On the sidewalk, walking towards the bar to get drunk I catch myself wondering “Are the days moving faster than they were back then?” They are. My days shorter my gait brisker my drunks drunker my awakenings more rude “Everyone else thinks about these things”, I think. They just forget to write them, I write. The potpourri of North Carolina spring that mysterious scruffy foliage just off the sidewalk wafting in the Tarheel blue fade of police lights gong of that church bell that tourists and drunk people love to ring I couldn’t ever properly capture the loneliness, the expansive sense of possibility of a nighttime walk down an empty North Carolina street.
Patrick asleep on the orange recliner the soft whirring of the electric fan late afternoon sun pouring in open windows downtown Greensboro waiting outside, cast in ancient white marble, immutable stagnant weathered by the seasons a portrait of Southern Greco-Roman stability the sun on dust specks rising up en masse from a piece of carpet books scattered on shelves and tables, across Patrick’s lap years of pleasant memories here I come back to this in-between place. sleeping in the closet, a warm womb with white walls fistdeep in the soggy mush of ancient, nigh-forgotten details the visceral tracers of stories I can’t recall quotations memorized and then promptly forgotten you remember the shape, the outline a garbled mash of intonations abandoned buildings and the Quadratic Equation drunkenly broken into.
"Zine Scenes" New York Post, November 29, 2009. Marissa Meltzer wrote: Aaron Lake Smith, 26, a journalist, is the author of several zines, including one on Joan Didion and his most recent, “Unemployment,” which was written during a jobless period last winter. He started doing a zine one summer when none of his friends were around.
"Photocopied and Stapled" The Rumpus, Jason Diamond wrote: What sets Lake Smith apart from what Tobias Carroll referred to as a “post-Cometbus generation of punk rock memoirists” is his ability to balance the silly with the serious. He goes through bouts of guilt that would make any Catholic jealous, and is constantly haunted by the dark shadow of capitalism. Whether or not Aaron Lake Smith is happy watching what he refers to as “the crumpled and fading empire of America” is of no matter to me, but the fact that he documents it so well is what matters.
