#solargothic

Prompt: Solarpunk has failed. It's time for the Solar Gothic. Show me an environmentally conscious world that is haunted by its past; where its failures still intrude upon the present. Where the characters live in the shadow of a decadent but much more materially wealthy past whose crumbling edifices mock them with the waste and the missed opportunities they represent. Show me characters who remember the promise of modernity, the story of ever-growing progress, and either lament that it is not for them or continue to cling to it like madmen. Show me a world that's trapped, claustrophobically, in an anthropocene that they are only gradually learning to manage, and where all former illusions of mastery or permanence have been dispelled.

Bruh, I came up in the hood.

Stockton to be specific. We didn't have the money to knock down the victorian, Edwardian, googie, mid century buildings. We also didn't have the money to fix them. People....live there. Vaulted marble falling to shit, crown moulding molding, nearly-paintless churches with crumbling steeples reaching skyward like they're pleading with god.

I had my 20th birthday on an abandoned car bridge from 2008 that went from our dilapidated smashed-in cookiecutters right into a swampy field, and that was one of the "good" neighborhoods because it was named after the biggest (increasingly senile) gangster in town and his grandkids lived there.

Unholy union of an industrialized swampy desert, that had once been riparian oak abundance. We teens would go to the scrappy remnants of the 1930's yacht club to go crew with retired tradesmen who were alcoholic enough to need young people running the rigging, to get out of into the swamp when it hit 105-110 and just sat there for weeks.

Largest city to go bankrupt before Detroit, second most violent city west of the Mississippi (first dead body I saw was thirteen in a gutter, first likely murder was a knifing in little manila at fourteen), behind east Oakland and ahead of Compton, second most illiterate, unemployment, malnutrition and obesity.

Hell's Angels staff their Nomad chapter there, the guys who don't have families who can roam to help other chapters with turf warfare... But the street gangs had nothing on the blood soaked property developers, burning down people's buildings if they wouldn't sell.

The city emergency financial committee embezzled the entire arts commission, so most of the galleries/museums/venues/programs folded, so we went to DIY punk shows after hours in strip mall vacancies that had just been a Verizon or something.

My folks were all mixed kids or first-gen Americans, trapped in a light-polluted parking lot with no view of the stars, like a bean sprout under a coffee can, listening to the sirens and trains at night, trains bringing something from somewhere else to someone else. The chief of police's family owned the newspaper at one point.

We explored the bootlegging tunnels in the 1913 seven-storey empire-style skyscraper with the birdcage elevators and the stained glass windows. Once, we let ourselves into the Yo-semite Club, the Victorian elite social club in the sixth, seventh, and hidden eighth storey of the vacant bank of Stockton building, where the citiest finest had drunk cognac through the prohibition, with private hotel rooms for the judges and a tunnel that pg&e maintained that went a handful of blocks to where the old Chinese whorehouse used to be, before they plowed the crosstown 4 through what used to be chinatown in the sixties, miles north of where it used to be.

We drank brandy and malt liquor on the rooves of abandoned mansions, because our a/c was broken.

We had a unmarked restaurant that opened at midnight full of stoner food and board games that had a parking lot full of the barely-dribing hoopties of hot-boxing teenagers, when that shit was fully illegal, and another unmarked store to buy tagging supplies. We went to slam poetry programs people paid for because they were sad our friends got killed.

I lost my virginity in a house whose front door hinges had been stolen from the old courthouse that got rated as seismically-unsafe in the sixties so that one of the inspectors buddies could get the construction bid; it took nearly every heavy machine in the city to knock it down, even when they'd take out all the pillars from under the dome. God, how people fucked, with the knowingness of death next door.

The faux-ivy league I dated some rich girl at - she was genuinely sweet, if innocent about slumming it, with her grandparents footing the bill; she finally decided her major a couple years in and became a graphic designer, she's married now, to someone comfortable - had its own separate police force, that would hit you way harder for smaller shit.

Things were bad enough that the italians left city limits to Waterloo, a small slowly-scorching-out vineyard and orchard town right outside, and opened the Italian Athlectics Association (Sicilians) and the Waterloo Gun and Bocce club (Genovese), taking over the town to be an enclave neighborhood once suburban sprawl wraps around it.

We ate feral blackberries and apples from the vineyard maintenance roads, nopales and mallow from the tenement landscaping with dollar store spices, half drunk bottles of wine from our friends' tasting jobs in Lodi that rich people were done with, dandelion soup to far from one payday and too close to the next. I know how to stretch top ramen to feed a black-mold apartment of disowned teen queers, six of us illicitly to a two bedroom with two dogs and a well-worn How to Train Your Dragon DVD; I once made crepes in my ex's ex's coke stash house with Bisquick and milk that expired the day before, while waiting around for her to pack up her shit.

A local jugallo ran a tips-only roaming cocktail bar from different park benches in red solo cups. I learned how to be quiet, keep my head on a swivel, keep a civil tongue in your head since you didn't all know who was connected to who and which who would put you in little bags in different dumpsters.

My friends began to trust my hypervigilance above their own, so I got more vigilant, but I could still be stupid too, and diplomacy was the only way that was ever out of having been stupid. Got mugged one night, but only halfway, because I recognized the tats and asked if he knew my friend's cousin; a couple years later, I talked myself out of handcuffs at two in the morning, and out of accessory to assault on a police officer when some rich leather-working hippie girl and her boyfriend passing through from Santa Rosa that I and my partnerish met at the taqueria that night panicked when stopped by a cop and punched him right in the face... Four cop cars and a supervisor at two in the morning, within twenty minutes, honestly let go because the only thing the Sarge and I despised more than each other was out-of-towners who thought our chainlink-and-cattail purgatory was a fun place to cut loose. I was a miscreant, and they were criminal justice majors at the community college, before; they knew where the good, cheap taco trucks were still, but we still only got stop-and-frisked when walking with our Black friends (from the nicer neighborhood next to ours, one of their Dads was the warden), so don't think they were still the people we'd played pokemon with, anymore.

Some rich folks, one a Belgian, restored an old fire station as a house and gallery, which made sense on one level - the Victorians built out of better construction material than any of orangepeel and popcorn spackle we'd ever seen a landlord paint job in - but they thought that the city was full of "charm, and vigour", and we thought there might be something clinically wrong with them... But they stayed even when someone got shot one afternoon down the sidewalk from their place, so they must have known what they were doing, and that made it their business, so... Yeah.

The biggest and oldest Sikh temples in the US were there, one by what became the fairgrounds, which was one of the worse neighborhoods; we'd joke that you could tell what quarter a car was from by the bullet caliber of the holes in it, and south of the four was submachine gun spray, with concertina wire and banana plants, and the old Amtrak station to Martinez and San Francisco.

They built a new one, a new Amtrak station, while I was living there. A bunch of people died because of it, because the property developers wanted the blocks between it and the downtown, since they heard before anyone else that the BART might be extended to Stockton, which was already on the main route between Sacramento and LA, and SF to Yosemite. Folks wouldn't sell, so they were "knifed by vagrants" as the newspaper put it, and their brick buildings burnt down from "homeless arsonists." Homelessly lugging couches full into and up the stairwells and dousing them with gasoline, of course, unpaid and of their own volition, of course. Of course. We'd sleep on the tile floors if it got too hot, down with our dogs, cats, and lovers who all gave us whatever approximated to meaning.