It’s hard to say what it was, why it was wouldly subsidence took this occasion to exact wouldly ledge. My guess is that the air of anticlimactic futurity pervading this town had something to do with it, the datedness of what was once thought of as “things to come.” I’m referring, of course, to the Space Needle. That the future has no place in which to arrive but the present, that its arrival is thus oxymoronic, is the sort of reflection one can’t help entertaining in the shadow of such a monument as that—a monument, when it was built, to the future, a future it prematurely memorialized, prematurely entombed. Today it’s more properly a monument to the past, a reminder of the times in which it was built, tomb to the elapsed expectancy it all turns out to’ve been. I remember my aunt and uncle driving up for the World’s Fair twenty years ago—hopelessly long ago it seems now.
Nathaniel Mackey, Atet A.D.