Journal 2025-05-06

Hello from Kollective Coffee on Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, AR. I’m having an interesting time trying to really figure out Hot Springs. On the one hand, it’s kinda what you expect from a Southern town. Some old colonial architecture with a few big hotels (like The Arlington) holding down the fort, plus your classic breakfast and lunch spots, restaurants that mostly advertise with signs for LIVE MUSIC and SHRIMP and COLD BEER. But on the other hand, this coffee shop claims to have the longest running weekly poetry reading in the country, and the stores down the road sell crystals and a whole host of spiritual woo-woo shit. That’s just up the road from the “CBD and Trump Store,” which seems to sell both vapes and jerseys with TRUMP on the back. It’s historical grandeur and timelessness slammed into modern strangeness and fragility.

Anyways, I’m going into the national park later on after this, so I’m trying to knock out a bit of writing in the morning to get this stuff out of the way. The first thing I want to crush is just a short piece on why I want to travel America. Documenting the in-betweenness of the whole experience, the constant gliding between memory and present, new and familiar.

(By the way, I finally figured out why the goal timer was so fucked up — I had set it to count characters and not words, so no wonder I was doing several orders of magnitude over the word count!)

The national park here is actually fairly small, I think. Mostly just a few hikes, and the baths are the real famous thing. I should probably go ahead and book that if I want to do it. I don’t really care all that much about experiencing the baths though, but it would be something interesting to muse about, bathing culture and all that. Not that I really know what to expect on all of that, but I have a feeling it’ll be a bit more straight-laced than in other places — Puritanical prudishness and so on that’s so insistent in American life. But my broader thesis is that it’s mostly a shame that bathing culture, probably worldwide, is largely going by the wayside. I think there’s something really communally important about bathing together, something equalizing about all of us stripping our masks and attempts at self-portrayal and cleansing together. Old and young, rich and poor, and so on.

I don’t know what else to say at this point, so this is required portion of the morning pages where I just start brain dumping stuff out onto the page. Words words words, they fly out of my fingers but they actually are conveying essentially nothing. Word count is a myth, and these words are but smoke, formless, visible but insubstantial. What else do I really have to say about Hot Springs? I don’t know, because I literally just got into town.

It was fun camping last night. I slept like absolute shit, partially because of the discomfort of sleeping on those little inflatable sleeping pads, although I have no doubt I’ll get more comfortable with that over time as I adjust to it. But I also had really active dreams. I don’t really remember exactly what the context of the whole dream was, but I do remember the very end of it. There was some woman involved — she was some big-shot person who had some kind of authority over me, I don’t remember the details — and we had some kind of meeting or moment together. There were other people at the door, coming at the end of our meeting, and I remember the two of us getting closer and I went in for a kiss. It happened, and she looked up at me in those big clear eyes. She smiled and laughed, kind of cute but with a look of being impressed at my audacity in a slightly pitying way, the way you may look at a small child who did something like an adult, and she patted me on the chest and said “you did that, not me” and walked away. She said that lovingly, I think, as if I had taken charge in that moment or something. I don’t really know why that dream sticks out to me so clearly, but it does. Something something agency and honoring my desires and so on. Her image changes in my mind — at first she looked like that hot lady I was obsessed with on retreat a while back, brown hair and olive skin, and now in my memory she’s what’s-her-name who plays Monica in Friends. I don’t know. Weird.