We kissed very passionately. And, she said that she'd never loved anyone as much as she had me...
* * * * * * *
I woke up looking for her, then realized I had been dreaming. It was the second night/morning I'd dreamed about this old girlfriend. I'm going to call her "Aria" from now on, because I've written so many songs about her--my permanent muse. I was somehow very relieved. Until these last two nights any dreams about her (an old girlfriend) in the last few years usually ended in the various events that led to the tragedy of our real life break up, many, many years earlier. And these events didn't just have to do the the end of a romance--but with how both of our lives would be altered forever by "other" things. When I write the second half of the post published on the first day of winter last year, a whole bunch of circles will have been completed. It is the story of an other worldly decision and its wide-reaching consequences.
I think with the Aria dreams of the week described herein, my subconscious mind was finally releasing me from the legacy of dissatisfaction about our relationship. It was welcome, especially because a new troubled mind was settling in about the end of this last Journey.
I couldn't tell what the weather would be like yet on this day. There were no spots of sunlight on the tent walls. I wasn't sure if that was because the sun was behind an elevated bit of land or because it was overcast. A quick unzipping of the tent flap answered that: overcast.
Sitting there with the flap open, something caught my eye in the leaves below. Antennae, long ones, and the wide head of a rather large millipede came slowly out of the leaf bed...
Sigmoria aberrans, family Xystodesmidae.
A species found only in North Carolina and Virginia.
I packed up, noticing some rather large carpenter ants in the area too (nearly an inch long). I didn't really like this spot very much and resolved to try looking for another. For now though, I packed and headed downtown...
Interesting Boys and Girls Club painting.
It happens to resemble my Nomadic symbol.
Apple blossoms.
More city apartments going in. Every major city I've been to is really packing in the apartments.
In the last ten years, Durham has increased in population by 20%. This is expected to continue for the next 20 years. Even the land size of the city is growing quickly...
The City expanded in size from about 98 square miles in 2000 to over 106 square miles in 2010. Currently, the City is over 108 square miles in size.
durhamnc.gov
Another thing I've noticed on Google maps is just how ragged and unconnected town borders can be here in North Carolina. Here is Durham...
Check that out! Whole islands aren't even attached to the city proper.
New England Map of Towns. In these six states (with rare examples)
you are either in one town or another.
Source: Wikipedia - New England Town
The local races. Seen at the corner of Pettigrew and Roxboro.
A crumbling bridge on Roxboro.
I like this. It almost looks natural. Yep. That's all it takes, folks!
Former Information Office - Now moved to Main Street.
I went to McDonald's on Holloway, where I would work each morning here--making my major meal of the day breakfast ($6.35 for a "Big Breakfast with Hotcakes" a good deal). And, I published a post that I had started the day before. Then I walked back to the library which was only a block away.
This central library is old and has a lot of drawbacks. It has brass-plated outlets in the floor which are countersunk, disallowing my AC adapter to be plugged in. So, I found the only desk that lined up with a wall outlet but faced the wall. There are very few windows. It is a bit industrial. And the restrooms are very nasty. Both the second and third level men's rooms stink terribly of urine. The doors' locks on the stalls are broken and the hand dryers are weak, blowing cold air. The Wi-Fi is slow and spotty and the staff is half asleep. Probably among the worst libraries I've been to. But I made it work for the two days I used it.
As an aside about public libraries and their restrooms...
Yes, it is a sad cliche that many street people are the only ones who use libraries now. But, for them a library is a sanctuary to get out of the weather, read or use the internet for free, be able to rest (but not sleep) without being "moved along" and the ability to use a public bathroom without being hassled. The only problem I have seen is that street folk treat a bathroom the way they find it. In other words, at an old dirty place like this library, they just slam the doors on the stalls until they break, write graffiti all over the insides, piss all over the seats and floor, leave the water running, and don't flush the toilets. In a nice library, with a well maintained restroom, they are more respectful.
The library I happen to be writing this post at is the eastern branch of the Durham County system. It is much newer, and the men's room is very clean, with autoflush toilets, fully stocked hand soap, and paper towel dispensers (though because of a defect in the design of the toilets, all the seats - there are six - are loose to the point of nearly falling off). Also, frankly there are fewer street folks in this "Oak Grove" part of town. At the central library there was a guy in one of the stalls for the WHOLE day. Didn't hear him snoring, but he must have been asleep.
I worked at the library without a break for over eight hours writing the "heiress and the artist" dream post. When I had utterly spent myself out (it was more exhausting than walking twenty miles), I left, forgetting that it had gotten dark out...
Walking back to the sleep spot on Briggs, crossing the Durham Freeway.
The R. Kelly Jr. Pedestrian Bridge glows in "Durham Blue" in the distance, across the freeway.
I never had time to walk over it or check it out.
Apparently, it replaced a terrible bridge built in the 1970's. Cost of the new bridge: $2.2 million.
I went to my rock and sat down, having bought a beer on the way back. I enjoyed the beer immensely and it loosened my tightening anxiety a bit. Thoughts about Maine permeated my mind. I wanted badly to see it again. Yet, I was conflicted by knowing that when I do see it again, all of this adventure will be over. I have lots of plans for when I get back. But, there is no way for me to feel certain about how to fund them.
This Journey is funded by readers who actually get something each day, in the form of these posts. Writing a book when I return to Maine and starting a social low income rural housing project (using my ideas for self sustaining property begun right before I left in 2014) is going to be a huge struggle to fund--maybe impossible. I will probably try Kickstarter again. But judging by what a miserable and humiliating failure the last campaign was (for the "A Manifest Destiny - America From the Bottom Up" book--still unpublished), the sour taste for such an effort still gives me mental indigestion, to the point of not even wanting to think about it.
* * * * * * *
AMERICA'S WORLD
AGE OF THE HYPERMALL
AGE OF THE HYPERMALL
One other thing is concerning me lately. I simply am caring less and less about the new places I see. It is kind of a "been there, done that" experience. Honestly speaking, towns and cities in the US are pretty much all the same now. They all have their unique features, but these are precluded by the homogeneity of what car culture has turned them into. Downtown histories are weakened and belittled by edge-of-town box store and chain restaurant areas. Some cities have up to four Wal-Mart Supercenters, dozens of McDonald's, and all the other fast and slow food (like Outback Steakhouse) places you could ever need, and then more than you need.
These areas are serviced by clover leafed, congested Interstate Highways, for the "convenience" of suburban neighborhoods. There is no need to go into a city's center for anything. And, besides the business class, office professionals, and executive upper middle classes (who occasionally attend opera's, art galleries, symphonies and fancy restaurants), why in God's good name would anyone choose to deal with the parking garages and street people of the cities' downtowns? All your shopping needs are on the edge of town, right off the highway. Buy what you want - but rarely need - hit an Applebee's, hop back in the car and you're home in twenty minutes or less.
The thought of walking around these mall areas? Are you kidding me? That's absurd, vulgar, time-wasting, "unnecessary," and makes you breath heavy. Fuck that! Civil engineers know this intimately well. And as we saw in places like Gastonia, there are no provisions at all made for people who do choose (or have) to walk. No sidewalks. No crosswalks. No walk signs. No benches. Not even road shoulders. No allowance at all for even the slightest chance of pedestrian needs. While this is more of an East Coast phenomenon, the Midwest suffers from these (what I alone, apparently) consider serious deficiencies. The Northwest is not so much this. But people in the East just don't believe me when I say that. And, frankly, they just don't give a shit either.
The car - the automobile - drives us. The infrastructure and new construction is centered around driving only. The cookie cutter-nature of corporate-owned chain stores and restaurants, combined with the development of city land, availability of easy gasoline, and the general laziness and distracted mind of the majority Americans is forming a tangled, concrete hypermall. The coming continental mall will have no borders, and is even now fully integrating itself into every town and city; filling the stretches of land between them with the same twenty (or so) corporate chains; erecting their giant billboards, and spirelike hundred foot logo-signs the way homesteaders used to claim land in the 18th Century.
There isn't even competition anymore. All these Burger Kings and Bojangles just expect to have each other on the same block. The advertising divisions have a fun time making a big game out of trying to outdo each other with the "McRib" vs the "Chicken Stix" vs whatever-it-is-this-week. But, truth be told, they just suck up each other's overflow of customers, keep all their prices at just about the same level (fast food is a meal between $5-$10, medium food $10-$20 and higher priced chains $20+). It is just the way business is done. The true monopoly does not have anything to do with single corporations buying each other up. It has to do with entire sectors colluding to maintain a status quo.
Such can be said about department stores, grocery chains, and specialty shops. Different regions may vary, but every one of them learns from the others what works and what doesn't. They employ as many people for as cheap an hourly wage as the law allows, then sit back and suck up the cash with the wide straw of a weird kind of socialistic-capitalism (meaning, all decisions about all business concerns are centralized and placed in the hands of a tiny collective global elite).
I'm not saying it's a conspiracy theory. Certainly not! All of it is being done both in full-sight of the public and with the gracious acceptance of said public. The public doesn't care that all variety and novelty is being pushed out of culture. They just want their unnecessary plastic stuff, their fattening sugary food, their government approved drugs (SSRI's, alcohol and tobacco), their mindlessly repeating TV commercials, their five gallons of gasoline each per day, and the debt-laden cars they never have to get out of unless they arrive at work, the mall, or home. As long as all of these symbiotic characters and organizations agree to the terms and conditions of this demonic contract, good old Mother Earth with be scraped, and drilled, and burned, and polluted, as irreplaceable resources are extracted, used and thrown away, by a culture that looks to the American way of life in order to define human existence.
THAT is the America I've come to know by traveling through these cities. Pull one of the ants out of his/her brainless positively-reinforced chemical trail of consumerism and willful, habitual distraction, and you discover that he/she's actually kind of a neat guy or gal! People are good. They do know how to love. When temporarily disconnected from the marketing-matrix people seem to enjoy each other's company. They are fun to talk with, and actually - gasp! - have individual personalities. In emergency situations they can shake off the complacency and addiction of all the ideologies long enough to help each other--even save each other. But, hold them too long from the umbilical cord of car culture and mall-driven mentality and they begin to panic like junkies who can't score anymore. They freak out and will claw their way back to the opium den of and the dirty needle of being told what to think, what to say, and how to act.
With that in mind, what incentive is there to save their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids the terrible - and probably now-inescapable - legacy of a hotter, carbon dioxide-ridden, trash heap of a world, mired in cultural-religious wars? We're all just having too much fun here, during the last hoorahs of the garden party of an early 21st Century Americanized world. We're gonna have our fun, and nobody - not even our own descendants who we already know will be dearly paying for our excesses and stupidity - is gonna stop us! We are the most selfish generations to ever live.
When I get to Richmond, Virginia, then the Beltway of Washington, DC next month, it will simply be more of the same. When I approach the sprawling New York City-to-Boston megatropolis it will be the most extreme version of stultifying cultural stagnation. By that, I mean that nothing new can advance culture in these stymied, overpacked, industrial grids. It is simply the same viral outbreak of materialist, consumerist, politically polarized, religiously misled and scientifically ignorant society--but maxed out.
They are still trying to fill up every space that hasn't been sold yet, re-using every tired out slogan and promotional gimmick that hasn't been worn out yet, and philosophically trying to drive forward by only using the rearview mirror. It is the fire in the madhouse. The runaway train on a dark and stormy night. Use any metaphor for insanity and lack of collective self-control you like. If you think I'm overblowing all of this, than you have been jacked in too long. You've bought into it and can't understand why anyone would want to rock the boat. You don't realize that the boat sits in three feet of water, and if you'd just tip the damn thing over, you'd see that you can stand up just fine--thank you very much.
Yes, it is the Age of the Hypermall, foisted upon the swarming masses by their own inaction--who play along with the Hunger Game, because they are too afraid to boycott or alter it. And, they are kept fattened, drunk, and ignorant by the filthy rich Donald Trumps [1,2], while the Global Debt Monster is breaking off of its leash to literally destroy the world economy. Combine all of this with a blustering hydrogen bomb-toting little brat in North Korea, and a second Adolf Hitler who will probably become president - and not hesitate to use the red button in his hate-filled, greasy-greedy little hand; and we really could be looking at THE END.
None of this makes me particularly proud to be a human being, never mind an American. And, all of this paltry, unnoticed crying out from the wilderness that I am doing is going fade away in three months, lost in the pink noise of social oblivion; just part of the entertainment on the death row of humanity, as it chomps on its last meal.
Sitting on my rock, drinking the last bit of my beer, I was not happy, not hopeful, and not filled with positive ambition anymore--at least for now. I wrote a song once, with a repeating chorus line: "Why should I change, when nobody cares at all?"
As I made my way over to the tent, crawled in, and slipped into the sleeping bag I sang that song over and over again until I fell asleep. Prophetic, indeed (click the following title and read the lyrics as it plays)...
* * * * * * *
AMERICA'S WORLD
Words and Music by Alex Wall
I look to the West
To the bomb, to the best
To end of the day
In a year, in a life
In the time of the night
In my shallow eyes
Open my mind
Give a sign
Tell me you said before
Tell me what you're looking for
Open my mind
Give me a peak...
I woke on Tuesday morn
I made the shower warm
On the radio they talked of death and war
In America's world I wasn't feeling proud
I was feeling bad, I was feeling sad
Why should I change
When nobody cares at all?
Why should I change
When nobody cares at all?
I got a job at the bank
I talk to folks all day
They call me up from near and far away
I know that all we have
Could feed the world each day
When I walk home at night
I pass little kids on the Hill
They all look up and smile
But their parents chill
It isn't worth their while
It isn't in their wills
Why should I change
When nobody cares at all?
Why should I change
When nobody cares at all?
From the Album Wake to Dream © Copyright 2001. Omega Art and Music.
Produced by Alex Wall.
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