Concrete Planet

It worries me that so many Americans live their lives shuffling from one spread of concrete to another.  It worries me that my own driveway is so completely covered in the stuff.  This vista of harsh glare and carefully planted trees attempting to simulate a "landscape" is so depressing.  Except at that golden hour, the hour before true twilight sets in.  I find it curious how gorgeous the most industrial and busted place can glow like semiprecious stones and metal- firing up like passion and design.  The sun hits the shopping carts just as it mellows and begins its descent and suddenly they seem like gorgeous archeological relics of a dead people.

Concrete is one of the worst things to happen to the environment ever since it's been used to smooth out and spread open planned subdivisions.  It creates a terrible water run-off problem which is so poisonous to our water supply. 

I would like to see people dig it up.  Where ever it isn't strictly needed.  Rip it out!  Lord knows it's no easy task.  Ask me how my muscles know! (They really know.)  We have cracked, pick-axed, and dug concrete out of our lives before.  We are no friends to it.  A car really only needs so much room to park in a driveway.  I felt the pick ax jolt my arms for weeks afterwords.

Is this really my country?  Is this really what we've become?  Neat freaks who cannot stand a piece of wild territory around us?  A country of people who can only appreciate landscapes if they are well tended and sparsely planted? 

oh no.  No, I know there is an undercurrent here.  The real American spirit isn't about concrete and shopping malls.  The original spirit was wilder.  It appreciated scrappy frontiers and mountains covered in timber.  It relished the wildflowers and the bears.  It loved to smell the tangled pines and sink feet into soft silent floors of fallen needles and leaves under a shady canopy of trees sheltering skin from blazing sun.

Of course the true American spirit is also puritanical and obscenely obsessed with god and what it thinks god wants.  So contrary, the original raw American spirit. 

Kind of like myself.  Two great tastes that never mix comfortably with each other.

Perhaps it's what gives our nation its creative drive. 

I'm not feeling patriotic tonight.  Just pausing to acknowledge that this country is more than the sum of its concrete. 

I'm looking forward to the new regime.