Finally, this big boy lives on my wall. a normal size really but big effort. Early 2025. A huge sleepy ramble is incoming. This is the Riverfill parking lot, a parking lot that fills in an old river bed in pikeville kentucky. Teens like to drive around the cinema in the evenings. There's the spooky white church next to it. Out of frame is a holding jail for the court. There's the rotting old river bed that is disconnected from the real river. It was behind my house. Fish would be stocked, fish would die. It is called Pikeville Pond. When the pond was a river, it was also cold enough that they could drive cars over it. The pond is now full of sewage, because people still have some plumbing that goes into the old river. This place is located in a river overflow area that historically was seasonally occupied by indigenous people, because it floods, and living there year round is kind of a nuts idea. Going up the hills to hunt is a good thing to do while the floods happen. Sources needed, okay? They made Pikeville there, anyway, and it flooded a lot. They rebuilt a few times after huge floods, and they had train tracks for the coal that ran through the town. There was an issue with coal dust. Pikeville has stair step looking mountains from its strip mining era, but now it's had a glow up. When I drew the stripped mountains in college, people asked me if it was a drawing of China. No one knows anything about Appalachia and it's pretty wild. After they diverted the river, they stopped having the floods as bad in the downtown, and they stopped having the coal dust. Now, they have a uni and a big hospital and a convention center, because they serve all these other areas with less flat land in the mountains, on account of they didn't have a ton of army corps $ and terraforming effort put into a river diversion. This project, that made the town, is only second to the Panama Canal for the amount of dynamite used. They're proud of the economic and human benefit it's had, but it's also a weird memory of the rotting river. They lopped the top off of this beautiful hill there to show off the cut-through project, because they decided they needed a really big parking lot. The areas we used to walk before they did that are the most beautiful places I remember in my entire life. No one can eat the fish, because they have mercury runoff from coal mining in Kentucky. I had a crazy eco grief about the river, earlier this year, like 25 years after I was there. This painting and poetry project helped. I wrote a thing for this that was much more professional. Can't find it right now. Maybe I'll edit this later :)