the trail is adjacent to the tracks which are adjacent to the freeway: three disparate choices to answer the north-south question. now imagine this urban aorta, choked with carbon deposits, dirty blood cells forever coursing through it, tied off with a tourniquet of unknown provenance and design.
stop the flow, we said. or rather, i said (and only in my head at that), as i walked the trail empty of the populace, for of course they are encased in the dirty cells choking said aorta and if the city is a heart i guess that places me in the right atrium of this questionable metaphor.
i am walking the dog. he likes the rabbits and groundhogs, but most of all the deer, for he fancies himself le grand chasseur de cerf all because one time he cornered one up against a fence in the woods and thought he’d finally earned the latent ancestral badge of honor awarded through genetics at birth, his herding bloodline transmitted but never having been permitted to establish itself thus far in practice. sadly he was mistaken, however, for his continues to be a largely dull urban existence, devoid of any subsequent deer herding.
so the trail is good for meditative ruminations on metaphorical aortic tourniquets and such other fantasies never bound to reach fruition. for the primacy of the automobile holds fast, and has continued to do so for well over a century now. scourge of the earth though it is, it will never lose ground until the oil dries up. and thus will it facilitate its own demise, being an unsustainable solution to the perpetual problem of transportation, a problem that humanity can never seem to answer in a fully satisfactory manner.
let us consider what havoc the automobile has wreaked, keeping in mind first and foremost that it is a convenience, not a necessity. humanity survived for a much longer time without the automobile than it has with it. and in that time with the automobile, we have breathed in its toxic fumes and polluted the atmosphere with said fumes, changing the climate in the process; we have paved over millions of acres of useful land with impermeable surfacing for the sole purpose of facilitating its mobility, leading to massive amounts of toxic runoff into our waterways; and finally, last but not least, we have experienced its encouragement of some of our most egregious characteristics: aggression, impatience, and laziness.
now let us examine the basic premise of the automobile. it is a selfish machine, for it prioritizes the individual over the group. i get in my car so i can go where i want, when i want, in the shortest length of time possible. all of us in our solitary steel cylinders, hurtling toward oblivion…
sigh. i can’t keep this up. it’s two weeks old by now anyway. who can sustain this focused level of frustrated rage for so long. not me anymore (thankfully). i’ve long since let it die back down to its usual layer of barely smoldering ash but this draft continue to languish, growing further furry layers of word mold (25 to be exact).
today my computer thinks i’m in shrewsbury, pennsylvania. so now my inner voice keeps repeating ‘shrewwwsbury’ in a shrill voice. at least one part of me continues its valiant efforts to lighten the mood.
does anyone even write blogs like this anymore. where a person just spews out unfiltered content. i miss those. it seems as if they are long gone from the internet. now everything is so painstakingly curated to the point where it ends up being completely banal. social media is an easy target for blame, of course. it started out unfiltered, but then everyone became self-conscious, comparing their lives to those of their ‘friends’ and not wanting to seem less cool or fulfilled, not to mention the growing paranoia about offending anyone for fear of public shaming. because social media is now the public forum. meanwhile irl we’re all silently ambling around ignoring each other. strangers don’t talk to each other out there, but online they shred each other to pieces. also, now apparently if you’re outed for anything online your offline life is also officially ruined.
when will these two worlds fully merge, or have they already. for some perhaps, while others of us have one foot in each world and as they each pull away from us our legs slowly descend into a painful involuntary full side split position before eventually…what…we break in half? or fall into the void between the two worlds? and what might that space look like. can we perhaps set up some type of shelter down there and just sort of squat together as a growing community of disenchanted outsiders? i’d be up for that. (no cars allowed, of course).
s. d. stewart 