Wednesday, November 23, 2011

11-23-11

It seems like the past tense of glow should be glew.... just sayin is all...

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Flowers in North Korea


Walking into downtown from my house there are a few empty lots.  One lot used to be a car lot- altho I don't ever remember it being in business.  I don't know what used to be in the lot next to it but they are both bare to the ground- no pavement or anything, just a wide, long flat of dirt and gravel.


Today it's cloudy.  There is one omnipresent cloud that hangs over the city.  It is like a huge warship that's slowly floating by and there's nothing you can do to stop it or hurry it up.  It spans over the downtown skyline, my side of town, the south side of town, everywhere.  Walking under it I feel confident that it won't rain, just as I am confident that it will not shine sun.  I wish it was sunny today, but at least it's raining.  The cloud might block the sun, but at least it's keeping the storm clouds from the other side of Lake Michigan out.


Today is Sunday.  Things are slow and I rarely see a car pass by on one of the many streets that surround the vacant lots.  It's quiet too, if I stop I can only hear the sound of machinery being used very far away.  When I walk I can only hear my feet move the lot's gravel under me.


Things are slow today, most of the store fronts downtown will be closed.  The skyline is high and impressive looking from a distance, standing in a wide-open lot.  It's also very drag looking, surrounded by the grey cloud.


Most of sidewalk around the lots is broken with large cracks.  The sidewalk is only marginally more stable then the gravel.  I stop and listen again.  It's some kinda of machinery,  I don't know what, but it's a motor of some sort.


I feel like I'm in North Korea.  I'm heading downtown, already full aware that most the shops will be closed and that, aside for some hobos collecting cans, it will be a ghost town.  I am Winston Smith, a secret dissident.  The dark, powerful looking showcase skyline is just a hallow concrete shell, and yet I knowingly walk towards it anyway just so I can secretly write my thoughts down on paper somewhere.  An M80 fire ant crawling under the vast machine-cloud apparatus.


In North Korea, at lest they have flowers.  They know full well how grey and dull it is, so they use flowers alot to make up for the fact.


There's a guy about a block away that is riding an old rickity bicycle, hauling a bag of cans.  Dose he know that I am a thought criminal?  He would turn me in at the drop of a hat to collect his reward of an extra soup ration.

There might not be many flowers, but at lest the weather will change soon.