Writing about your hometown
Dang, I wish I had my radical essay book on MY TOWN ready!
Nothing has ever been written about HERE before. There’s a reason
why, too. Why nothing much has really been written about any of our
new Freeway Exit Communities. One is like the other. My town is
ever more like yours, but they’re all silent. Something is going on
behind the scenes that needs more exposing, I figure. So I wrote
up what it’s like around here. By being specific, I figure it gets
universal. I’m quite excited, but have been too busy to wrap it up.
I need to do a little rewriting, another readover. It’s called (for now):
Rescuing Okemos: Making Somewhere from Nowhere. But I need something
better. Of course, when something is the only book about something
important, best to just get it out.
I also have my radical essay book on ‘Trespassing, Animal Rights and Culture’
to polish up. That should also kick the butt of this tourist-frenzied hook’n’bullet
(and lotsa cash) state.
Then there’s my essay book on Culture in general. Just in case.
I wish I had them all ready (to go with my other new line of 23 OYB books)
coz our town and culture needs saving BAD. It’s going down FAST.
No time to waste.
Of course I might get lynched. THAT’S the rub! When you write about
actual places candidly as a local you get into deep-do-do in ways that
campus radicals only dream of. Give your HOME TOWN the Treatment
and see what happens. Of course, you have to BE KNOWN around town.
Your parents, too. This is a real town I’m talking about. Or it was.
I’m messing with heritage here. With reputations. When you write a BOOK
about the town council, about people you know, as an ADULT, a HOMEOWNER,
a PARENT, it gets taken TEN TIMES more seriously than a college kid going
to volunteer and shoot em up with the commie guerillas in El Salvador.
That’s kid stuff. Home town ain’t. If your kid will have to go to middle
school there, you better come out smelling like a rose.
So I have to play this right. Of course I don’t want to do anybody wrong.
No random venom spewing.
The main thing, I figure, is to take out all the negative stuff.
Keep in the indictment but spin it constructively.
Also, ‘don’t tell, show’. Stick to the basics.
Cheerfully tell everyone that all they gotta do is
make sure they shop from family-owned businesses or our town will be
a sewer ghetto in 10 years. Easy solutions, but don’t spare the rod.
But I gotta keep it upbeat. I have to take the highground away. I’m MORE
of a town booster than they are. They’re wrecking’n’running, dine’n’dash,
I’m saving. I have to make it clear and say it in print that our entire countryside
will be a trafficjam in ten years. That our air will stink. No one
will dare to go outside except to play soccer in approved indoor zones
(please pay). UNLESS we do the fun’n’easy thing and acknowledge our
heritage. Be patriots. So let’s play up what meager actually
real qualities this area has and celebrate them because everything
else is fake. We have a neglected river. A system of amazing (unknown)
drainage ditches just like the Dutch (who celebrate theirs). How? Part of the easy
answer is that we have public land strips and right-of-ways across country and
along the river that we could put official paths and trails on as transportation
alternatives, places to stroll and ponder and escape traffic, depressurizing
zones, which are currently being screwed over every time they are proposed.
We need those trails as a shot in the arm to break the freighttrain of traffic frenzy
and no humans in sight. I have to let em know the price we’ll pay if we don’t
play up our HUMAN heritage in at least that one small way in addition to the
CAR frenzy. Even the car drivers need to know there are real people out
there strolling across a field between minimalls and subdivisions or else the
guilt and pressure will eat em alive. If the illusion is TOTAL even suburbanites
will go bonkers in droves. (And they do!) Building in a little real cultural
infrastructure is for their own immediate good. (Now, now, I have to tell them,
‘town’ doesn’t always equal ‘store.’ They need a little shepherding.) We need to prick
the balloon in a few places and keep this town connected to where it is and a
few other root elements. Without the messenger getting himself killed.
I figure I’ll get all those essay books out in a year max. We’ll see what happens.
