Creeva’s World 2.0

I vis­ited the grave of a friend today. Pre­vi­ously I had writ­ten about him here. It still seems odd that though I am now in my thir­ties that I am young enough that have friends that died. When his death first hap­pened I thought that part of my world had ended. Now look­ing back I can say part of it truly did.

We can wax on philo­soph­i­cally that it’s all in my head, that it’s a state of mind that even­tu­ally I’ll get past. But it’s been eight years now and part of it still touches my soul. The abil­ity to hang on to youth and child­ish things stems from him. He also gives me my inner spirit to drive for­ward no mat­ter the cost. Part of me wishes I could be half the man he could have become, the other half of real­izes I am if not more. The uncer­tainty of it all is what I think dri­ves me the most crazy. I wish I could have known if he would have sur­vived the crash that he would have accom­plished some­thing. That sad part is very few peo­ple in my home town rarely do.

They go about their lives in daze. Work­ing min­i­mum wage jobs, going to the bar, doing what their par­ents were doing twenty to thirty years ear­lier. It is almost exactly what their par­ents were doing down to the same bars and jobs. Part of me pities them. Don’t get me wrong I don’t feel bad for them. I think they should want to do bet­ter. Yet they are happy main­tain­ing their sta­tus quo. Speak­ing of that very few of them would use the term sta­tus quo in nor­mal speech let alone in any­thing they wrote if they took the effort. This is the part of me most of them con­sider stuck up, since I don’t go down to their level. They feel that I think that I am bet­ter than them, I’m not.

Part of me feels a jeal­ousy towards them. Since they don’t look at the big­ger pic­ture or life out­side of the small town they grew up in, they are very happy. Exter­nal pres­sures and news don’t have the same tug of emo­tions inside them. They are com­pla­cent and want to go about their daily busi­ness. I think part of me wants a bit of that com­pla­cency. It’s the town. Not the peo­ple we were born and raised a cer­tain way and because of that most the cit­i­zens in the town feel we need to per­se­vere so things that existed and ways of life that were per­formed gen­er­a­tions before we came around are main­tained as closely as can be achieved.

Since small town Amer­ica hangs on to this ideal they are shocked when the man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs dis­ap­pear. My home­town took a bit hit finan­cially when the Ford plant that employed most the town closed down and the pro­duc­tion moved away. The par­ents of my gen­er­a­tion used to say that the day they grad­u­ated high school they would walk down to the Ford plant and be hired imme­di­ately. Friends of mine who wanted to get into Ford waited for years to move up the queue on the wait­ing list to be inter­viewed. Some made it, some didn’t – but now those jobs are gone. These are jobs that some of them looked for­ward to in high school.

Like every small town where this hap­pens the peo­ple blame the com­pany because they don’t want to relearn or train. One of the argu­ments I’ve had on this is that Amer­ica is tran­si­tion­ing into a ser­vice indus­try. If it’s in the ser­vice pro­fes­sion you can be pretty sure your job won’t go aware. It doesn’t how­ever mak­ing eco­nomic sense to con­tinue man­u­fac­tur­ing in Amer­ica when cit­i­zens are com­plain­ing about the cost of goods at the store. Over­seas man­u­fac­tur­ing makes that cheaper.

I’m sit­ing in my car down at the beach writ­ing this. Some guy chuck­led at him­self slightly point­ing that I have a belt hold­ing up one side of my bumper. In this econ­omy I shouldn’t be forced to fix it just because some­one else finds it odd. I don’t think of it as some­thing to be ashamed of, just some­thing that is more prag­matic for me to deal with the way it is instead of spend­ing money to fix it. Judg­ing by looks it looked like he was in a lower income bracket then me and should have real­ized that. But peo­ple in my town would rather waste money buy­ing a new car then deal with a belt on the bumper. For a side note not pick­ing on the guy since I don’t dress or act like I belong in the income bracket in which I live.

Lots of peo­ple have walked by me look­ing at me odd since I’m typ­ing away on a lap­top. Like it’s the odd­est thing in the world to have some­one using a com­puter that is not at home. I used to get the same looks com­ing down to the beach and play trum­pet or even to read. It always seemed that the cit­i­zens thought that these things some­how were meant to be actively enjoyed instead of pas­sively relaxed inside

I was going to write more – but exter­nal forces pulled me away from my writ­ing – instead of being now off the groove I’ve decided to put what I’ve writ­ten up as is.