|
Morning Lessons and Eerie Desolation
I've decided to make a better effort to get up earlier in the morning. Today, I arose at 7:30, giving me a whole hour and a half to myself before reporting to work. It was nice. I put on the kettle, opened the sliding glass door, spun some Stereolab, and proceeded to check email, read Blogs, eat breakfast, and shower. Then I just zoned and pondered what it was I wanted to get accomplished today. When I went to work, it felt different than usual. Instead of feeling inevitable and rushed, it felt like a part of some overarching plan for the day. I think I like having this extra time before work, so I'm going to make it my goal to get up each morning this week before 8, preferably around 7. If it works, I may well find myself renaming the Midnight Disease to something more appropriate for morning writing.
By the way, I've lately discovered Stereolab. Great stuff, especially for background listening. I started with Emperor Tomato Ketchup about a month ago and immediately found myself hooked on the melancholy tunes, retro-synth textures, catchy riffs, and female French vocals. I'm currently enjoying Mars Audiac Quintet, which has a similar sound to Emperor, and am hoping to soon get my hands on Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements.
This past Saturday, Marius and his wife came over and the three of us took a day trip to the Salton Sea, a specter of desolation and economic dreams unrealized. In the sixties, it was thought that this inland, saltwater lake would be the next big resort in SoCal. Streets and subdivisions were laid out and resort properties built. But a chain of events over the next decade - the death of thousands of birds in a botulism outbreak, decreasing water levels, and increasing salinity - stopped growth in its tracks with only half-finished buildings and street grids left behind as evidence of any human activity.
It's eerie driving around a modern ghost town. In an abandoned Colorado mining community, you accept the desolation as historical fiction, something out of an old western, far removed from reality and not to be taken too seriously. But the Salton Sea hit closer to home, sending a chill up my spine as we passed all-too-familiar surroundings. The streets and homes were just like the stuff you see in any suburb, except with broken windows, pigeons and rats nesting inside, and virtually no people around. A very surreal and post-apocalyptic experience.
The devastation wasn’t limited to the rotting structures but extended to the Salton Sea itself. At one point, when Marius and I were on the beach photographing the shoreline, I looked down at the "sand" we were standing on, only to realize that it wasn't sand at all - it was bird and fish bone pieces.
We returned to living, breathing suburbia that evening and had dinner, just as if we had gone to the beach or to see a movie. But driving by the tract housing and strip malls later that night, I had a mental flashback to the carcasses we recently left behind and suddenly felt just a little more fragile and vulnerable than before. It made me think that more people should have a similar experience in order to combat societal hubris. We could re-energize the Salton Sea as a great tourist attraction, a parable of human enterprise gone terribly wrong for reasons outside of man's control. Wouldn't that be wonderfully strange if a kind of perverse tourism sprung up around seeing tourism fail?
|
