|
|
|
the presence of shredded onions
Tuesday, March 4 2003
Today Gretchen and I drove back to the Catskills in our truck full of the things I'd deemed suitable for my laboratory. Among the things I took were a pair of large graffiti-besmirched speakers that had once been integral to the sound system of Harkness Co-op in Oberlin, two old modular Macintosh SEs, a half dozen old school computer monitors, the dumpster-dived 40s-era oscilloscope, a fancy VHF oscillator (the kind one might find in a radio hobbyist's shack), and an armload of old five inch hard drives whose platters I want to use in sculpture projects.
The drive to New York was far more bearable than the drive down to Virginia had been. It helped that there was no inclimate weather and that all of our driving took place during the daylight. It was also good that we weren't going into the journey under the delusion that we'd be able to listen to music of our own choosing. For my part, I was aided by three tablets of the stimulant pseudoephedrine, which gave me an elevated sense of well being in out of all relation to the circumstances. I tend to worry about imminent vehicle failure on road trips, but that part of my brain had been shut down.
We only stopped once on the entire 6.25 hour drive, somewhere in or near southwest Schuylkill County along I-81. There we ate sort of lupper at a sanitationally marginal gas station, though my turkey sub actually had flavor due to the presence of shredded onions.
There are, by the way, few places as ugly as the slopes above Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. There's something wrong with these slopes - they've been rifled through by mining companies in a manner not unlike that of a burglar looking for jewels. If you're a mining company and your job is to results in unhealable devastation (particularly if you do mountaintop removal in West Virginia - the sort of terraforming usually imagined only for uninhabited planets), you almost have to believe in an imminent rapture so you can be "saved by the bell" from the consequences of your ecological ignorance. While we're on this subject, how confident can we be in George W. Bush's long-range planning when he too believes there is no future?
Along I-84 somewhere in Eastern Pennsylvania is a creepy monument of retro-futuristic world. Protruding high above a forested mountaintop is a enormous Sequoia tree perhaps 300 feet tall. But since Sequoia trees don't grow in this part of the world and would have been cut down even if they did, it must be a manmade structure. It's almost certainly a cell phone antenna tower. I've heard about these before, but didn't know they were being installed on the east coast. For most Americans, of course, it will probably pull off the stunt of passing for a real tree. In fact, Karl Rove could probably convince a plurality of Americans that a forest of such artificial trees is just as good, if not better than, a forest of the real thing.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030304 feedback
previous | next |
