ANGST AWEIGH ANCHORAGE

With Anchorage, Alaska becoming for many of us a city dug into the memory rather than the daily skin, and with the city itself growing less characteristic, I think it might be time to try to staple together a coherent collective narrative of experiences that are specific to our pasts in Anchorage, both glorious, chilling, or filled with that particular sky aluminum grey. This evening's whimsy is to collecy quintessential stories, whose purpose is to target the particular qualities of living in the city of Anchorage, as opposed to fishing in Alaska.

The city as an afterthought, an airport, an aftershock: when I return not only am I struck by a remoteness I easily ignored, by how little physically remains from even twenty years ago (and how only the tiniest geographic shards feel like they were once home), but by the stage-like quality, a crowded ghost town.

What was it? America itself is homogenizing, and Anchorage was nothing if not ghostly, a mist of Americanism somewhere between the shark's teeth of the Alaska range and the peeling puke green paint on the trailer's propane heater.

We were perhaps, the children of the very last sane converts to manifest destiny, the end of the road for the relentless expansion of Western Civilization. Here, between a PJs and Ft. Richardson, Americans' relentless physical domination of the Earth stopped, largely out of room.

I was thinking about small brown frogs that seem to have disappeared, about the botched, peculiar attempts to hide bodies in Spenard , about nuclear tipped anti-aircraft missle silos dominating the subdivision, about French Stewardesses cutting an erotic swath through the Upper One, about a cop busting a cocaine ring at Wendy's by ordering sugar on his hamburger. In this worldy, insular, time-drunk place, what was distinct, hilarious, historical?

Start here. It might be worth a new blog.