Every summer, we return to the land of our youth, the Mid-Atlantic USA and, as has become tradition, relay our impressions of it to you. With this episode — Part 2 of the August 2024 NM America Diaries, Carly wanders an aging office park in suburban Maryland finding far more than its drab facades and sidewalks to nowhere suggest.
See also: America Diaries August 2024, Part 1 (Lil Internet)
Some images below, and some additional materials will be posted to the podcast channel of the NM Discord
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I should have taken more photos but it was early and the story only really revealed itself in retrospect. Still, here's a few along with some excerpts of the text, which will hopefully at least give a sense...
Our room at the BWI Doubletree by Hilton had a pool view. The window in our room, as with most chain hotels in the US, was sealed shut, preventing the possibility of guests falling or deliberately jumping to their death.
Passing by in the airport shuttle the previous evening, I hadn’t paid this structure any attention as, at driving-speed, it fades into ex-urban noise.
But now as a pedestrian, I clock the spread of wall and roof mounted surveillance cameras, the small satellite receiver, and the badge-enabled full-height security turnstile.
In the immediate vicinity, interspersed among the office buildings, there are more than twenty economy and mid-market hotels, each its own micro-colony, each with its own parking lot, airport shuttle, buffet breakfast, and members’ points deal system. Patches of non-contiguous sidewalks gesture toward a shared geography but in practice the accommodations are self-contained islands, aggregations of integrated services for non-residents.
Throughout this trip, I would repeatedly confront the kind of extreme surface level incoherence that the BWI Business District evidences – which is to say an incoherence produced by a perfectly coherent logic at a more abstract layer of the system. I would think of this the next day at CVS in Virginia Beach, which is just dystopian as any other CVS — shelves haphazardly stocked, a proliferation of yellow coupon stickers obscuring most of the products; the store so air-conditioned the shelf-stable Tostitos nacho cheese dip sits solid in its jar. What got me though was the ratio of promotion to regular shelf-stock, which felt desperate and over-leveraged, a kind of hypertrophy born of a retail ecosystem that had fallen out of balance. But maybe I was looking at this the wrong way...
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Thank you for tuning in.
Carly
