Post by StealthGoth PanI'd like to get a roll call going, I'm quite curious as to who's left
in this dusty old place.
I'm still here. Sadly enough, despite my intellectual pretentions and
ongoing usenet presence, I've turned into a strange combination of
unemployable poor white trash (except that I don't to trashy things like
crime) taking truckloads of trash to the dump for chump-change,
neighborhood activist, and budding politician.
Any goth that actually saw me as I am in day-to-day life would shudder
at the sight. Faded blue jeans and hideous plaid lumberjack shirts and a
surplus patrol cap are hardly to be considered adornments and my
complete lack of piercings mark me as "one of THEM". While the
cognoscenti might have their curiousity a trifle piqued by the
incongruous Doc Martins which bely the otherwise Pure Hick exterior,
this is easily explained by my truckbed full of rakes, shovels, and
chainsaw. My neighbors sensibly dismiss me, but not for being Gothic.
The flood of "undocumented workers" -- inexplicably all driving very
nice new trucks -- dismisses me because I am neither rich, nor
spanish-speaking. The few remaining long-term residents dismiss me
because I'm "young" or alternatively dismiss me because I'm middle-aged,
or alternatively dismiss me because my house is paid-for and they're
paying ridiculous rents and never getting ahead, while I have fairly
nice and useful things all over the house even though I have almost no
income. The folks in the ghetto across the highway dismiss me because
any white American who is as obviously poor as myself is "no-count". The
people who are moving into the neighborhood now tend to be either
yuppies buying the former homes of recently-departed elders and gutting
the shells and rebuilding tiny mansion fortresses on the front lines of
suburban re-gentrification, or they're local-government employees
grossly overextending their credit to buy the last-chance at an
affordable home in the county where they work. They dismiss anyone with
a paid-for house as "shiftless crackers leftover from back in the day
when this was as far out as you could move and still work in the District".
So, I have far too much time on my hands, most of it spent living a dual
life: the life in my neighborhood, which is hardly interesting or
attractive, and on the other hand there is my life in the world of text.
I study issues in the neighborhood and write letters and papers and send
them to various people, getting more information or sending opinions to
people in positions who can get things done. I get letters back -- thank
goodness for the affordability of e-mail -- and read some more and write
some more. I've managed to get some things done, notably cleaning up
some neighborhood woods and parks which had become crime-ridden and the
lairs of homeless and dealers and robbers, and I've assisted in
organizing two well-received National Night Out events which brought a
massive presence of outreach and service agencies into the neighborhoods
they most need to serve. There's an ongoing story being written here and
it's doubtless the work of hundreds or thousands of hands but perhaps
most of those hands are, in terms of the allegory of community evolution
as a play on the world's stage, just a lot of primates banging on the
keyboards, while I am trying to make it a work of the bard.
And so people see me driving my crappy old truck full of junk and
looking dim and non-clueful, and they probably figure "there goes
someone of absolute unimportance" and they might be close to right about
that. But if they're seeing the look on my face and interpreting that as
vacuity, ignorance, and thoughtlessness, they may not quite understand
that before I put words on a page, I write the story several times in my
mind, nowadays. And the story I intend to write is one that, bit part or
major players, they will be playing in. Pay no attention to the little
man behind the curtains, he is of no consequence. He's just some mental
case who used to run around dressed in black and can't get any work
other than the most menial tasks. Oh, he types a bit, too. You can hear
the keyboard clicking 12 hours a day unless he's out hauling a load to
the dump. Of course it's of no consequence. How could some relic hauling
trash write anything of value? It's not even really worth the trouble of
finding out what he writes, nor to whom, it can't possibly matter to
anyone. Consider the source.
Well, this is getting tiresome. Maybe I'll go do what I did ten years
ago or so, which was show up at a bar full of internet maillist
correspondents and concerned local activists, and suggest to the person
who will draft some poor unsuspecting accountant to become a saving
grace politician, that perhaps that nice man in Budgets in the bowtie
would make a good replacement for Marion Barry. Then maybe I'll go write
a blog or something, full of silly ideas that turned out to become the
reformed fundamentals of a nation's capital that can no longer become
the laughingstock of the western world.
Time to put on the hideous flannel, the patrol cap, the Docs, and drive
my crappy truck to the dump while the drivers in oncoming traffic gape
at me, clearly drawing in a breath to ask their passengers "did you see
that clueless redneck?"
That's me in their world.
This is me, in mine:
http://www.earthops.net/klaatu/
http://www.radicalcenter.org/
http://www.aspenhillnet.net/mcni/
--
The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may
often assume the appearance, and produce the effects,
of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy.
--Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"