I took Matt on a pyschogeographic excursion/photograph lesson in the park behind Kmart. The park is located behind an ill planned but prosperous collection of shopping plazas that comprise some of the most beautiful and maligned spaces in the Upper Valley. I often see middle class vehicles with athletic signifiers in the vicinity and I wonder how many of their owners choose to drive long distances to perform the activities related to their signifiers rather than go for a walk behind a strip mall.

We managed to walk from the Kmart parking lot all the way to the abandoned Home Depot nature walk without ever really touching 12a.

Fun was had by all and I enjoyed a mild sunburn.

In typical Gordon fashion, we ran into the owners of the Kmart plaza and I knew a member of their entourage.

I told myself that I had to do something I wouldn’t normally do.

I wouldn’t normally walk around Barre, VT. I don’t like it there and it doesn’t make me feel comfortable. I feel that in order to make Montpelier the town that it is, the state of Vermont forced everyone slightly undesirable to move to Barre. Yet in many ways, Barre is the nicer town. It has a great local foods store LACE, a real camera store and a big cool statue. More on the big cool statue.

In my work, I often visit places people don’t go. There isn’t anything wrong with these spaces, it is that they are usually located in areas that are hard to access for the average person. This field is between an interstate highway, a dam and an electrical transformer. The area where I work has lots of these forgotten surplus spaces that are there for the visiting if you just look for them. Your own neighborhood has such spaces and you can learn a lot about how you live by visiting them.