death and mankind will be stunned when nature arises

it has finally come: they've decided to tear down Tiger's stadium. it's probably for the best, as this image can attest. better to burn out than fade away, and all that. about five years ago I lived a few hundred feet away from the stadium, approximately at the lower right corner of the photo. the stadium was already empty by then and sat silently alone, its steel slowly rusting and paint wearing away, empty bottles and trash building up behind the steel fences. a single security guard watched the place day and night, one of the loneliest jobs I can imagine; like watching a patient die. I could see the top of the stadium from my balcony and took a lot of pictures of the huge banks of darkened lights silhouetted against the sunset. They looked like giant steel lattice sentries waiting to be juiced up again to flood the dissolving field below.

In spite of the desolation surrounding my apartment building, I always felt internal pride when telling people where I lived. "in detroit," I'd say, "at michigan and trumbull. right next to Tiger's stadium."