evacuation

I've been looking through these pictures of suddenly abandoned homes I came across on English Russia. They're amazing. It's too easy to imagine a context in which someone would rush out the door of their apartment, leaving for good with their highly personal belongings strewn out across their floor. I imagine fear of toxic gas, of nuclear holocaust. Fear of mob reprisal and torch-wielding mobs. Fear of secret police and instant death. I imagine crying children leaving behind filthy, beloved stuffed animals and prized television sets left in haste.
But the sad reality of it is that these places were probably left in fine order with everything where it was supposed to be. The apparent havoc left by scavengers and drug addicts, looking for expired medicine and Nazi gold.
When I was a sophomore in high school there was an abandoned house that some friends of mine had found. There were newspapers dating back to 1986 stacked up just inside the front door. The closets still had sweaters, the pantry still had dry goods.
There was also a fully stocked bar in the basement. I remember we found some sort of board game that basically consisted of a vinyl football field and a stack of cards that we somehow had turned into a drinking game. We would line up four shots of whatever we'd come across (this was the first and only time that I ever would drink banana schnapps) and somehow counted them as downs and field progression.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette (I still am filled with a small pride that I respected the abandoned home enough not to fill it with smoke) and walked smack into a police officer. I was 16 and pretty drunk. It was the second time I was ever arrested.
This is how I live now. It's 11:30 on a Saturday night and I'm looking at crap on the internet and telling high school stories to nobody in particular. We went to a nearby shopping center today and came very close to dying in a car crash on the way home. Fucking California drivers.

Watching: The Science of Sleep. It's so filled with whimsy that I just want to blink myself out of existence.

Reading: The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman. I'm pain in-the-ass late on this, but it's the most impressive graphic novel I've read in a very long time. It's put together from a graphic design standpoint and can at times be an utterly exhaustive read. In a good way. I can't recommend this enough.
I got Warren Ellis' book in the mail on friday, and expect to read it in one giant sitting. Perhaps I'll write something on it late.r