Hey Jack, its Oct something 2026. ‘m still writing to you. I guess it’s mostly in my head at this point.

Anyway it was a day of unbuilding… so fucking hot. I must have spent a good hour standing in front of that last derelict facade. Don’t want to wax all poetic but I just can’t stop thinking about this gig. What were those stories, those lives? What was now sun bleached particleboard over windows and doors. Imagine the storefronts, people bustling through the doors, kids underfoot. Now it’s just a sagging facade — not even graffiti for chrissakes — I mean there wasn’t even anybody left here who cared enough to even tag the joint.

Take it all down I figure. It’s a job. There’s nothing here anymore, nothing worth remembering anyway right? No aesthetic value, no unique contribution, scoring on the index scale is less than one. All just riffs on a fucking theme. I think what scares me the most is that people always assumed their experiences were unique you know? It’s the same same same story repeated in only the smallest variation. This building didn’t get a single vote — not even one person cares, not even one memory worth preserving… I should have worked harder on this one but I’m just tired. Somebody’s grandfather had planted that tree, had owned that store… I’ll be damned if we can find any excuse to keep it though.

So I had the cutters take out the building as usual, dissecting it faster than almost I could see; a slow motion collapse… I’m keeping the bricks and I took the planks and boards out to mulch piles. Metals were sent back to the east. Even the memory is gone I guess — another bare patch of dirt joining the rest; planted with fast growing desert grasses all watched over by the so called machines of loving grace…

You know I almost don’t care anymore, but somehow this one just seemed especially vivid. Lives have been had here, there was something, like a note in the air, so vivid, wish I could write it more plainly, so faint, like there’s something somewhere down in that infinitesimal noise something that couldn’t be turned into ones and zeros. It just felt so real — even more real than being online somehow.

Tomorrow I’ll do it again, and again, until it’s all gone. A few ghost towns probably I imagine we’ll keep. Maybe where you lived too. I’ll direct the cutters around it. I’m sure that there will be enough votes, you know, something that meets the societally accepted standard of redeeming aesthetic quality, that captures some ineffable human emotion and all that jazz. I can do a good writeup I hope.