Insert Green Day Reference Here
Where we live, and that's a general we referring to all of the people who live in the place where we live, we have a distinctly strange relationship to Americana. Or, maybe the strangeness of our relationship to Americana is that we have one. We think we understand what it means, because we've lived steeped in it our whole lives. Just the mention of the word, or its affects brings up images of wide, rolling countryside dotted with tiny, dust-heavy farmhouses. Not tiny for size but for distance. Scopes of miles flatly visible from a single place in a way that you could never recreate artificially. We've seen so many photographs and images of wide, rolling countryside dotted with tiny, dust-heavy farmhouses that they all become the same place in our minds even though we might not mean for it. But do you ever wonder who takes those pictures? I mean, I know I never thought to. Honestly, who sets out time in their day to photograph nothing but land. And if somewhere in all those wide acres the density and arrangement of tiny, dust-heavy farmhouses should shift, grow or shrink on occasion, then who would be there to count it? There must be someone. After all, who takes all those pictures?
And isn't it strange how we've mythologized all this empty space? We all have our own ways of understanding the world. Mathematicians and scientists understand it in terms of maths and science. Religious men understand the world in terms of morality, good and evil, but most of us aren't mathematicians or scientists, and most of us don't see flatland in terms of religious struggles. We are all storytellers, and in one way or another we each understand the world in terms of stories. But there is no story to miles and miles of wide, rolling countryside dotted with tiny, dust-heqvy farmhouses. There is no symmetry or intention. Or, perhaps there is a perfect abundance of stories. Perfect symmetry, perfect intention but we do not see any of it. Because stories are history, after all, and who cares to count the history of all those wide acres? And so we supplant our own stories, to make sense of it all. To imagine that anything which exists only exists to the extent that we exist in conversation with it. And there is an irony, I think, in making a thing real by artificially recreating your understanding of it. But that's the power we have, isn't it?
I'm reminded of a road I walked down once. It wasn't a particularly traffic-worn road but it wasn't hidden either. It was the back road of a block downtown of a tiny town on a tiny island, where only the trucks carrying mail would usually come down. It was where they parked every night. It wasn't the first time I had walked down that road that day. It was the second, in fact. The first was on my way to clock in to work, early in the morning. The second time I was on my way to the same place, for different reasons, late at night. I had been out later before, but it didn't seem like it. There were no stars, no moon, though it wasn't overcast. The lights on this street rarely seemed to work, but they did that night. A big sign with a digital screen advertised enthusiastically that the temperature was seven degrees. It didn't feel like seven degrees, I thought. It rarely felt as cold as I thought it should. And in the perfect still of that night what I remember most was how wide it all seemed.
Without the usual social markers that come with interacting passingly with other people in a way that necessitates everyone involved see the ground as a set of rules, instructions for how to get from the place you are to the place you want to be without getting in anyone else's way, a perfectly utilitarian function of lines on rocks, without any of that I was able to see that street the way you see those photographs. I took myself away from the idea that causality would take me anywhere, and I walked with no regard for stories.
But I wondered if, in all that wide, rolling countryside dotted with tiny, dust-heavy farmhouses, there wasn't also a set of rules painted in the ground which I couldn't understand. I had spent my life moving from road to road just like this one. Dozens of them, and in a way they all became the same place in my mind even though I didn't mean for it. And I wondered, what kind of stories does that ground tell? What stories does the world tell itself when humans aren't around to listen?
