1

persistence

it’s easy to go about life within a progressing city, a

transportation hub, a unique and vibrant gateway to a

world that gives the sense, even at its slowest pace, that

it’s moving forward.

construction, new architecture, new people,

new places.

what’s hard is coming to terms with a place where

none of that is happening.

where there’s a stagnant culture, a stagnant set of

places and people that won’t be any different today then

they are a year from now.

e’s a stagnant culture, a stagnant set of places and people tha

ne of wind moving through slow traffic and a strange mix of factory smell and chic

keep driving past the suburbs, into rurality.

somewhere that there may be a city, but it only seems to exist to serve the mundane routine of the ones who

reside in it.

somewhere there’s always a sort of persistent drone of wind moving through slow traffic and a strange mix of

factory smell and chicken shit in the air.

it’s an island.

where everything has to be driven to, no matter what.

the distance between your destinations force you to think about yourself more than you ever wanted to.

the kind of place where you walk into a diner and you can’t shake the feeling in the back of your head that your server doesn’t have a life to live beyond the glass windows.

2

familiarity

in middle school, my friends would overtly clench their butt-cheeks together whenever Johnny, one of the first openly gay people any of us had met, walked by us. it wasn’t until much later that I started to question why an action like that was necessary except to show each other that we belonged.

Taylor and I were a little

drunk one night so we

went out and walked around the

neighborhood next to his for

a little while until we caught

a really awful smell that made

us stop and investigate a ditch on the

side of the road. there was a

dead deer who’s eyes were open right at us and we sort of just stood there for

a little bit. he made a joke

and called her bambi, then we

left.

my older brother’s grey ’96 Nissan Sentra didn’t have working a/c nor any sort of audio system. when I rode around with him we would listen to music out of a cd player in between the seats. there was a huge wave-shaped scrape down the right side from when he hit our church basketball goal.

in high school there was a

group of guys who all drove

very large trucks with at least one

confederate flag hanging out of it somewhere.

they also chewed tobacco

and seemed to think that was especially cool

to carry around in school.

there’s not one time I go back where I don’t end up seeing

some other young person

driving a truck like that. too

young to even comprehend

the history behind the flag they wave, just carrying on its

legacy.

just a few years ago, behind my house, through the trees near where our dead pets were buried, a trailer blew up due to a meth fire. rumors were that someone was still inside but I never found out.

after high school, most weekends we would just get drunk and drive to mcdonald’s at just the right time in the morning where you could either get breakfast or dinner. there wasn’t really anything better to do.

3

salvage

the smallest things have much more importance out here then they do in an urban environment.

much more attention is payed to the smaller scale, and when a change is made to the rural landscape it’s impossible to ignore.

distanced cities and towns are the most resistant to change, and it’s not hard to see why.

it’s near impossible to get the same level of resources a large city has out to a smaller town, even one that’s fairly populated.

public transportation is a fever dream. so small towns have to work with what they have.

it’s an island made of little islands, each one further away than the last.

so 3 miles away there’s a gas station that also functions as your local grocery store that also functions as a pizza restaurant and it’s the closest thing to you for another 10 miles or so.

it’s an island made of little islands, each one farther away than the last.

it’s an island made of little islands, each one further away than the last.

the picturesque small-town community isn’t what it

seems here.

you have your town-centralized, religious-based

micro-communities that are bred by exclusivity, and the “rest” dwindle around

in their own bubbles.

what results is a fostering of a public that distrusts

the public.

so most tiredly give up and will vote republican no

matter who’s name is on the ballot.

public cooperation and grassroots thought might

not ever reach out that far, but satellite television

always will. the picturesque small-town community isn’t what it seems here.

the picturesque small-town community isn’t what it seems here.

there are real people living

outside of the grand moving

machines

but there’s something else.

anyone from the city can slander on with full pretension about anyone from outside of town and the regression of rural society, but there’s one thing that will forever be discounted and one thing that can’t be dismissed here:

there are real people living outside of the grand moving machines that are our metropolises.

and furthermore, there are people that refuse to leave the small towns they were raised in because they know if they try hard enough they can at least make an individual difference to improve upon the way of life there, if only for one other person. and they will.

because they truly care enough for something so small.

and they’ll be happy.

stalled is a free-form sociological short magazine.

this is the first issue.

photos were taken with 35mm film on two disposable cameras in and areas surrounding gainesville, georgia.

printed on canson xl recycled sketch and drawing paper.

jason combs / march 2015.