast to pull it over or give it a ticket. But we did grab the license plate number, fortunately. We've kept an eye out for it ever since. Never saw it again though, and Bangor just isn't big enough for somebody to just up and disappear like that, so we guess it must have been a time-traveler or something crazy? If so, we'll probably never really know for certain. Sometimes people just get away with things forever, you know?

I was once a giant cruise ship out on the ocean. After many years asail at sea, I got tired of passengers giving me norovirus, so I beached myself here, far inland. I'm so tired of that fucking virus. I never want to hear about it again. Just leave me alone, please.

I know that I'm a little bit square…but do you like my hat at least?

This is where I met the kindest and most courteous people in the entire world, who served me the most delicious and nutrious food in the entire world, too. Please visit them and enjoy their absolutely wonderful meals. I will be returning there often myself.

The kids all called me Chunk when we were growing up. I didn't mind because it was true. It still is.

Where spirits are available to assist you in climbing that black wrought-iron ladder to the stratosphere.

Tired of being alive, honestly.

Not quite turquoise, not quite cerulean, not quite aquamarine, not quite royal, not quite electric, not quite indigo, not quite twilight, not quite lagoon, not quite river-under-clear-blue-sky, not quite sapphire, not quite toilet bowl cleaning solution, so you can just call me Grover.

Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! Wheeeee! The sky.

Please be continually informed that you never really own anything, and we always, always own everything.

1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, half-dollar, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, blah.

We're identical twin sisters, though we were raised separately because our parents had a nasty falling out and got divorced the day after we were born. We had never even met each other until just last night, 23 years into our lives. Mom and Dad had finally gotten over their long-standing grudge, or at least we thought they had, so they'd made a little reunion dinner for all of us. Without even knowing each other at all, we twin sisters had both jazzed up our hair in the exact same way for the big night. We're blondes, and we'd both added some maroon highlights in the exact same places. Do you like them? Maybe it was something like mental telepathy that let us know. We just sat right next to each other and smiled silently the entire time, not even really touching our food, trying to be cheerful for Mom and Dad, who'd started arguing by the time our plates were ready to be cleared from the dinner table.

"CITY HALL HAS MOVED." It raised itself up onto its aging haunches, it crawled down to the riverside, its sagging underbelly scraping the pavement, it gazed at its own collapsing reflection in the surface of the water, and then in a shambles, it waded in.

You don't play chess with death. Death doesn't play chess with you. Death doesn't play. Death doesn't. Death.

With gratitude to the three awesome women who so kindly guided the author of these posts to the maroon & yellow Checkerboard Standpipe. (When in Bangor, please be sure to visit this wonderland of a shop and say hello to them.)

All faith is blind faith, and skin is but a scrim to the stars.

On the other side of the dark mirror of torture was an echo chamber, barely obscured. We heard distant sounds coming from inside it at regular intervals but noticed them only when those quiet cries of horror suited us. Ours was now a culture in which anything could be bought, including oversized noise-cancelling headphones, which all of us wore for most of the day on a daily basis. Stray rays of sunlight tried to reach our ears through our headphones, but we devised a mechanism, an implant inserted directly into our heads actually, to block it all out. Then we grew a small wildflower garden around the things that most distracted us from ourselves, like a tiny painting that you hang right over the deep and growing cracks in the wall, in order to hide them from view of any visitors. We hated ourselves but told other people we loved ourselves. We smiled our way through it. The light around us continued to fade until what we finally understood about the echo chamber which we gazed at dai...

BOOM and I landed on this building with a metallic thud. I fell all the way down here from my goddamn spaceship. I know I look like an electrical configuration, but I'm actually a robot. I preceded "The Iron Giant," and its animators actually interviewed me while drawing the film to help them shape the character. Anyhow, I've lived on top of this building since not long after that time. I don't really miss where I'm from, so I have no real intention of going back. We didn't have rain on my planet, so when I feel it falling on me here there's a slight sizzle in my wires and joint-work that I bet you can't even hear. It feels like a barely perceptible buzzing in my veins, if I had any veins. I know I'm not alive but sometimes it almost convinces me that I'm alive, the sensation of rainwater streaming down my sides. I have a great view from up here, you should climb up and see it sometime. My towering perch gets lonely.

That little cylindrical tower wing at the Public Library? Don't listen to her. She lies about absolutely  everything . She didn't eat a cyclone. She gotten eaten *by* a cyclone. Which promptly spit her right back out. Right back out onto the lawn of the Public Library. Where she belongs.

A city of citizens, as they say, or a sea of humanity. Some things needn't be described but rather must be felt. The ground vibrating underfoot, loudspeakers suspended across the stage blaring away. Music makes the people come together , a singer once sang. Music will save the world , a writer once wrote. Lofty ambitions, when it's just as easy to listen to the music entirely alone, for free, beyond the tall metal gates of the state amphitheater. Or you pay to enter, pay to inhabit a space, to absorb the sounds, mainly to be a part of one large moving body comprised of many moving bodies. What is art? What does art do? Is art free? Does being forced to pay for art negate its creative values and its artistic aspirations? These are all important questions for you to explore, for you to think about alone, inside your own mind. The band stood on the stage, performing to the letter its applauded routine. The larger-than-life jukebox lights flashed red and blue and gold and green...

One time an angel flew right up out of the river that runs through the center of the city. This happened very late at night, so nobody saw it. Standing at the river's edge, the angel gazed back down into the water. The angel had never been in a city before. "The lights here feel cruel," the angel thought. The angel also heard a distant humming in the air. "Is that sound inside of me?" the angel wondered. Three blackbirds circled the angel overhead. In the middle of the night, they were invisible. The angel could not see them, but the angel could hear them. Then the angel realized that the humming sound was coming from them. All at once, down the three blackbirds dove, crashing through the humid summer air and straight down through the surface of the river. The angel waited on the riverbank, but the three blackbirds never re-surfaced. The angel can still hear their insistent humming, however, the reverberations of their presence in the world. https://www....