1060 Finally, an Answer

1060 Finally, an Answer
Finally figured out what was offputting about living in the country.  And the answer came when studying the difference between the brakes on a car and the brakes on a train.

Car brakes always are off unless you “turn” them on.  Train brakes are always on unless you “turn” them off.  You drive.  You come to a stop sign.  You push the brake pedal.  The car stops. 

On a train (or a truck with air brakes) you come to a stop signal and take your hand off the control lever.  The brakes return to their default position, which is clamped around the axles. 

Let’s backpedal.  The usual complaint about this country town is there’s no energy.  Responses range from “make your own energy,” to “but there’s plenty to do here.”  The first answer is irrelevant because community energy comes from communities.

The second statement is true but is not an answer.

Cities are cars.  Momentum, forward motion, is the default situation.  Small towns and rurals are trains.  Nothing-happening is the default situation.  Every event is a reinvention of the wheel.  In the cities, it’s like a wave.  There’s always plenty of something happening.

How someone relates to these differing pictures matters much more than the situations themselves.  Neither is good or bad.  It’s just the presence or absence of what you’re used to.

The “plenties to do” requiring gearing up, getting ready, getting into action.  The urban momentum is a thing-itself.  When something happens, you have to gear

down to meet it. 

Momentum.  Inertness.

Brakes off.  Brakes on.

It’s not “something to do” or even “lot’s to do” that makes a city vibrant.  It’s the gas pedal.

Shrapnel:

--Arkansas is circling the wagons around the death of Chavis Carter, the left handed black guy who supposedly shot himself in the right temple while sitting in the back of a patrol car while his hands were cuffed behind his back and after the cops had searched him twice and found a small bag of pot but no gun.  The latest:  Carter had meth in his system.   Even so, he still was left handed, shot in the right temple and had his hands cuffed behind his back both before and after he died.

--Followup to an earlier post:  Home Despot greeted customers the other day with a huge display of cheap, name brand 100 watt incandescent lightbulbs. Contraband. Where are those two beer bellied bulb cops when you needed them? A citizen’s arrest was warranted but for the paperwork involved.

--Someday, the ghosts of Jerry Sandusky and Todd Aken will meet in Hell.  And at that point, maybe Jerry can teach Todd what rape is all about.  But you have to think that Todd said what most people of his political ilk think and his Big Mistake was nothing more than putting it into plain English where we can all see what’s under the cesspool cover.

Friend and colleague Dianne Thompson Stanciel has a lot to say about the Missouri Moron and his rape nonsense.  See it here:

http://www.highheelshotflashes.com/2012/08/dont-get-raped/

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com 

© WJR 2012