the latest road trip. into the car after 3:00. a last second wish to get out. too late, say, to hit a museum or such. north on 95, still 128 to me. up to Saugus, where a sign noted the Saugus Iron Works. as a Cub Scout I visited there on what I remember was a significantly hot day. I keep the camera busy, of course, as the landscape peels by. the mills and factories of New England are a characteristic of the region, and oddly comforting, even tho mercantilism has left many a blotch, here and elsewhere. North Adams Massachusetts for instance possesses a canyon of factory buildings that are pretty oppressive, looming, but luckily the Muesum of Contemporary Art has taken over many of them. next door in Adams Massachusetts, one gets the idea that suicide might be a favoured pastime. the iron works, we discover, is a lovely setting, a 17th century emblem of busy colonists. the info palace is closed, alas, likewise the grand angular building there. I love this stuff. visions of what was there before everything else landed. back south toward Lexington, where Erin wanted to get some Magic cards. no wait, we stopped at a coffee shop for coffee and bagels. Lexington is the other end of mercantilism. I grew up there and I can say, it is turning into Wellesley. if you know Wellesley, you know them's fighting words. Magic cards are game cards that are vociferously traded. a man told me his 12 year old son was making $50 bucks a week buying and selling them on EBay. Erin's strictly a player, tho hot to trade for something useful for his decks. the store has a couple of table's where dissolute boys can play all the livelong day. Erin got his goods and then we went to Barnes & Noble. there's a castle of literary merchandise. I used to feel uncomfortable there. tho their poetry section is rather large, given low expectations, I've got all the classic books (dead white guys) and can't scare up interest in many of the contempoets. but there's otherwise so much there. and the smell of Starbucks coffee. we made a solemn grab recently, on the pretext that I needed some Jungian texts, which just primed the pump. this time I aimed for a tarot deck. interest deriving from my reading of Jung. the tarot images are so dreamlike and pregnant, that has piqued my interest. it seems like a procedure is involved, one that I can liken to writing procedures. I mean, I have this one sense of procedural writing, be it flarf or aleatoric as of Mac Low, that one goes thru these methods to distract one's self so that the writing can proceed. to avoid relying on that built up artist brain that we've been training for years. and in that subversion, well, something happens. which the artist brain will claim, genius that it is. with tarot or other such divinations, the big thinker is defenestrated (temporarily) and the subconscious peeps out these ideas that have been brewing. dreams are a more obvious example, but I am fascinated by the power of the images of the cards. I also hate the sound of occult, don't get me wrong. so I got a deck, Beth got a book called Why We Run (or some such), which really is about why we do so. Beth always finds different books, open to what catches her eye, whereas I tend to have something in mind and go get it. I might do a shelf, but quite a bit less often stumble on an unexpected gem. obviously Beth's is the better method but I am impatient in the store. it's all interesting, basically, so I focus. Erin got a manga book: teaching our children to read backwards!!! that was our family outing, outed as a family.