Dog Days in Plasticvillette

Nowadays we here at the Experiencing Belgium desk are displaced exiled American expats repatriated in another exile of sorts. Trapped in an exile within an exile of Love. In short lost in Plastic-land. Feeling trapped in Ohio with nowhere to go. Temporarily or permanently - who knows - who cares...

I don't mean to feel sorry for myself but there is no one here to listen to my endless rants and raves. When I do find other souls out here I find they have such a short attention span that I spend my time listening to their mental loops turn in ever closer around themselves.

It's not just the oversized Sports Utility Vehicles that I am becoming used to and rather fond it. It's the gas prices for even a 80 Miles to the Gallon Italianate Vespa (motor scooter) that I can't afford. With names like Santa Fe, Tahoe, Durango... I do like those big over sized cars with the names of American towns from way out west - towns that have become cities. Big oversized American cars popular on the roads between Dubai and Sharjah (where gas is cheaper and the currency goes farther around the world that the US dollar goes at present)... I wish I were getting job offers from the UAE because I'd be out of here in a heart beat. Isn't there anyone in Dubai or the UAE or anywhere in the Arabian penninsula or Muslim world who wants a live writer and commentary from abroad?

Here in Plasticville we have sidewalks - except the sidewalks don't take you anywhere but around in circles. One neighborhood of a bedroom community like this one I am in doesn't connect up to the next one over within sight. Even if it did connect that one there would just take you around in circles. Consequently when I walk the streets here in these circles I feel sinister. Like I am casing the joint looking for open garage doors or open front doors. Nevermind that on hot summer nights I sleep on the floor in the main room with both doors of this modern day plastic shotgun shack wide open.

I seem to be caught up in a place great for teaching kids how to walk or learn how to bicycle ride - but once those kids are up on their feet and wheels they have no place within reason to go for the sidewalks and bicycle paths don't go anywhere. I tried riding a bicycle the other day on the short distance I drive to my brothers house and found that the roads out here don't even have enough shoulder to walk on. It seems the drivers find bicyclists to be akin to international terrorists and thus find it a sport to drive bicyclists off the road.

When my father complained to me that I complain alot about the world I live in - meaning the beloved land he is a veteran of foreign wars for - I said well look at it this way dad - being critical of the world we have made is a patriotic thing to do. I believe this. I am not overtly patriotic but I am critical. I might, however, be covertly patriotic though I am not sure. My being critical stems from my belief that the USA is a Democracy and that change is possible. I believe this land and nation are big enough to benefit from my negative observation on the way things here don't work. Whether this is true or not depends on the purse strings of multi-national corporations and the rather warmongering Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower once warned the Americans of - but no one remembers that farewell speech.

So yeah I do think for the moment Ohio and my Fatherland of the USA are lucky to have me here in residence once again. Ohio having suffered a massive brain drain over the years is run by a bunch of idiots. I hope they fear me because I don't fear them but their ignorance is vexing. The Fatherland, well, the USA is my fatherland and as long as it behaves as the worlds Keystone Cops abroad I shall refer to our beloved country as the Fatherland. I am proud to be an American Dissenter in residence in this strange country after an all too short ten year absence. Not every country in the world has citizens allowed to self publish dissent or experiment with the boundaries of freedom of thought and press or decency. I'm not sure if that has ever been true in the land of Uncle Sam - whoever the hell he is - but I ain't behind bars yet for thinking and writing this stuff. But then nobody is reading this either.

Meanwhile Plasticville the dubious condominium place of detached bungalow villas still quickly age. Keep in mind if you go to Google Earth and look at this place it still is a farm field. So these villa-ettes are all new and yet look at how they age. I'd show you but as an unemployed blogger in the midwest I don't have enough money for a digital camera to upload scenes of my life for you. If I did have such a camera and if I could figure out its tiny wicked workings I'd photograph for you how the plastic vinyl siding is beging to warp and woof. How the bolted down decorator "shutters" that don't shut as they don't even have a hinge and if they did they wouldn't be big enough to fasten to each other anyways - well they are beginging to fade and they can't really be painted because they are solid plastic.

I just wish there was an over priced corner store to walk to but there isn't. If there were it would be set behind an overlit parkinglot for cars and everyone would be suspicious of people arriving on foot. This cantonment of containment I call Plastivillette could be anywhere - Russia, Mongolai, Saudia, Iraq - anywhere American Industries work abroad and want to house their employees and their families in a make believe mini-America walled off from the reality outside.

But this is the US and Ohio at that so why do I feel like I am trapped in a Western styled Cantonment for foreign ex-pat employees and their families? Where do you find excersize in these parts without being suspect for walking or riding a bicycle. Why does it seem like if I am outside riding or walking I should be wearing a suburban uniform to inform onlookers that I am making sport. Why don't Americans excersize in their pyjamias.

Then the clothes here in Plasticvillette - Suburban mall clothing variations for a nation at WAR. Camoflage sweatpants for running. Military shorts for walking with useless pockets for war gadgets I don't have. The clothes all look rather casual and strangely militaristic. It's one thing to support guys who have no options in life but to go the military route but it's another to support the corporations making war on nations who would choose to become just another new state if they were at least politely invited. When I look at the young men here in town from the military I envy their physical training and their mental discipline. Back when I was young enough to go that route I thought about the Navy but felt I was too much of a sissy to pull through basic training. Now it would be alot of fun.

For such a nation and such a land of the free we here in Plasticvillette cannot paint our houses pink if we wanted to. We cannot plant trees or garden - much less plant a "Victory" Garden to get by on. We are not free to walk anywhere or bicycle to any place in particular. We are not free from gripping debt, working poverty much less ignorance despite our college loans. We do not have time free for reading a book much less writing one or even blogging. I'm not so sure America is the land of the Free for all the obsessive talk of it or the compulsive flag waving.

Which reminds me I once read a booklet from the 1950's - more an aged and yellowed brittle pamphlete on the proper way to display a flag. The booklet included the proper way to fold a flag - when to hang it out and more importantly when not to hang it. When I see all the plastic flags dotted around Plasticville or on the back of cars I wonder if anyone of these "Patriotic" types ever learned about the rules and obligations about waving around their precious flag. Well it's getting about time in history to change all those white stars in the blue area of the flag to little six pointed stars - If this change were initiated would anyone in these parts notice much less care or get the irony of it?

Notes from Plasticville: Suburbian Dreams in the Plastification Age

The Experiencing Belgium desk has temporarily re-located itself to Central Ohio for Experiencing Familium under a big sky for who knows how long. It's been ten years abroad in a self imposed exile of sorts and two years since I visited here last. Times change and things here are more than visibly worse.

From Dollville to Bru-town's Villette to Plasticville I am still dedicated to writing down my experience and reporting on various structures of the world a la Samuel R. Delany (read it but only in hardcover!) - it's not a book about baseball players despite what you've been told. Excersize your right of freedom of the press by reading that book if you can. If you don't use your freedom (of the press or others - especially religion - if it's middle eastern) you just might loose them if you haven't already.

Actually I am just posting today to set up my blog and claim some more staked out virtual real estate space on the web while it still is there in all its glorious vastness of ether to make claims on for free. Space ain't the final frontier - cyber space is - but you already knew that didn't you my little electronic pioneers.

Why am I naming this small corner of Blogistan as Plasticville when perhaps Cyberville is more like it? Well Blogistan was already taken though Cyberstan ain't all that bad either. Plasticville relates some how to Villette by Charlotte Bronte about a thinly veiled old time Brussels in the very early days of dubious land refered to as Belgium that was the absolute if not dim beginings of what would be later known as the European Union - Much to France's regret.

Plasticville the actual place is a "community" - or rather a real estate investment exploitation program in Central Ohio who prey upon the naive swallowers of the American Dream - First time home ownership in little boxes of plasticky ticky tack starter homes. As there is no Big Government anymore - just Haliburton and the like as Big Corporate Governance - there is no body of protection for hard working families who just want to own their own home - even if it is in a sell out cantonment of a condo life without any of the benefits of a condo (except here someone mows your lawn) and certainly all of the inconveniences of a condo. Whatever happened to having your own plot of ground and a little cabin of sorts to go on it - even if the cabin was entirely made of plastic? Indeed this chunk of real estate investment appears to made entirely out of plastic, hence the name, Plasticville. If this place is refered to as something Plastic then the times that this place takes place in should be known as The Age Plastification. Indeed living in this over priced plastic shack has me feeling like I have been laminated. Condomized in a condominium full of silly rules. Dogs on a leash or line behind the house (no fencing here!) leads to endless yapping... No vegetable gardening only flowering plants allowed - seems rather unpatriotic if we as a Nation are AT WAR on Iraq and/or Terrorisms. Wasn't Victory Gardening once and American passtime and virtue to take our minds off our young sons and daughters dying abroad for dubious reasons?

Things that make you go hmmm Plastic is a petroleum product and where is our current government more obsessed by - somewhere off where there are large oil spigots within Israels greedy and bloodthirsty reach. From the Experiencing Belgium desk I have written of the Concrete Conspiracy and here my fellow readers we will examine the Plastification Conspiracy. For example why is this cute (from a distance) little house made to look like some piece of the old American styled Tim Burton nightmare of Suburbian Dreams found at the end of tram lines or off the super express freeway? It looks all old American, Cape Cod fishery, replication of a Sears brand home from before the war to cracker box shot-gun shacks of a post World War II variety. Which if you know anything about the history of American Architecture then this house is from the begining a rip-off of the actual McCoy. De-volution in the style Devo the pop band with plastic hair band once sang of - that being we are all caught up in Evolution in Reverse. Not exactly what the Creationists had in mind either.

So here we are in Plasticville - somewhere along the off shoots of Tornado Alley and this lump of Plastic domesticity is set up on a concrete conspiracy slab. Now where exactly is Dorothy supposed to run to in the event of an actual Tornado passing by over head? Now-a-days Auntie Em's is so fat there is only room for her corpulence to seek shelter in the bathtub - alone. Ironically the bathtub is made entirely of... you got it... Plastic. Where were all those blessed building codes and land ordinances to protect the little people of Oz? (Otherwise known as the mythical middle economic classes)... No basement spaces mandatory or enameled steel or cast iron tubs for self preservation in the even of an act of Allah almighty God's judgement in the form of a airy Tornado.

Plasticville housing is brought to you by your local Midwestern chapter of the Military Industrial Complex and is therefore exempt from all local building and zoning laws - especially those costly ones intended by compassionate and ethical governence for your protection from cost cutting corporate greed. My guess is these houses at Plasticville are so cheaply made that the profit margins on these shacks is huge. Then if exacting those profits weren't enough the lenders devised a scheme to steal even more money from the harder working lower economic classes with loan scams that in the end took not just my former neighbors dreams but their actual homes away. Now how all of this is supposed to be good business in the long run I'd like to know. Suddenly politicians are unavailable and the conservatively elected governance is nowhere to defend those people who blindly put their faith in the Republicans. Then again the Democratic opposition is nowhere to be seen either because they are nearly as right minded politically as those who they are supposed to oppose. Unrestrained Capitalism will always eat itself in the end.

Here in Plasticville you can observe just that. In a neighborhood which only a few years ago was picturesque old Ohio farmland you now have boarded up foreclosed homes, For Sale signs on every street. Plastic siding and roofing already showing signs of fatigue. Gardening is down right impossible as the farmland was cleared so precisely so as not to leave one centimeter of plantable topsoil - a fact which is apparant in the newly lain sod which will not really grow or yield even a green color. Nevermind state regulations which do not permit builders to remove the topsoil layer without putting it back. Meanwhile here in Plasticville the topsoil remains in large mounds which look like Ohio burial mounds behind the cantonment unseen by the passing state route out front. More evidence if you needed any that unrestrained Capitalism will always in the end eat itself into non-existance. Perhaps then the Buffalo will return along with the once native Trumpeter Swans of old Ohio.

Stay tuned and check back later for more musings and postings from Plasticville, Ohio, U$A