Bithumen

Bitumen, bits, humans. Mummies and Deaddies. Disneyland rather than Egypt. An Oscar shaped mummy and a pregnant mummy are queuing up for the bathroom or then again maybe they’re in storage. Actual living bodies have to squeeze past – warm skin on cold skin – to get beyond the oversized body figures and into the bathroom. The Mummies’ passivity turns the warm living into the actively rude. And when you get out of the toilet they’re still there waiting to stare at you, not through bandaged eyes but rather through their bellybuttons. The ubiquitous camera. Planet Hillary. The eye as a wormhole through hollow brains, bridges between brains – ubiquitous cameras. Sewage, peepholes, drainage pipes for all things fluid, dirty, and also a portal, an entrance and exit. A man sitting on a pipe and a cannon.

Bitumen, the goo, the puss of earth, the slime that binds our streets. A thick black sticky smelly viscous skin, hardening and softening. A sealant, a resin. Petrol, Oil. Pitch. Asphalt. In the pits. Dirty hands with cleaning products. Floating on a pink slippery surface – a dirty mirror, a sticky puddle – into something – afterlife, a parallel reality. Out of the window, into the street.

Once while out in a canyon I found a tar seep, bubbling away. I took a long stick and stuck it as deep into the hole as I could reach without putting my whole arm into it.