The Big City 5000 Years From Now

 
I'm well into my second calendar year as a citizen of The Big City. Impressive! The last half of last year, the first few days of this one, I'm a homeboy. So I know very well how things go here. The average guy uses most of his effort watching out for what's his. Fences, padlocks, chastity belts, and all at a premium. But you have to pay it, if you want to see tomorrow, and a good belt's always worth the extra bucks for everyone’s piece of mind.

I'm personally not cooped up at home all the time. Especially when it’s warm, I’m out everyday, scrounging for cans and hitting the salvage metal yard about once a week. That takes me some interesting places. Parks, alleys, dead-end roads, behind old buildings, around thick trees, foliage and weeds where some homeless guys hide, etc. I see rundown conditions all the time, boarded storefronts, graffiti, and illegal dumping. I can get you a decent mattress, but they've all been repeatedly rained on. And couches. Leading me to ask, Why do they always mangle a couch just before dumping it? I forgot to mention tires. Tires everywhere!

Today I was buzzing around under an interstate bridge and it made me wonder: These great highways, how long will they stand? The beams on the bridges are thick, like they've got eternity in their sights. But it’d only take about 40 years neglect in certain places and the whole thing would tumble down. Stopping traffic, leading to congestion, and honking drivers, angry as crap. What’ll the interstate be like in 2-3,000 years?! Depends. Whether we're taken over by terrorists who have one redeeming quality, they like good roads. Or terrorists who are such sadists they don't care what the roads look like. Maybe they're from India. Or just split the difference, a few who like roads, a few who don't.

What about 5,000 years? Who knows? I heard that time I’ll die when I’m 85, and that’s now only about 20 years. I'll barely live to see anything. And I'd love to see bacon under a dollar a pound. It used to be! Oh, yes, we assume the price was always stuck at 4 dollars. But back when minimum wage was $1.60, bacon was cheap cheap cheap compared to today. For that to happen now, though, it'd take another Great Depression, a depressing thought.

If we could skip ahead 5,000 years -- I wake up like Rip Van Winkle -- I'd be sure to check out the progress. What would I see? I see about a 80/20 chance of a dystopian future. With an ice age. And most people living underground for the insulation. And so much ice, it's Ice Road Truckers conditions everywhere. Interstates were buried long ago, trucking costs are cheap because they're driving over frozen lakes so thick they never thaw. Pigs are raised underground, there's no pollution from slaughtering them since everything instantly freezes. People need bacon for warmth; it builds muscle mass; so it's not cheap, about $15 a pound. The national headquarters of the Pork Producers is also in the White House, for national security, and Pennsylvania Ave. has been renamed Hog Pavilion Pathway.

As for illegal dumping, nearly everything is now kept, for warmth. Those old mattresses you always see, big stained wet messy ugly things, are prized possessions in 5,000 years, because you can lean them up against doors and easily keep the temperature just below freezing. Wood barely exists; the tree line and temperate zone is about 20 miles on either side of the equator. People steal, kill, and sleep around, of course. But they usually freeze to death, so justice still prevails.

The other scenario is that global warming turns out to be true. After the Ice Age, instead of freezing, everything's thawed out all the time. And bacon can't be adequately shipped or stored, so it's very cheap. The bad news is you literally have to live within a couple miles of Hog Pavilion Pathway, still the national headquarters, now at the equator, to get it and enjoy the bargains.

The Big City in the above graphic is a time during the warmer era, a time of peace and security at the equator. But it lasts only briefly, until the rest of the non-bacon eating world gets wind of it, floods the zone, and tears it all down. "Throw that in our faces, will you? Your cheap bacon and flying store to store in airplanes to get it, you bastards!" is a common complaint. Their hero, an conscientious agitator writing a righteous blog very much like this one, stirs up passions and they tear the whole thing down. The whole idea of chastity and belts is forbidden. It becomes a very nasty world, making me happy to have died before I ever lived to see it.

An Enormous Icestorm (Or Not)

I swear, I'm starting to think that ice can be downright dangerous! You try to walk on it and if you happen to make a mistake -- in an unguarded moment of carelessness -- you can go right down! Very slick stuff, ice is, a hazard, a public menace. But what can you say? Sure you hate it, but it's as natural as anything else. You get the right combination of moisture and temperature, and similar to those little trays in the freezer, you've got ice! They don't call it "the icebox" for nothing!

And wouldn't you know it, it's winter, and we're prone to experiencing it firsthand, nature at its worst, which has lulled us into a continual confidence vis-à-vis our legs by uprightness from warmer times being the norm, only to upend us when the cold comes to bear. Slip! You're down, with no undo button, and left to survey the possible damage: "Are my legs injured, did my hands get hurt, how's my all-important spine?" I've known people who've been terribly injured on the ice, then others (like myself) who've come through falls with almost miraculous deliverance.

One time I remember clearly was probably 35 years ago, when my feet went out from under me slick as snot, as we used to say. This was split-second stuff, whoosh! And I hit my head with some violence where I stood. It hurt like hell but shocked me worse, shaking me not just by the physical pain but with what it did to my normal breezy confidence. 'If that could happen as fast as that,' I must have thought, 'then, really, what confidence can I have?' The lesson stayed with me and I've been more careful since. The greatest part of it was I wasn't injured beyond the immediate pain. I shake my head and it's the normal rattle.

Today was the day we were dreading, an ice storm for the ages coming in. When I heard there would be ice build-up of a half inch, in my imagination that's the biggest half inch ever; I pictured it as something closer to three times that. Do I have a faulty imagination? I was never great with math. Or is it that I fear the possibilities of enormous ice so much that to be extra safe is to be extra careful, and as a reminder to magnify the predicament? Could be. I do lots of extraneous stuff, and careful redundancy is my middle name. I make backup copies of grocery lists in case the original is lost. Good thing I don't knit sweaters; they'd be so thick they'd last forever and suffocate you.

As it turned out, at least during the day and in town -- and it may have been worse in other places -- the ice storm was nothing much. Once I got out, inching my way to the car, and casting my ice melt upon the frozen waters, I realized it was nothing. I didn't have a problem in the world! The roads were great. I didn't see a single car in the ditch, whereas during a less-dreaded storm a couple weeks ago I saw two cars spin out in three seconds and wisely turned the other way. What it was like on the interstate, though, I can only imagine. Ice is always so much worse there, with maniac truckers flying by at 80 mph and throwing it on your windshield a foot thick if it's an inch!

I also didn't see anyone fall on the ice. Good for them, but bad for me. Couldn't rush over and do my good deed for the day, helping them up and issuing a heartfelt warning, "Be careful next time, stupid. Let me tell you what happened to me 35 years ago, and everything I learned from it..."

Ice Can't Sink A Ship

Where have I been? I haven't written much lately. That's no accident, because I've been very blah and not feeling up to it. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the political scene. Presidential elections get to me. The Republicans are so completely shitty as a party, anytime the country flirts with putting one of those bastards in power again, the consequences being so mindblowingly horrendous, it's enough to depress any reasonable person. Which I am.

But then, like today, when I hear of something also revolting to me, although truthfully not as revolting, I just have to shake off the doldrums and come out and state my case. So, like the tortured genius artist with his first album of original material in 10 years, here I am again, today to offer a well-deserved defense of ice. That's right, ice, the slick stuff that water turns into when it goes from its liquid self to a harder shape.

All this has come about because I just happened to see part of a show on National Geographic about the Italian cruise ship that sank a few months ago. What was it called? The Cordon Bleu or something like that. I need to Google it. Oh yeah, the Costa Concordia. It was an accident that costa lot, and left very little concord with the passengers, who might have been eating Cordon Bleu, till it all went down.

As far as accidents go, I don't really know much about it. It seems like a rather minor thing to someone like me who doesn't know much about it. Most of the folks got help, I'm assuming. Whether anyone died, I don't remember. Be that as it may, that's not my point. That's not what outraged me enough to shake off my politically-induced blahs and come back to writing. If you had 100 people trip over the same little crack on the sidewalk, three or four of them would die. Next paragraph! 

What I saw on the show -- and I only saw about a minute and a half of it -- was that ice was the cause of the rip in the ship. Or at least, That's their claim! For I have a very hard time, an impossible time, believing that ice can do that much damage. And if it turns out I'm wrong, then so be it, but I don't think so. Still, if I am wrong, and presented with enough evidence to convince a staunch unbeliever, I will be the first to confess it. But I don't think that's going to happen.

The charge -- the false charge -- is that ice was the culprit! That the ship, apparently veering off course, slid up against a bunch of ice -- frozen water -- and somehow (no one knows how) it managed to cut a lengthwise hole in the ship, basically from the front to the back. This then, they claim, opened up what they call compartments of dead air, that then allowed a situation where air was going out and water was going in. To me, that's a standoff. But to the so-called experts, water beats air every time.

OK, so last night as I was thinking of this subject and thinking how I might mount a credible defense of ice, I had a glass of iced tea in front of me. I clinked the ice around a bit. It tinkled, that's all. I swished it harder, and the noise was a little louder. Then I sloshed it like the town drunk, and it made a somewhat louder noise, but in no case, no matter how hard I sloshed it, did the ice cut a hole in the glass. And, mind you, the glass was plastic, not the tougher material they make ships out of, iron. 

The results of my experiment prove that ice is harmless.

I've seen films of ships busting through ice. And never have I seen a ship go down in it. At least not very often. Meaning there had to be some other reason for the accident. Whatever else it could have been is anyone's guess. It just could not have been ice. OK?

Salt and Sand

It seems to me like there ought to be higher-tech ways of getting rid of ice.

On the sidewalks out there, especially on the north side, there's ice. You put sand on it and salt and that's pretty good. But it just craters it and it still remains basically slick.

Why can't there be some machine -- there probably is -- that has a fan at the bottom of it? You go along and melt the ice and that's the end of it? I suppose the answer is it would just freeze again. But maybe not, a little wind, or the heat of the heater, and it'd be essentially gone.

Or some way of crunching it.

We Have Ice

It's been an icy day. I looked out at the Skelgas tank and noticed a wavy sheen and knew right away it was ice. Then up at the eaves and saw a few small icicles, like a kid's runny nose but horizontal and sustained.

I don't mind ice, but I know some of my elderly neighbors hate it. They slip and rupture a bone. Much of the town stops because of the ice, even though really it isn't that bad. The city guys have been out spraying sand and salt, the sun's beating down on it (while still below zero), and enough young people, innocents, are out it's getting some wear. Still, you hear of things being canceled, churches, grange meetings.

I was out driving a bit and went by some major parking lots of places that aren't open on Sunday. Of course their parking lots are pristine, no salt, no sand, just shiny. I was thinking how fun it'd be to go in there and brody around, a few donuts, maybe a Ralph or a Louie. Or straight ahead in a wavy line, you know, a Broken Arrow aka a Fish Tail. But then, what? I'm in there, an old man doing all these wild moves, I hit a pole, or maybe the police happen to be driving by, or young people, innocents, see me and see a bad example being set.

There was a guy right out here on the street the other night. And the street is narrow in places. But he was going back and forth, with some so-so donuts. I was wishing the police might be coming by but they didn't.