STRAY COUNTRY

Maple Street.  Elm.  Oak.  Moormont.  Westmoor.  Eastmoor.  Different names for the same place.  A tree-line little carnival of front porches, backyards, sweeping lawns, laughing children and polite little houses.  The cost to get here?  Perhaps we haven't quite done the accounting yet.

The next time you see a white plastic grocery sack floating down the street, you may consider that what you're looking at is a legacy humankind left to itself.  Generations previous we climbed on a carousel, pushed the button, and began the ride.  A ride we were hungry as pigs for.  A ride which, left to its own devices, has no end.  A ride that will keep spinning, no matter how many times we're sick over the side.  No matter how full the world is of vomit.  A ride we could stop, if only we'd all agree to push the button.

Out there, out there in the tangled knots of suburb streets, in the dollhouse void that is the Levitt brother's new way of life, out there is an enemy known as the white plastic grocery sack.  A byproduct of our greed.  A byproduct of our hunger.  A byproduct of our amusement.  It sits there in the streets waiting, tangled on fences waiting, drifting through schoolyards waiting, waiting with the patience of plastic, forever waiting . . .

Portrait of American run to its logical conclusion.  Someday she’ll find herself in the same place as Billy, Jack, and the janitor.  Cornered in the storm cellar of an old farmhouse by a white plastic grocery sack. 

This is the dead end of the American experience.

Playing dead.  Colloquial term for a universal phenomena.  Exhibited by vertebrates and invertebrates alike.  Seen on land, sea, and air.  Practiced by birds, fish, snakes, possums, frogs, ants, spiders, ducks, rabbits, chickens, sharks, and even humans.  Tonight, our study a specific strain of human – engineered sometime after WWII and manufactured on an industrial scale.  Yes, tonight we are about to witness the modern suburbanite’s version of playing dead.

Witness if you will a world that gave birth to the white plastic grocery sack.  The red, white and blue American neighborhoods - red carpet communities rolled out to escape the sins of the cities, but only downstream of the muck.

Remember, the white plastic grocery sack is the offspring of unbridled American passions.  And let it be known that the child is a serial killer.  Hell-bent on matricide, patricide, homicide and last but most critically Terracide.  Remember, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gacy were once babes in cribs incapable of swatting a fly.  But they grew. 

And tonight, outside a farmhouse with a city grown up around it, one junior high school janitor and two boys are watching a white plastic grocery sack try its legs and flex its muscle.

This is what’s meant by paying the piper.  This is the comeuppance awaiting every man, woman and person when the bill of fare from our unchecked appetites is opened and examined, the tally made, and penalty paid.

The best-laid plans of mice and men . . . and the American suburbs.  A plotted landscape plotted against by plastic sacks.  A corner lot trying to corner a piece of parkland . . .  somehow leaving one junior high school janitor and two boys cornered.

3:33 a.m.

Seconds, half-seconds, quarter-seconds – they crawl by on hands and knees inside the farmhouse of the janitor whose gaze is thrown out the window, into the wind, looking for a flash of plastic in the brand new world that somehow stood up around him.  The janitor, now just part of a cellophaned landscape, just a piece of trash, a relic of the past inhabiting a plastic world.  Stretching his ear, listening closely . . . for a fragment of what humankind has deeded itself.

Imagine if you will you’re on a carousel.  A carousel you can’t stop no matter how sick you are over the side.  Some may call this amusement.  The janitor calls it America. 

Tonight’s lecture – The Curious Fear of Getting Old 

Not unique to Americans but in many ways uniquely American.  They say you can fairly judge a society by the way it treat its poor.  The janitor may posit you can fairly judge a society by the way it treat its elders.  If you live in a reductionist world where people are only the sum of their outputs, if you live in a world where elders are nothing but spent labor, a draw on society, pulling us down, takers not makers, may I suggest you are part a cult.  White hoods swapped for suits and ties, but a cult all the same.  A cult dedicated to the riding of this merry-go-round no matter how many people are sick over the sides.  No matter how many people fall off to be ground in the gears.  If you’re afraid of getting old, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself if the fear is truly lodged in the pit of your stomach or rather part of the birthright of a society that views your labor as a commodified good to be bought, sold, traded, and most of all depleted.  A society that views people as depreciating assets the same as trucks.  The same as tractors.  The same as commercial buildings and livestock.  A society that only pays lip service to the notion that all men (women and people) are created equal.  Because once upon a time, not that long ago, society looked to the longest lived for the bulk of their wisdom.  But wisdom is a wash in a world of widgets.  Aged-bones a bust in the building of Bethlehem Steel.

He may ramble.  He may take the scenic route.  But resist your American instinct to tune out the man on account of his age because once upon a time living this long meant you had something to say.

Once upon a time there was a deep burrow for the American man, woman or person.  Because, let it be known and contrary to popular opinion, humans are den animals.  Same as dogs.  Same as wolves.  Same a bears.  And humans built these dens themselves out of sticks and rocks and trees pulled from the great American loam.  They called them homes.  And they built them with their bare hands. 

Sad, forgotten ritual.  Long ago passed away.  Given over to interchangeable parts and the commodification of labor.  Remember – The Levitt Brothers new way of life was built on the same industrial principles that drove Bethlehem Steel.  Homes milled at the blistering rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process.  A factory that walked from plot to plot.  Street to street.  Neighborhood to neighborhood. 

In other words every modern home was built by machines.  Which makes them distant cousins of the white plastic grocery sack.

They ran through the streets like they were being chased. 

Because they were.

It’s howl outside.  Kite flying weather.  The kind of wind that gives plastic sacks legs. 

Two boys. 

A junior high school janitor. 

About to step outside.  Into the trade winds of plastic sacks.  On a night they could run their legs dry and still fall behind.