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illinois, electric

For several years i worked at a trashy nonunion electrical safety contractor servicing Ameren Illinois. I stayed in almost every rural town with a Super 8 over the course of several years. The drive out to the work area might be 3 hours plus and you worked by yourself almost all day almost every day so I spent a lot of time listening. To books, to podcasts, to albums. I finished like 6 Neal Stephenson books, and 10 Peter F. Hamilton books, that's how much time. I should have gotten into Aubrey-Maturin.

During a lot of this job I was doing this on either an iPhone 3G or a bit later the best phone ever made, the Nexus One. One thing that was nice about the Nexus was that it had a semi-decent camera compared to the awful pre-4 iPhone so it was the first time I took a lot of photos. Years later I found hundreds of candid shots from Illinois. Some of them were basically evidence of crimes, some were terrible shots not worth saving, and some were pretty great. I took a selection of the pretty great ones and this is what you see before you.

an all-wood bridge over a swampy area
a barn atop a hill with vines growing up the side
a crumbling abandoned warehouse
a rusting, broken meter box on a felled pole
a pleasant looking beige-colored dog
a muddy cornfield in wintertime behind a wire fence
copper and metal leaching
a bunch of random metal and tractor parts covered by weeds
worker in a non-backfilled hole for a replacement electric pole
a 2nd floor door with a missing exterior stairway
a dirty wet stuffed animal and some rope on top of a pile of parallel sticks
an empty phone booth with no telephone under
a fake windmill shed
sky at dusk with parallel cloud patterns
an abandoned school bus that was formerly a domicile
a printed sign of a dog that says 'pet not allowed'
an unusually tiled house in fall colors
a former Holiday Inn Holidome converted into a different hotel
a broken McDonald's sign that says 'MCRIBS THEY IS BACK'
a long fenceline in wintertime along a corn field
an absurd amount of wooden Christmas theme standups in a yard
sorted junk piles in a backyard around the electric pole
an abandoned house's kitchen filled with old appliances and dishes
a steeple without a church
a cemetery behind a large factory plant
a homemade backboard with the Dodge Ram logo and the words hemi, skeeter, and ram tuff
a door that has a sign that says 'this is not a store, keep out'
an odd telegraph pole that looks like a soldier's grave with a helmet
an electrical worker climbing some bars
some sort of tower or loading area from 1923
a barge floats down a river
a gnarled old tree standing alone in a field
a muffler man and a fiberglass elephant outside an antiques shop
a sign that says 'no unauthorized playing'
an intricate covered wooden bridge
a small piece of the original intact route 66
a wooden garage door with a water pump and bucket carving

illinois, electric by edmon graham is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0