Peter Eichenberger is tired of breathing your exhaust fumes.
I haven’t ridden the thing yet, first, ‘cause I have this thing about busses, second, that unless one is incapacitated, like too drunk to walk, downtown Raleigh is as walkable as you’ll find, and finally, that free is really free via the bicycle. But forget me, the R bus line, by reducing the “necessity” of driving a car everywhere one must go, rain or shine, night or day, in a dense, urban grid, is the best, smartest idea Raleigh has had in, gee, I dunno, a generation.
But here’s the predicable Greek Chorus, “whaaah, whaaah, whaaah,” from the car set: “It’s not free! It costs me money and I don’t ride it.” Listen up, ya babies, let’s talk about “free.” How did it somehow become written in the sky and implicitly understood by every mother’s child that the motorist is exempt from some normal standards of responsibility with this century-long free ride to foul their path with zero or minimal responsibility to clean up the mess their fiendish contraptions leave? Every time I go anywhere, I have to breathe your exhaust fumes, dodge your oil spills and jagged heaps of broken car that litter nearly every intersection and never seem to get swept up – not to mention never getting a chance to relax from the mortal danger waiting at every turn via inattentive drivers futzing with their music, phones, hair, yada, yada. So tough tits.
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Peter Eichenberger takes a look at spending, shopping malls, and our current recession.
As the end of this decade will more or less mark the sixtieth birthday of pioneer shopping center Cameron Village as well as the very first credit card purchase ever, at Major’s Cabin Grill in the Empire State Building the same year, 1950, some scritchings on da money mess:
With typically savage ironic synchronicity, I recently found myself at Quail Ridge Books (love the place) in a Christmas return pickle. The more I dug into what I walked out with, James Carroll’s latest, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, the more I was struck by parallels between the “defense” morass and the “Economic Crisis,” “Financial Crisis,” or whatever the Meltdown (TM) will be called five years from now. As the shopping center/card synthesis gelled around the same time the Department of Defense consolidated its power, the comparison is timely—and appropriate.
In a unfortunate bit of synchronicity, the oil spill at NCSU’s central heating plant occurred the same week the following piece was written. With a negligence smacking of happy-news cover up, the N&O as well as NCSU tried to soft pedal that the oil did in fact leak into Rocky Branch via a storm drain on the north side of the creek, near Pullen Road. Tuesday morning, The News and Observer report read, “NCSU workers noticed the spill Monday evening and worked to prevent it from reaching Rocky Branch Creek, which runs through campus.” The story went on to report that workers at the city’s Neuse River Wastewater Treatment Plant noticed the bunker oil clogging intake screens at the plant and suspended discharge into the Neuse river Tuesday, “leading city officials to declare there is no threat to the public.”
I read the story Tuesday morning, then surveyed Rocky Branch amid a heavy odor of fuel and black tarry residue and reported my findings to NC State.
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My faith in systems, political, economic, religious, has been over the years largely eroded away. Presidents, Popes and Plutocrats. Paah! So 9/10. A dimming ember of interest in the piddly, jittery pond of humans, save what we inflict upon this home of ours, this fragile world, has led me back to a renewed, always humbling study of geology, put on the back burner apres my undergraduate years at NCSU and a general requirement class, Rocks for Jocks it was called, conducted in a cavernous lecture hall by Dr. Victor Cavaroc, an ironic and wise sort imbued of the patience perfect for a geologist.
[Below the fold, Tuesday’s inauguration becomes embedded in the sedimentary layers of time.]
With further layoffs and decreases in coverage comes a few words of response from Raleigh newspapers, acknowledging complaints.
Peter Eichenberger’s ongoing account of the downfall of the great American newspaper:
Back in the saddle after the newly departed hollowdays, among my favorite times of the year. Not for the usual reasons, mind you. While Christendom celebrates the wrong day, wrong guy (Santa sharing the same letters as SATAN) we malcontents receive a few days of relative, welcome respite from annoyances like dumb-ass BOOMP BOOMP BOOMP mobile stereo jockeys, sirens, dump truck traffic and the ceaseless, infernal beep beep beep, crunch from the fuggin’ prison job over yonder. Nothing but the wind in the trees amid muffled sundering of wrapping paper and accompanying delighted squeals of the children…
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