Insanity in the City of Cranes
(Early 21st Century Americana with short Audio-Video further down below)
Found art by a tagger cartoonist as construction noise roars across traffic. South Lake Union/Downtown area of City of Seattle. Discovered one Thursday morning on the 5th of September 2019.
My beloved Seattle has mutated into a nightmare. The once Emerald City, the former Jet City, is now the City of Cranes. We’re the Abyss of Homelessness for those whom the Great Global Recession never ended and for whom the well-to-do would rather eradicate from view. Left my creaky old minivan at home, walked up the long, steep hill to the top of Phinney Ridge, and caught the bus to work. The #5 dropped me off with others 3 blocks further away than where it used to do as the cancer of over construction tore thru our city of dust & mud & noise. Dammit, I must zig zag this way & that way just to get to work!
Gosh, thought I would get to work early! Not now! Streets seemed closed in all directions. Sidewalks, too. I must cross the wrong way here to get over there to go the right way. To go west to east to get to work, I zig north, then south, then north, then east, then south, then west, south again, north next, north again, then east, then zag around the darn corner to end up going east again. Why? Because every block is different in a city cluttered with octopus intersections. On one block the sidewalk is shut down on one side and on the next shut down on the other side. Just like that, back & forth block to block.
People are both amused, stressed out, befuddled, giggling, and pissed off. Uber & Lyft drivers block honking buses. Lime-green & orangey-red app bicycles litter broken curbs. Hashtags litter all languages. Tourists peek back and forth between smartfone screens and big, floppy maps. Both are already obsolete. The lights take forever to change, traffic is too heavy for me to leap out into the street all skippity dippity dooby doo, and, ya, there’s ewwie random piles of doggie poo oozie-oozing outa tossed plastic baggies to hop over, too! Work is waaay up there beyond the top of the next hill. If I can just get outa this crazy ass place! Construction is so LOUD I turn off my hearing aids merely to keep my eyes open to see my way thru the madness.
The construction workers scurry along then stop to drag on cigarettes and chug coffee. Many seem to understand this is their time before this boom goes bust. They’re overbuilding and few will be able to afford to purchase or rent anything then all shall go absolutely to shit. Income inequality soars with the vaping & the heroin & the rage and fear. Noise is everywhere. Deafening. The energy is enough to drive a Bigfoot bonkers. To make the ETs flee. To distract us from the necessity to address serious local, regional, national, global, and solarian challenges such as global climate disruption, the decline of capitalism, growing threats of thermonuclear war and Disease X, and, yeah, get this, asteroid bombardments.
OK, challenges, Hell. What a barmy ass word, challenges is. That’s New Age “reframe-mation” speak for problems, as in, hey, y’all, we gotta buncha serious, serious problems, people! The only thing we must stop, really, is our collective behavior as a species in Earth and around the Sun.
So watch and listen to the video below!
Must find ways to transcend all those issues dividing us so we can find ways to work together to address our common world challenges. For now everything local is global, and our global problems are also local. Few see the long views, however, or are able to see the Big Picture we’re already within.
A quiet Sunday stroll to work on the 28th of July 2019, LOL!, but, shit, I need to go THAT way!
How many cranes do you count? There’s plenty more out of sight! Took this picture on Wednesday 21 August near where I work. Sobering to know I narrowly missed driving into the same spot where a crane being dismantled in high winds with its pins prematurely removed collapsed across buildings and street traffic four months ago. Four people died and others were injured. This happened on the day before my 60th birthday as I got off work a few blocks away.
Aye, make it stop. Please!
I don’t know who the artist is. Is the tagger cartoonist name USED, VSED, VZED, UZED, VZKD, or something else? Heck, I don’t know. The artist’s humor is revealed thru their plea, and I sense a mix of anger & despair, a sullenness beset with giggles amidst a profane-laced howl lost in the destruction of creation run amok. Thank you, tagger, who ever you are, for stopping to craft this work. Made me turn around and walk back half a block to snap a few shots including a short video. And, yes, I did make it to work on time.
William Dudley Bass
Friday 6 September 2019
Revised Tuesday 22 October 2019
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol
See also another urban vignette from the same area: “Lost My Wife,” at: http://williamdudleybass.com/lost-my-wife.
Copyright © 2019, 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.