Welcome

Hello, this is my little blog about politics and pop culture. All my life I knew the world just wasn’t quite right. What I have to offer you here is just how not quite right our world is. My perspective is a bit unique to my generation. While my parents grew up with General Motors, I grew up with Goldman Sachs. Instead of dreaming of white picket fences and a car in the driveway, my generation dreams/dreamed before great recession, of mc mansions complete with three car garages packed with SUV’s and Jet Skis. Nothing is sacred and nothing always has been that sacred.* But I suspect there was a time when the stakes weren’t quite so high as today. Perhaps I am wrong. After all there were great atrocities before my time, and its foolish embrace a romanticized image of the past when a more realistic one can shed more light on today. Nonetheless here I am. Left adrift in a world of consumerism and “I don’t give a fuck” trying to make some sense of it all.

I will draw on many different sources in my posts here, but I think its time I explain the title of my little blog here: the parking lot fields. I chose the phrase comes from the Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern” off their first album. I’m a fan, but thats besides the point. Issac Brock wines,

Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job  
Go through the parking lot fields
Didn’t see no signs that they would yield
And then thought, this’ll never end
This’ll never end, this’ll never stop [...]       
[...]And we’re losing all touch, losing all touch
Building a desert

This song about overdevelopment of the land and the underdevelopment of our humanity brings out so many of the details of just how not quite right our world is. While I could prattle on about the references in the song about  subduing the mass with religion, the depressing life a wage slave leads, or the need for an ever-expanding sphere of consumerism for capitalism, I won’t. The song speaks for itself on those points. However, what I do wish to point out is that I grew up in the parking lot fields. In my time I’ve met many geriatrics eager to tell me about how when they were young, “this was all forest and farmland.”  Well for me it wasn’t.

That quaint little pond they foggily remember, is and always was a McDonald’s for me. The Big oak tree that used to have a tire swing. It’s a strip mall. The old neighborhood bank that underwrote the ten thousand dollar mortgage on Grandma’s house, well now Chase owns it, and they use it to lure people into debt they don’t need. I didn’t grow up with spacious skies, amber waves of grain, or purple mountains majesty.  I grew up with smog, Monsanto, and strip mining. So now that we’ve gotten that out-of-the-way, welcome. Welcome to the Parking Lot Fields.  I hope you enjoy your stay, comeback, and even tell me whether I’m right, wrong, grammatically inept, or just plain stupid.

*From time to time I will slip into double entendre, its habit-forming. However, if we don’t break out of Aristotelian shells eventually we will never realize chicken shit!