Last weekend we went to Ocean Shores. A dismal place, but not the most dismal in Washington. I know that because we drove through through Aberdeen, home of the late Kurt Cobain, on the way there. We passed one family unloading a ratty couch from a pickup, then a block later another group loading another couch onto a truck. Reminded me of Kipling Road

a typical East End Street, people were in and out of
each other's houses with each other's property all day.

Ocean Shores, a place one could call in the heartland, if it wasn't on a sandy spit, battered by Pacific storms. The supermarket had photos of the locals serving in the war, so we knew we were in the red part of the country. In the blue bits of the country the local PBS or NPR affiliates' websites would instead display similar photos in their tributes for the fallen relatives of their domestics. The storms and rain were ok by me as I had come prepared with Iain Sinclair's Downriver and Stewart Home's Come Before Christ and Murder Love, which is not about Christ. They're both part of the growing corpus of works about esoteric London; along with Michael Moorcock's Mother London, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, and Alan Moore's From Hell. A close group, with whom knowldege bleeds in knowingness. You must know your Ripper mythology, Templar/Masonic conspiracies, and the politics behind the anarchist groups in Conrad's Secret Agent before you can begin to comprehend the analogies and allusions in these works.  ¶ 9:20 PM