Another throw-up piece. It's like putting a message in a bottle or tying a note to a passenger pigeon or banging out an e-mail to everybody you never knew. It's a canvas on rails, a wall that crawls, vehicular expressionism. It's a mode of transport and an empty vessel.
It's also a crime. A misdemeanor, I imagine. Though I also imagine that, with fuel prices through the roof, not many railroad yards have extra loot to spend on an anti-graffiti task force. Who cares, anyway, if the Heartland sees sprayed-on boxcars and gondolas gliding through the amber waves of grain? Does the Heartland even have that kind of eyes anymore? We must get things from one place to another. If, in the process, the mode is gilded - let it be.
So every tagged and bombed car is a scrambled message that, when decoded, says that peak oil and the crumbling economy is, at least in some form, benefiting the artist. "Let it be," each engine grumbles. These days, you'd just about have to want to get caught by the bulls. ..
Today is Earth Day. And today at work, I met a co-worker who told me that her son had been killed - "run over by a semi" - nine years ago. "They spent five hours picking up the pieces of him and putting him into a plastic bag," she told me. "But I don't think he's dead." There are some people in this world that get chewed up and spit out and are left to walk alone. This woman was one of them. "She crazy. Talk some sense to her, Jonathan. She be thinking she talking to spirits and all."
I figure she's doing pretty good to be getting up every morning and facing the world's ongoing calamity. "I used to be strung out on pcp, lsd, crack cocaine, speed, qualudes..." she pronounces each with a stark, husky Middle Georgia accent about as far as you cd get from Rhett Butler or anybody else who lucked out and got born into ease. Bewildered affect. Present moment. "My birthday's next week," she says, "Ain't it a beautiful day?" She lifts her hands in prayer.
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