Saturday, January 30, 2021

Left At The Cock And Balls


You know that thing where they take down a house in your neighborhood and a day later you can't even remember what was there? It turns out if they do a good enough job of it, they can take away your ability to find your way home. They can knock out your entire navigation system.

One of the good things about living in the same place for forty-three years is you can find your way home in the dark. With your eyes shut. Three sheets to the wind with an off-key song in your heart and a flat tire. Anyway, that's what I've heard.

You don't have to creep down the avenue looking for the cross-street signs. You know where you live and you don't have to think about it, which is an advantage in any situation, and getting to be more important all the time. In my case, when I'm driving home, I don't have to think about it. I hang a left after the cock-and-balls and just before the jacking-off monkey.

I did not notice the cock-and-balls originally but once it was pointed out to me there was no other way to see it. It's a sign for a Mexican café, a proud, rigid column with a big round flower on the bottom. The tacos are just fine, no need to examine the sauce. The monkey from the coffeehouse has to answer for himself. He knows what he's done.
 

 
Anyway this is all something you tuck away in the periphery of your vision. But apparently the entire intersection is involved. Because when someone takes off all the siding on the building on one corner and then whisks away an entire large concrete building on the other and replaces it with a smooth coat of gravel, you can shoot right by your own street and miss it altogether, even after 43 years, dead sober. If you're a certain kind of person, you can then travel several blocks before it occurs to you to wonder where you're headed and why. You might even, if you're a certain kind of person, keep going hoping something will pop into view that will remind you why you're in the car. Maybe, for instance, you were going to the hardware store. If a hardware store shows up, then you can park and wonder what it was you wanted.
 
Certain kinds of people are afflicted with such a rich interior life that they are able to sail through their days on cruise control, oblivious to suffering, woe, other people, or one's own personal whereabouts or coordinates. There are quilt blocks to design, novel scenes to write, and music running in a loop. Such a person probably should not be driving. But definitely, if such a person is not to get lost or mislaid, buildings should not be whisked away, willy-nillly. 
 
I'll tell you what, it didn't take too long to bring that big concrete sucker down. It had been vacant for at least 43 years. It was just a place for dogs to pee and kids to express themselves with spray paint. In one day a massive backhoe knocked it down and scooped it up and then it was 1600 square feet of level gravel, without even a memory attached.
 
It's alarming to realize how much of our daily life doesn't require paying any attention at all. An entire nation can blunder along without having to notice what keeps us safe, what we stand for, the civic contract that doesn't exist except that we all agree to it, the frailty of the scaffolding of our civilization, until it's threatened or gone. With any luck and some time, we'll still find our way home.


26 comments:

  1. I admire your optimism, but I am having some doubts about finding our way home. We've taken a detour and am not sure the spare tire will hold air. It might be a rough ride.

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    1. Oh it WILL be a rough ride. I'm frightened what I will witness with the twenty or so years I've got left--can't imagine being a kid!

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  2. Nice segue, Murr. I didn't see it coming.

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  3. I didn't see it coming either, well, that's what happens when Jews are shooting solar-generated blue laser beams down from space--maybe it's they who messed up your way home! Anyway, you weren't kidding about that La Bonita sign, how did I not see that before reading your piece?

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    1. Hey, that story is an obvious lie. If Jewish space lasers had been starting fires on Earth, the alien Satanic lizard people would have put a stop to it.

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    2. Silly me, I need to read or watch more real news!

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    3. I'll let you two play together. We'll be in the other room.

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  4. Oh I hope we find our way back home. Things are pretty scary at the moment.

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  5. Be very careful with this. If you turn right at La Bonita instead of left, you'll fall off the edge of the world and get eaten by dragons.

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    1. That's not the edge of the world. That's just the Alameda Ridge.

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  6. The blogpost that the phrase 'willy-nilly' has been waiting for all these years 🤣

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    1. Aha, so you think I've said it all now? Heh heh heh.

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  8. Murr, as always, you amaze me. Your words reflect what most of us can't put into words.

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    1. Thanks. Scariest thing I can think of? "There are no words..."

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  9. We've had lots of old buildings razed around here, but old homes and a nursing home or two and none on any corners, so I still know my way home. Even if the corner homes did get knocked down I could still turn left at the third corner from the shopping centre and walk past the long, long green fence and be home.

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    1. Someone takes that fence down and you're lost again.

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  10. I am relieved to learn that I am not the only one who can't recall what used to be on the lot where something new (even if only new rubble) now exists. What carolyn said!

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    1. And this is true even if you walked by it every day.

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  12. The Boy Scout in me is resolutely optimistic that we will indeed find our way back home again. You see, as a pre-teen Patrol Leader, I learned that there will always be a few nut jobs who insist on wandering off the hiking path and encouraging others to do so too. In my experience, it usually took them one or two bad cases of poison ivy or one incident of being lost in the woods, alone in the dark and the rain, to fall back in line with the other boys. When that happened, some of them were humbled and quietly stopped trying to disrupt the progress of our hike to our destination. Of course, there were always a few who were incorrigible, and their peers resorted to coping with them with many eye rolls.....In the long run, everything worked out in the end when we reached our campsite for the night. Chucky would dig a latrine. Tommy would gather firewood. Michael would pitch the tent, and Marc would make the dinner. We were forced to recognize that our survival was a function of our interdependence -- that we are all in this together. (Or do I mean that our interdependence was a function of our need for survival?)
    Then again, I am sometimes accused of looking at things through rose-colored glasses.......
    And hey Murr -- as someone else said above, thanks for putting into words what many of us would struggle to articulate!!

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    1. Great analogy, Ed, and I hope you are right. my glasses tend to be grey-colored rather than rose-colored. perhaps a more realistic shade would be a combination of both -- a dusty mauve, say.

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