Waste
I love something unsustainable. It’s damaging, unrealistic, divorced from reality, and yet I love it all the same. The multitude of indisputable facts, which should corrode my fondness for the object of my love, still fail to tarnish the image in my mind. I’m subject to the delusion of addiction, I suppose.
The object of my troubles is rather more mundane than, say, drugs. Yet, it is just as potent a shaper of lives.
I love the suburbs.
Poisonous to the environment, gently curving rows of houses require far more energy to heat because they share no walls. Happy husbands inadvertently dump waste fertilizer into the water supply, slicking over the ponds with algae in neighboring watersheds. Wildlife is bulldozed for sprawling shopping centers which will hollow out to shanty towns of cheap stores as the tax-base collapses and the 30 year suburb boom-town cycle moves to another prime metropolitan ring. Long commutes to city jobs burn untold gallons of gasoline and choke the highways leading in and out of the nearby city. And that’s just the beginning.
With the rising costs of energy: natural gas, diesel, gasoline, propane, we begin to realize that only for a infinitesimally narrow slice of history was it, or will it ever be, possible to live the way we did in suburbia.
Yet here I am, rather more than a bit stuck in my mindset. I love nothing more than to hop on my bike on a warm summer evening and just… take a ride. A golden, even light drapes itself over children playing and neighbors chatting on their driveways. Fresh cut grass. A little league team’s barbecue in a backyard, moms and dads chatting about the game and the odd-jobs for the weekend. But most of all, most of all, I can see the sky. It’s a big sky, not eviscerated by the deep stabbing needles of tall buildings, but merely a little ragged on the edges from houses poking into the horizon line. In the distance, birds. Nearby, a family dog. Order. Peace.
And in a calm that seems infinite, on a summer evening that stretches on for days, it’s easy to forget transiency of it all. Drop me into the deep pool of naïveté, and as the cool water surrounds me, may I swim a little longer before surfacing to the harsh realities of a changing world.