3:30 am

My path home reveals mere scraps of a once untamed course. The infrastructure of so called civilization has tamed nature with culverts and erosion barriers. Destroying what should be protected in favor of the ugliness of fiscal decision making. Don’t get me wrong, I respect and benefit from the comforts of a modern world, but there is nothing beautiful being built for as far as my eyes can see.

They are rebuilding a section of interstate above my head. There is a lot of logistics and engineering involved to keep the traffic moving and ensure this structure lasts as long as possible. It is expensive and time consuming to construct and it will hopefully solve whatever volume and safety concerns were brought up before financing the project.

In the meantime it is a blight of orange cones, flashing signs, and piles of rubble.

What never came up in any of the meetings prior to this endeavor was the question of how to make this thing beautiful. The only concern was how it can be done to standards as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t matter if the people who pass under this thing get to experience something other than the same old brutal function over form design of concrete and steel.

That is until some hooligan spray paints unartistic garbage on it, or it turns into a litter nest of meth addicts. That will separate it slightly from the other trashy looking overpasses. It will eventually be mottled with beige cover up splotches because again, why try to color match when you can cheaply trade hoodlum art with civic graffiti.

I mean who cares? It’s just a highway overpass. We all know what they look like and collectively we can ignore them to the point where our brain makes them disappear. It is visual background noise to coincide with the drone of tires and engines as they speed by.

Now I am not asking the city pay for a highway project to look like the Sistine Chapel, but I live here. I am going to pass by this thing every day. I don’t need it to be a tourist destination but I wouldn’t mind if it blended in or provided some kind of artistic value.

I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine it would cost millions of dollars more to put some kind of lipstick on this pig. Someone out there has to have the design skills to lessen the fucking eye rape of cheap highway gitter done.

Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. There has been a ton of new construction in my neighborhood lately, but all they build are boxes. Occasionally they will put a lame facade on the doors or add a peak or two to the roof line, but it is all the same placid color scheme and flaccid design.

Cheap.

Disposable.

Don’t worry about making something historic. We may need to tear this all down for data centers so just throw it up fast and pray it doesn’t crumble onto someone’s grandma.

It isn’t just the buildings either. If I have to drive somewhere I am flowing in a stream of cars that all look the same. A school of mechanical fish, replete with drab colors and the same basic shape. Cheaply made, built to be disposed of in a few years, nothing you ask your grandpa to leave you in his will.

In a word, uninspiring.

Luckily there isn’t one of those fake pine tree cell towers over here. There is one up the way. It is an attempt at what I am talking about executed poorly. I respect they are at least trying to hide the ugliness of communications infrastructure but that shit looks like a fucking LEGO dropped into a realistic miniature train scape.

I know these corporate giants have the money to make a realistic looking tree tower, they just choose the cheapest way to do it.

It’s half-assed.

To go along with a world that is looking whole-ass.

I don’t know. It’s easy to blame capitalism for the lack of soul in what humans are producing nowadays. It seems there is no pride in the product, only pride in the profit. There doesn’t seem to be a single CEO out there bragging about what they produce, only what they earned. Granted capitalism has allowed for most of the great innovations the world has enjoyed, but it isn’t a problem free system.

It seems like most of the discussion is about either scrapping Capitalism, or cutting the restraints. I don’t hear anything about actually massaging the rough edges. I like capitalism. It provides me a comfortable life. It also provides me a ton of stress when the goal is designed obsolescence in the name of earnings calls.

It is 2026. I don’t need a dishwasher that talks to the cloud and collaborates with the stove. I need a dishwasher that actually washes dishes and doesn’t have some bullshit plastic piece that breaks in 2 years in a place where the repair bill is as much as a replacement.

Anyone seen that Maytag repairman?

It is also very hard for the average person to swallow the reality that capitalism created one person with enough wealth to make one million people a millionaire while most of us lost the skin on our teeth two catastrophes ago.

I know. This isn’t a purely capitalistic system. I also know that capitalism probably provides the best chance for people to succeed on their own merit. It also switches the focus from the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of capital. Capitalism produces great outcomes for people, but it also plows people under if they get in the way of the machine.

No system is agile enough to properly handle the ebbs and flows of human desire and behavior because all systems at their core are inhumane. Every system funnels resources to a select few. There are always someone shitting on a gold toilet right next to thousands of people shitting on the street.

No one can point to a system throughout history where there is parity of wealth, only parity of poverty. The only time you have a situation where everyone is equal are tribes where everyone has nothing except the bare necessities to survive.

Perhaps a beaded necklace or two.

I am not saying I have the answers. Far from it. I just know that once a system gets a bit too top heavy it topples. Right now, in the US, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and has been since 2009. Let that sink in. There are some people out there who have to work for an hour to buy 2 gallons of gas.

Meanwhile you have one dude who makes something in the neighborhood of 2 million dollars an hour. If he put all his money in a basic savings account, the interest alone would earn him 40 billion a year.

Granted the richest man in the world doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars just sitting in his basement. It is all locked up in companies and futures and all manner of financial bullshittery, but the idea is there, and he isn’t the only mega billionaire scuttling around.

When the balance of wealth is this far out of whack, I don’t see how it doesn’t snap. I mean I haven’t been able to square how people haven’t lost their shit 100 times already, but this feels different. Something about the way the world has been moving these past few years doesn’t seem normal.

My gut is telling me there is something afoot.

Smells of nasty afoot.

I don’t know what the catalyst will be, but we have all seen how small actions can lead to riots all across the country. I have joked that if wifi ever went down people will revolt, but wait until people begin to starve. Wait until something starts to jeopardize the basic animal needs. People will become animals real fast, and I don’t know if it is governments they will go after first.

Fuck.

I need to not allow myself to get bogged down by the fear porn. I just wish I didn’t have to rely on conspiracy theories and cynicism to justify why so much of life seems fucked. I want to believe the future will be better than the past but with every step I take back to my life there is more and more garbage I want to see cleared up.

I suppose it starts with me. It isn’t like I don’t have a bunch of personal garbage I have been ignoring. I just wish my personal infrastructure choices had led to profits. Mostly they have led to wrinkles and stubborn belly fat.

I don’t want to talk about the beige splotches.

I really should get another tattoo.