When I was a little kid I was very open to possibility and I was very open to the notion that the world was more complicated than what met the eye. And part of that was just because I was weird. I was a very weird kid. And I say this, you know, not really as a point of pride, but just as a point of honesty.
And so I really liked going, there was this place, this space near my parents’ house that was, it was the old trolley tracks that, Minneapolis used to have this amazing public transportation system that was demolished by sinister forces from the auto and gas industry, and it was just, you know, just ripped up and gone. And so there’s all these little weird pockets, these weird corridors, where you can still see where the old tracks were and it’s all kind of like these wooded little random forests that just sort of, and they’re all scrubby, it’s mostly invasive woods and all kinds of stuff, but gosh I loved going there when I was a kid.
And it seemed magic to me, because you couldn’t really hear the cars and you couldn’t really see the houses, you were just in this little space of green. And it felt like a magical wood. And it felt like there was magic there. It felt like that to me. And I needed that to be magic, because I was a super lonely kid. I was bullied at school. I wasn’t particularly good at school. There was just not very much that I was very good at. And so I didn’t really know what my place was.
And so I would go over here and I could imagine a place and I could imagine a place that had endless possibilities that were available and also where the world that I was in seemed complex and unknowable and mean to me. And the world that I created in my imagination was also complex and unknowable. But it was hopeful and that my oddness and my not good at things-ness was not a liability, but rather it allowed me to encounter strange and magical things in the realms of my own little mind. So that’s where that came from.