My Hometown #1

Now main streets whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there aint nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they aint coming back to
Your hometown……

My Hometown
Bruce Springsteen
From: Born in the USA (Released: 1984)

My Hometown #1: Giant Rabbit (©2012 Richard X. Moore)

This is a personal project for 2012.

I returned to Saginaw last summer after a very long absence. I was moved by the experience and wrote a lot about it in a series of four posts that I consider my best work over the last 12 months. It was dark and fatalistic and I was criticized for it (rightly so, I think). My city is deeply wounded but it isn’t dead.

Still, given my personality, most of the time I’ll see the glass as not only half-empty but cracked and leaking what little liquid it is able to contain. I mean, when your psychic card reader packs up and leaves town, that’s an omen and not a really good one.

So I will be moving about this place where I grew up and recording what I see. I’m sure it’s not going to all be gloom and doom, wailing and gnashing of teeth. There is beauty amid the ruins. But realistically speaking, this is a place on it’s back and bleeding. We can talk about who and what might be responsible but these things seem somehow remote to me, well beyond my control. Sitting around bitching about it isn’t going to help anyway.

My Hometown #3: Fence and Derelict Building (©2012 Richard X. Moore)

Life is a lot like shopping in a outlet mall filled with choices, some good, some destructive, some stupid, some pleasure, some pain. Sometimes these choices are all of these at the same moment. Sometimes you go home without choosing anything at all. Sometimes the choices choose you.

My Hometown #4: I'll Need Another Beer (©2012 Richard X. Moore)

I will spend the year reflecting on what I see around me. I’ve thought a lot about this over the last couple of months. I can make no predictions or promises. This is something, it seems, that’s choosing me.

In the immortal words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

res ipsa loquitur
Let the good times roll!