Casually ignored detritus

We are trying to say this right. From the train window I saw today’s America. It is made up of messy sprawl that makes little effort to disabuse the passer-by. Messy is not the word perhaps. Casually ignored detritus, left where it fell, or gathered into piles like Steve Goodman’s graves of rusted automobiles, mounds of boards and discarded elements of collapsed structures, acres of dirt and dross, signs marking the end of one sprawl area and the start of another. The dominant architecture single-story rectangular storage spaces so nondescript that none could be said to be preferable to another, an unrelenting procession of testimony to an abundance too shabby to warrant even a proper home. There I go again. What good would it do to be salient regarding an American temperament that would permit such a betrayal? What would replace it as a better portion?

I’ll tell you what. Right from the shoulder. Straight and true. One of a thousand designs of car-free communities of up to 10,000 living within a square mile. These to be surrounded by verdant natural surroundings that might be farms where animals reside in some dignity or where various crops are grown. Instead of agri-business, custom flora and fauna. Nature trails.

Crop rotation? Here and there a high-tech recycling operation that testifies to our universal slob-hood, grabbing it by the short hairs and saying, “OK, sucker, we will take everything, every piece of shit, every discarded unopenable plastic wrapping, every McDonalds megacontainer, and convert it into a t-shirt you can wear once and discard, go ahead, because we will be there to scoop it up and enter it back into the techno-apparatus that will end once-and-for-all our need to flagellate ourselves for being prodigally wasteful.

Yes car-free communities in places unlikely to be beset by tornadoes and floods, adjacent to interstates that could be plied by vehicles as yet uninvented to enable easy access between the thousands of iterations of this single transcendent pattern.

From THE VISIONARY (FicMem Book 3) http://buff.ly/1vRVhRF