outside lights

There is something about how these inside lights transform the ground they’re sitting on—grass, normal grass—into something like astroturf, into an inside-outside. Astroturf is an outside thing that because it is inside, no longer is what it is (and yet can only be described as that, as being what it isn’t). This grass suddenly looks like the fake version of what it actually is.

I think it’s because these aren’t just “lights”: they’re the specific kind of lights that you might buy to put in your house that would make your house look a little like a coffee shop, or a restaurant that was re-decorated in the last ten years. They’re mass-produced, very cheap, but in that IKEA way that actually looks pretty nice, and so you see them in a lot of coffee shops and restaurants that have been redecorated at some point after food services basically ceased to be a profitable industry. Or am I just thinking of a very specific coffee shop and a very specific restaurant that did that? (In the last ten years.) I’m not sure.

In the soft light, the road and sidewalk have such delicate, domestic pinks. When I took this photo, I was out walking the dog, but I can’t remember if it was the soft light of morning or the soft light of evening. Dawn, dusk… these are the moments when light seems like a thing you could turn off or on.

The two smaller lights in such a neat row. You’re not tempted to take them, and not only because you don’t need a permanent indoor light fixture that you found on the ground. These lights seem fixed here. If you could only find the switch, you could turn them on.