So I'm up in PA. Thoughts... I have been introduced to the concept of the Rustbelt. Economically speaking, everything up here seems to be dying a slow, decaying death. When I sit down to jot down my experiences, I'm not sure where to start. The things I write seem not to capture the nuances that I'm seeking to express. I spent a long weekend up here with no work, hanging out with my friend Cameron. There is not a whole lot to do up here. We talked to lots of random strangers, which was fun. We encountered perhaps the only foreign-born resident of Bloomsburg, PA last night at the bar. We encountered some attractive young ladies but had our romantic pursuits cut short by the early closing of the bar.
Tomorrow I head back out to the site. A pair of looming, collosal cooling towers stare down upon our scrabbling in the dirt. Last week an air raid siren split the air while we were laboring out in the fields. The sirens of fire trucks soon followed, dismissing the possibility of impending nuclear holocaust, but it was a bit of an eerie experience. I would like to upload some pictures, but it seems to be more of a pain in the ass at the moment than I'm willing to deal with. We spent last week walking recently plowed fields, dropping flags when we found artifacts... even when the artifacts in question were clay pigeon fragments. Apparently those can sometimes be "historical." I spent most of my time collecting said artifacts and placing them in labeled bags. We used long tape measures and right angles to map out the locations. There's something viscerally satisfying to me about creating those sorts of maps. In some ways it reminds me of drawing dungeons for D&D.
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