Posted by panch from ? (204.120.48.3) on Sunday, May 19, 2002 at 9:24AM :
...Is a seaside resort village just south of Santa Cruz, California. It is terminally cute with all the right cute houses, shops and restaurants. Cool jazz on foggy nights...the lights from the pier somewhere out at sea by the boats bobbing in the curving bay (not bad).
Went there the other night, fairly late, to walk around and kick old men. Walked out on the pier, starry clear night...big moon reflecting on the water...faint music coming from the village. All around the town, nestled right up against a curving beach, there are signs of wealth. Everything is clean and new or restored. The lawns are immaculate, the paint fresh and well coordinated. Everything is as lovely and as perfect as can be...and prices are so high it isn't crowded either...a real dreamy place. Came back from the pier end after a drink at the one ramshackle bait shop and bar they have there, to walk down on the beach, down by the surf. I was stopped by a sign warning of a health hazard, that I shouldn't even come into bodily contact with the water...it was so polluted.
What do you go to the beach for...except the beach. That cute town, the construction of which polluted the water with all the wastes thrown into the sea, could have been built on a mountaintop. In the daytime it isn't as alluring as at night...in the day people come there expecting to curl their toes in the sand, let their children wade and swim and surf.
They can't do that now without getting violently ill or glowing. That's such a metaphor for modern life...things look good...way too good. But the guts and core, the whole point of the thing, is missing, or worse, is so poisoned in the effort to make things look nice...that there isn't really point to it after all.
They ruined the beach to build a beach town. They destroyed villages in Vietnam to "save" them...and Assyrians are waiting for the day when their dear homeland will be bombed into the kind of place no one wants...and we wont either, but the Muslims will be gone, into the ground. We'll stay in Chicago and Turlock after all...maybe build an Assyria in Vegas.
Yuk!
-- panch
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