I live in America. Most of you may think that America is a great big nation between Canada and Mexico. This is incorrect. America is a house in Oro Valley, AZ.
It looks like a rich person's house. It is essentially a smallish McMansion. 3600 square feet on the first floor, 2000 on the second floor, cathedral ceilings, the works. However, if you look a little deeper, it's made out of "stick and stucco", a cheap foundation, and rotten plumbing made of a horrible plastic that cracks if you look at it funny.
And in America, I hire a guy that comes by and spreads horrible poison to keep unwanted, lesser inhabitants out of the house. This allows me to have it all to myself.
I rent the place, which is also American as hell. It's a bit more than I can afford, but that's a problem TOMORROW, and TODAY I get to sit in this gargantuan house and enjoy the things that my money or credit brings me.
My landlord doesn't care about anything. That's kinda cool. As long as he gets HIS, he doesn't care WHAT goes on. The neighbors complain, and he makes soothing noises at them, and then forgets all about it.
So there you have it. America in a nutshell.
I am told that other peoples' Americas are different, but I can't see past the gate at the end of the street, so I just fart a bit and go back to my mindless consumption.
That was pretty awesome. I must try to find time to tell you about MY America.
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 18, 2012, 05:58:18 PM
That was pretty awesome. I must try to find time to tell you about MY America.
I am told that other people have America.
I am in fact told that for about 80% of people, America isn't even pretty on the OUTSIDE, like my America is. I find this rather difficult to believe; why would anyone choose to live in a non-pretty America?
Your house is almost six times the size of mine. I can't even imagine what you do with all that space.
Anyway, my America is a university, which is pretty nice. Decent library, decent instructors, and a decent education if you ignore the weird little sea in which we sit. It's full of concentrated poverty, but its ignorable if you don't look down when paddle across to my America. It's ignorable if you don't listen to the scratching on the bottom of the boat. I'm not sure if it's sea creatures trying to claw their way into the boat or just the hull scraping over their bones.
Sometimes I think about looking down, but I never do. I don't want to know.
MY America is a continent. Some weird guys at the north keep using the name to describe themselves, which is weird because there are a lot of other people in America. Arrogant weirdos, I think. Plus, they speak funny. South of that people speak a bit less funny, and me and my country do not speak funny at all. But then everyone around it thinks we are the ones speaking funny. Go figure. :?
I live in America. My America is a story-and-a-half house that was once billed as a "classic old-Portland bungalow", with one tiny bathroom and one giant kitchen that's the biggest room in the house. It's not a huge house by modern standards, but for 1909 it has rooms and rooms and rooms... more than enough rooms for me and my three kids, so I rent one to a guy. I owe more on it than I'm worth, but less than it's worth, so it comes out OK, I guess. Except that the mortgage payments add up to more than my annual financial aid. Most places, I hear, a house like this might go for a third of what I'm paying. Not here, in the prettiest little city in the Pacific Northwest.
In my America working hard wasn't cutting it, so I quit to go to school. Problem is, grants and student loans and State aid aren't enough to pay for this house, so I still work part time... but that's not cutting it either. Plus, to keep my loans and grants and aid they have me jumping through so many hoops that what could have been productive time is eaten up with bureaucracy. So I have to work extra hard, all the time, nights and weekends, trying to make make make enough product to pay the bills. But it isn't selling anymore. A girl just can't catch a break, not even with a 3.6 GPA. So my backup plan, if it comes to that, is to stall foreclosure long enough for me to graduate.
In the meantime, I nailed a piece of plywood over the rotting porch floorboards of my America.
Everyone smiles a lot in My America. Everyone in My America is doing JUST FINE THANK YOU and wants to show you pictures of cats being adorable at things. Everyone in America is better than average. Nobody ever fights. It's a crime to have a bad day in America, so no one ever does. Sometimes someone gets sick, but they'd better POWER THROUGH IT and GET SHIT DONE because America don't stop for no one, and if you're not running to keep up you're falling behind and you don't want to fall behind because then you start to see around those corners that you're not supposed to look at where you can see the cracks in the stairwell to the basement where the drywall's rotting and pieces of it jump like Chinese factory workers, notice the shoddy patchwork cement holding together the crumbling stone foundation slapped together in another century by someone who didn't have a solid grasp of geometry or civil engineering but no one wants to complain and one time I heard someone got too far behind in the bathroom and the whole ceiling fell down on their head. Everything's fine here, move along.
My America is full of kids that that get hurt, but won't get help. My America is full of broken people that didn't need to be broken. my america is full of people who won't listen because they can't back down, can't look weak, can't quit.
My America is full of kids with brightly colored clothes and hair, who just want to pass the next midterm.
My America is full of people who are always right, especially Always RIGHT, that don't want to share with anyone else.
My America is full of people who should just get a job, and of course that means signing your life away to maybe be blown up by people you don't understand, for things like Everybody's America, except Yours.
My America sometimes smells like CLP and cordite and hot brass.
My America?
I live in America. America is sharing an apartment with a Puerto Rican, a Lesbian, a non pregnant white girl, and 5 felines, among other minorities. It is in one of the city's pet "Nice" places, where for once City Hall and the Mob have agree that good business is good, and stopped messing people up for a few bucks when they would willingly spend twice that the next day. It is a RARE display of sanity. I keep the nastier segments of the population at bay, as always, by being large, white, and crazy. The neighbors think I carry out contracts, or am a reincarnation of Roger Williams. That's fine, since I KNOW that H.I.M. Joshua Norton's long lost disaffected grandson lives in the house behind me. I work a job in finance that I have held onto despite the undulations of the finance job sector, and drive horrible contraptions around to strange destinations. I watch all of this with vague bemusement, since I am certain it will fly apart at the seams sooner than later. I will then tuck my head down, and get drunk for two days, while the foolish expend their ammo. I will then emerge with a clear head, knowledge, and direction. And so I shall build my Empire.
I live in a suburb of America. It's called England. The part I live in used to be called Scotland but they banned that name in 86, along with trade unions and individualism.
My ambition, as dictated to me by the holy cathode ray tube, is to be famous on teevee. To this end there are cameras everywhere, watching my every move. If I'm lucky I get my own show. If I'm not I get captured, doing something only the rich and famous are allowed to do.
I work in a bile production facility. I can feel it rising in my throat, as soon as I walk in the the doors in the morning. As far as I can ascertain, this is why I'm here.
God bless America.
I live in America.
A little red house, two stories tall, that was really a nice place in the 1920s. Now it looks kinda like a patchwork of plywood and paneling.
A little town with no real diversity, 'cept maybe the pile of bones buried under that miner statue.
Fields all around growing food that I never see after it's been harvested.
People frivolously going about their business which largely consists of going to wal-mart and pretending that the mine shafts running under the town aren't really subsiding all that much.
My America is full of steam leaks, rotten acid lines, weird electrical fluctuations, and loose bolts.
No. I'm not talking about my job. I'm talking about my country.
Quote from: Secret Agent GARBO on October 19, 2012, 12:14:35 AM
Your house is almost six times the size of mine. I can't even imagine what you do with all that space.
A couple of rooms are closed off. The rest is there so we can get some running space when we bounce off the walls.
I live in a cheap copy of America, where you can get your coca colas, big macs and 7/11 bits and pieces, and where the most important life goal is to be famous and/or rich; but you get stuff that is very UnAmerican, like free healthcare, decent unemployment welfare etc. DOn't worry though, they are trying to save us from that.
My personal copy is a basement apartment filled to the brim with useless doodads, and Apple products and empty Monster cans.
I live in PROGRESSIVE America. Not the way you commies think of "progressive", but REAL progressive, we get everything FIRST, after they test it at places like Pine Ridge (which are predominantly smudgey and therefore, not really american).
What do we get first, you ask? Nothing. The object of being PROGRESSIVE is to keep everything out. So FUCK your education, health care, and soft jobs, RICK PERRY SAYS WE DON'T NEED THAT SHIT. Our teen pregnancy rate PROVES that we are a growing, vibrant community.
I grew up in America the Classic. Two parents who fought constantly and a million relatives who where much more into their imaginary friends that live in the sky than in the real people right in front of them. Apple fucking heartland pie, it was.
Despite my best effort, I've never seen what it looks like outside of America. I've been to 10 different countries and not one of them wasn't America. To the south they speak Spanish, but are as American as anyone here. In the middle east I thought I would see another culture, but as the Arabs put on their best Billy Mays to sell me cheap goods I felt right at home. "My friend, my friend, is cheapest!"
And Japan? Shit. They put on a good show, showed us how traditional they are. Sushi. Table floors. Bowing.
When the show was over they put on the suit and tie and went back to the cubicle, just like good Americans.
And today? I would need pics to prove how deep I am now.
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on October 18, 2012, 05:58:18 PM
That was pretty awesome. I must try to find time to tell you about MY America.
doo bee doo bee dooo
:argh!:
First, GET OFF MY LAWN.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFVdvXGIT34
We're all living in America, even if we don't want to; is it OUR America? Yeah, right. Coca-cola, Wonderbra, X-mas, Halloween, Walmart, 7-11, Fritos, Ford...
In "our" America nothing is pure, everything is corrupt... in "our" America, there is an abundanza of resources which a minority properly gobbles up.
There's a reason why right now we are communicating in English and not Spanish, nor French or whatever... not like it matters, sooner or later we will all be speaking Mandarin.
Where every red left turn arrow is an opportunity to say fuck you to the man.
I can see the American dream.
The gated community compounds, the good schools, the hospitals where people don't have to wait in the ER for 14 hours because they are not actively bleeding to death, the toll-roads so that the rich aren't inconvenienced by the teeming masses on the freeway....
I see the Land of the Bright Shiny Surface.
Your dreams are sucked down into nothing, and you are nothing, and all is nothing, and no matter how many clean and well-lit places you find, it all means nothing.
But it sure does look nice.
The miserable trudge you make through life as pointless as trench warfare, and your hopes and dreams and happiness, that doesn't matter....
In the end a pickled packaged carcass slides in to the ground and it sure looks NICE.
All pointless, all empty, but with a shiny surface and whitened teeth to devour your neighbors, the gleam on the blued barrel and have a nice day, motherfucker, because your vote COUNTS, Hallelujah.
Everything COUNTS and it all COUNTS towards selling your soul for a pile of meaningless shiny plastic SHIT.
And everyone dreams of living in a place where someone with the tightest asshole imaginable comes by and measures the length of the fucking grass in your yard. AMERICA! YEAH!
And it all looks so nice.
So nice.