A Living Magazine - Day 329 - Homecoming - Westfield to Holyoke

It seems I'd made the right decision about staying that extra night. The clouds had poured rain as I slept, utterly exhausting themselves before a bright clear sunrise. I got up, took another shower and touched base with people online--also checking my route to Holyoke, before leaving at around 10:30 a.m. 

I was feeling good, well rested and the pack seemed somehow lighter. Then, at about half way down Franklin, and going over a mental list of items, I realized I'd left my computer's power cord in the room. Urghhhh! On the half mile walk back, I was reminded of just how many times things like this had happened. They don't happen TO me, they happen BECAUSE of me. Can't blame anyone else.

When I got back to the motel, fearing a long exchange with the manager, I was happy to see that she was just coming out of the office and let me into the room without issue. I grabbed the cord, thanked her and retraced my steps, heading down Franklin, and then north up Route 202... 

I love the temperance drinking fountains I've seen in many cities.

Here is one erected in the 1920's. It had gone into disrepair, but was cleaned up in 1996.

   

People from Westfield lost on 9/11.

Rad, dude! Compared with...

Here, just about five miles north of Westfield, and unbeknownst to me, the SD card in my camera malfunctioned. This was the last picture I would get for two days...

When I got to Holyoke, I made the long walk downtown to see where the post office was and go to the McDonald's there. It became immediately apparent that this town was economically depressed and culturally impoverished.

I found the McDonald's first and went in. There, four or five street people sat without any McDonald's items in front of them. They stared at me as I got in line, ordered my drink and then sat down. I don't take kindly to being stared at, so I just stared down each of them, until they looked away. They will use paying patrons to shield them while they fill up a water bottle with Sprite or dig in the trash for uneaten food. Two of them begged me for money. I had no extra money so I gave none.

Or they will simply shrink into a corner and hang out sleeping for as long as they can. Recall that there is no sitting allowed outside in cities. It is illegal to rest and especially to sleep. These human needs are called "loitering and trespassing." They can be done in parks until darkness comes--as long as the person isn't lying down, but even there, sometimes people are told to "move it along, sir" if they are there for the whole day. That's why McDonald's is often a good alternative. This particular restaurant was much more tolerant than many others I'd seen.

Most McDonald's restaurants in a city like this (with a high population of street folks) will post notices about 30 minute limits for eating meals. This particular place kept the restrooms locked, so that you must ask to be buzzed in. I needed to use the restroom and asked them to buzz me in. I got into the stall and went to grab toilet paper to wipe off the seat, but there was no tissue left. I immediately went back to the counter and told them they needed to resupply the bathroom. Ten minutes later an employee came out of the service area and went in the bathroom to re-up the toilet paper. Finally he came out, I thanked him and went in to find the baby changing table down with the roll of tissue sitting on it. The dispenser near the toilet was still empty. I took pictures of everything (now these shots are lost).

After this joyous McDonald's visit, I walked out into the middle of the city to locate the post office. And, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that there was not a single car on the streets. One or two street people poked along pathetically, heads down, shuffling aimlessly. I found the post office, where I needed to pick up a package the next day.

With the sky now overcast and gray, it looked like an Eastern European city behind the old iron curtain, or maybe a sci-fi movie or zombie apocalypse, where a virus has killed nearly everyone and I was the last person unaffected person, beside these poor and unfortunate zombie street people.

Honestly, it was a depressing and dead looking place. I took pictures of the run-down tenement buildings, which looked like they were inhabited by ghosts still living during the great depression. They had back porches, with broken windows, laundry drying, trash piled up on the ground below.

I felt as though, ever since leaving Torrington with my one extremely expensive but unproductive night, a cold gray pall had settled over this Journey. Having first been excited to enter Massachusetts, I was now suffering from the dirty, dank, New England negativity that I had been so happy to escape from nineteen months earlier. I am sensitive to social atmospheres. And lately, this meant a possible reintroduction to the defeatism and carelessness of the region I had called "home," and was now on my way back to in this "homecoming" Journey.

The impression was that I had done and seen so much only to be returning to the life I had wanted and needed to leave. Leaving Maine was my last resort for trying to find sanity. And, I had successfully found sanity in my work of journeying and reporting about life from the street level in America.

Now, by returning home, I had begun to develop the terrible feeling that nothing I had done mattered. The people here in New England had no idea that their native son had gathered the experiences of the rest of the country to share with them. No one here gave a shit. They weren't even slightly aware. And, if they were to become aware, I knew they still wouldn't care. Hell, I was one of them, and I wouldn't have cared either, upon learning of some dude's "travel blog." It wouldn't have anything to do with their lives.

In New England you choose your career and then paint yourself AS that career. You are not yourself; you are instead, a lawyer, doctor, ditch digger, baker, candlestick maker...whatever. There is no YOU in New England, there is only the social stereotype (flattering or embarrassing) that society sees you as, from the outside. And this entirely fickle and shallow image must be tweaked depending on whether you are walking through a city or a snobby neighborhood. Neither need be accurate, it only requires fitting into the expectations of the population at hand--at any one moment.

Feelings, dreams, creative goals? They are secondary to the hard shell you wear; a shield more effective than thick skin. It is one so effective that you believe in it yourself, and thereby use the critical eyes others see you with to then similarly judge everyone around you. Personal aspirations are a laughing matter, a joke, wimpy and "unrealistic." What is most important is that you not stick out of the crowd. If you do, than the first people to turn away from you are your family. The second group are your childhood friends--or they may give lip service to remaining as your friend--in the pretentious hope that you will eventually see things their way.

Your expectations for yourself must be kept in a closet that is darker than any drug addict's or LGBT person. Drug addicts have programs to treat them. LGBT folks have laws to protect them (or, are beginning to). But there is no protection for a novel-minded person who craves cognitive liberty. He or she must be a hypocrite every single day, betraying him/herself by thinking, speaking and acting in ways that won't stick out and lead to ostracization and social excommunication.

Yes, I generalize with the above. Perhaps I exaggerate. But these are precisely the things that happened to me over my life in Maine. Now that I've seen that the rest of the country is not this way, I am coming back to the psychic prison camp of New England with a burning desire to chop away at the chains restricting those who long for cognitive liberty and free self expression.

I have shown that if my extreme version of simplifying life (having all I needed to survive in a backpack, for example) is possible, certainly any other form of simplification along the spectrum of American excess is also possible, and beneficial. When you have few expenses (sell the stuff you've forgotten about in that storage unit you are paying for each month, for example), it is exactly like making more money, except that you need not spend more time working to do it.

Hoarding, mindless shopping as a sport, thinking day and night about THINGS, working just to pay debts on houses and vehicles that you feel you need in order to stay working, to pay debts on houses and vehicles you need in order to stay working... you get the idea.. is an insane practice that imprisons your soul.

That you then encourage your children to fit in, that they can obtain unpayable debts to live in houses and drive vehicles that assure employment to make money to continue to pay debt on these things is - in my opinion - child abuse. And when you become depressed; when your relationships suffer in favor of this insane lifestyle, leaving holes in your happiness and spaces in your satisfaction as a living being, the only alternative is to shop for more stuff. It makes you feel successful to know you have money (or think you do) when you pay at that Target register. You also get the serotonin buzz of seeing your new salad shooter, plastic tote, squirting mop, or whatever in your house. There it is! It's a tangible visual, material thing that is all yours! Surely, with more of those things your holes will be filled...

Or, if you are a few IQ digits above the shop-for-therapy concept, you seek help from a doctor who is incentivized to medicate you with SSRI's so that you better accept your cubicle, your lifelong debt, or the restrictive social expectations of your family and friends--dumbing you down to fit in.

All of these conventional soul-killers are most prominently on display in New England societies. You do things, because, um, that's what you do. You say what you are supposed to say, because, um, that's what you do. This circular and stultifying non-logic extends into your very mind. Ads on TV, Google, every website you visit, billboards, radio, the very clothes you wear, magazines, newspapers, etc. reinforce this brainwashing technique to keep your mind in the "game." Depart for only a moment, and people look at you with a furrowed brow, laugh at you, offer the name and number of some doctor, or expert, or program, or diet, or self-help book to get you back onto the straight and narrow. It's the New England way.

Walking around  Holyoke, eventually going back the way I came to find a sleep spot, I saw all of this settled right in place, where it "should" be. The black people were only semi employed or homeless on the street. The Hispanic people were doing the manual labor. The Middle Easterners owned the general stores and gas stations and Indian Subcontinental folks were running the motels and hotels, while the white and Asian people drove by it all on their way to the suburbs directly from office work in a larger city; driving their leased and debt-laden Mercedes, BMW's, and Audi's to their mortgage-leveraged McMansions. The modern American caste system was functioning perfectly. And, though this is the way it is around most of the country, the people in their stereotyped positions here in New England have the distinction of eliminating genuine manners and kindness from their interactions with each other. A game without fun. What a game!

A life spent in this way, turns a person into a hollow automaton. It over sensitizes their realization for and inevitable acceptance for the bleakness of their futures and the futures of their children, while it ramps down and constricts their ability to change that future, or even want to.

I found a sleep spot next to a park that used to be a junk-filled ditch, but was revived into a green lawn one bench and some nice surrounding trees. It was blocked off of course, discouraging people to actually USE it. That just made things easier for me. I walked in and then through the rougher parts of the surrounding trees, until I found a space that could be excavated.

I'd taken pictures of everything I'd seen in Holyoke, as well as videos that would have been excellent evidence to accompany my little rant above. Yet, because of the malfunctioning of the SD card, I'm afraid you'll just have to take my word for it.

I stood around thinking and contemplating what might be found further up the road, and further into the future. The angry and disappointed knot in my stomach fit perfectly into the physiologically sore hernia of my belly button. I had three people to share the misery: me, myself and I--the trinity of loneliness. And, since misery loves company it was a grand old party in the park.

Eventually I turned in, knowing that the next day was likely to be a better one than this Holyoke experience, and fell asleep quickly.  

Holyoke Sleep Spot.