It's not been a good week.
Fascism has fully arrived. A billionaire Nazi is illegally taking over critical government systems. Today my workplace laid off 66 people after weathering a difficult two years of game industry layoffs.
It feels rote to repeat that a better world is possible. Everyone says it because it's self-evidently true. But the distance to that better world seems to get farther and farther every day.
Last year my partner and I went to the Chicago Botanic Gardens. My favorite place there was a small side path where I could best see the Horaijima, the inaccessible island meant only for viewing. I've thought about it frequently since then, and I've decided: the better world must live over there.
Anyone who's been to Chicago's beaches will recognize the water cribs, mysterious-looking structures that were built to collect clean water from far out in the lake. Two of them are still used. They serve as reminders of a time when, flawed as society was (the cribs were needed in the first place because of all the sewage being dumped into the lake), it was still possible to imagine and execute ambitious civic engineering projects to improve material conditions for everyone.
Wilson Crib, as photographed above by Reddit user Seamus Ian, has been abandoned for a long time. Certainly the gulls out there are enjoying the better world.
I just finished Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. It's about a baron who lives his entire adult life without touching the ground. If I could live in the trees, I might. The better world could be up there.
Where does your better world live?
