fraggle

meh. valentine's day brought my mom up from p-town; happened to be a visit day at my brother's college... it was kinda trippy, going to their little president's speech and brunch thingie and all that showy jazz...

i've been hanging out more on the claremont colleges' campuses lately... this week i mean... especially since that chick moved in with us... has seemed like a time to go wandering around that place... i only know a few of the senior class now, and as soon as they graduate, i figure there'll be no more reason to visit there ever again... except for the buildings i guess... it seems to me that you can visit a place to visit the people there, and other times you want to visit a place for certain things that are there... but i've even been noticing that even the landmarks of the place are changing...

there is an interesting place on the claremont grad school's campus; its a place i stumbled upon once while walking randomly, half lost half not, in the early morning one day... its this huge fountain; or really its a huge basin with a tiny stream of fountain coming out of the middle. and in the past, it was kinda divided in half; there was a wall dividing down the middle so half was actually a bench, surrounded and covered with flowery vines, and on the other side was the rocky half-circle where the water was... there was an overhang and pillars and vines all over it... the pillars were especially interesting because on each pillar was this bronze plack with a quote about the 5 colleges on it... from the outside it looked like something from greek myth, like a shrine or something.. i went there at many key points during college to meditate... but i have noticed that since this summer, it was radically changed; they redid the half-circle-setup, took out the wall, and now its just a huge smooth curved basin with water spouting in the center; thick cement around its periphery, and no more pillars; just heavy thick corner-blocks at every corner..

now from a distance the place looked so militant; like the entrance to a fortress... and the quotes are gone; i only hope there's a record of them somewhere... i wondered who had wanted such a wierd change so bad as to have spent all the money to change it so utterly... the place has a different energy now; the flowers are gone, the words are erased... the person i went with when i first found this out remarked that i seemed very upset about this change... i told him it was true; the physical place itself is regrowing over itself and becoming other than the place i knew before... it seemed wierdly like a bad omen or something... i hope i don't sound all silly and superstitious... it just felt eerie... you know when you spend alot of time in a place and you think hard and private thoughts often in that place; you get used to its feel, you get used to its particular sense... this was like that place, that personish sensation that i knew had been rooted out and replaced by... someone else... someone else that didn't know me; that didn't remember my problems; that was built for a different world... i left the place feeling like, well, that the world was changing slowly, piece by piece...

...sorry if i sound uber-silly and paranoid...