Can't be in a place for more than ten minutes before the critical hits.
A cloudy winter morning on the bay side of the cape, on the piers, staring at enormous wheatpasted black and white portraits of Portugese fisherwomen on the side of a boat house, reading a mounted text about how these women were 'the backbone of the Provincetown fishing community' and also the keepers, in the grand tradition of hearth and homestead affiliation, of the 'songs, dances, recipes, and rituals' passed down orally and praxically through generations and thus kept from falling victim to cultural delegitimation, cultural death. Towards the end of the text, it's mentioned that the state of Massa-choo-choo, on account of the tightening of commercial fishing laws 'meant to ensure sustainable practices' -- which is, I'm sure, a gloss obscuring corporatized rights to cape waters, have been slowly pushed out of the Provincetown area as these laws re: sustainability have made fishing-as-primary-independent-economic activity increasingly untenable.
The night before, I had a nine-dollar margarita.
Unravelling sympathies and complicities, always.
