Pleasant Mellowness

Muncie Appreciation Photo Digest for August 2021

Muncie remains an easygoing place to weather the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Choose the right route at the right time of day and a long walk can be an almost entirely solitary experience. These photos aren't intended as poverty porn or purely as Eggleston-worship, but an appreciation of the corners of the built-up areas that have cracked and eroded after extended periods of disuse. Alan Watts wrote in Nature, Man and Woman (1958) that "a certain amount of ordinary laziness would lend our culture the pleasant mellowness which it singularly lacks." Human ruins can be lonely, but they also convey some of Muncie's pleasant mellowness. They're things that I saw on my daily walks throughout August that reminded me that everything is forever and always in a slow fade back to the dirt.