M is for Mississippi, McDonalds, Margaret...

Don’t much like the suburbs. No terroir thar…

First crossed the Mississippi River up near Aitkin where it was little more than a swollen creek meandering out of Lake Itasca. By Monticello – ugly place, not a place at all, just a box store sprawl by I-94 – the river had widened considerably. They keep the Mississippi River behind a fence so as not to distract shoppers from Monticello’s WalMart Supercenter and its Target Superstore and its multiple pairs of Golden Arches – no! really, they do.

These satellite commuter communities are curiously disperse – miles and miles of the ugliest box houses you’ve ever seen, and a few support businesses scattered here and there that generally include a couple of bars, a couple of gas stations, a couple of auto parts stores, a single supermarket where the lettuce was fresh some time last week. Maybe one heating and plumbing contracter operating out of a cement cell; a General Rental Center. We’re still sixty miles or so out from the Twin Cities, so these people are willing to drive. For eight months of the year through snow and ice!

And there’s still fifteen miles or so of county roads before you hit the Big Neon clustered along the Interstate – the WalMarts, the Targets, the Home Depots, the DQ’s, the McDonalds, the Radio Shacks. The ad nauseams.

Do I sound like a Luddite?

I feel like a Luddite. It’s enough to make me wish the Amish were an evangelical sect.

If there were ever town centers in places like Becker or Big Lake or Monticello, they’ve all been torn down – which attests to recent prosperity, I suppose. When an economy is prosperous, it tends to want to raize its old structures, build new ones in their place, monuments to better times.

This is why the most picturesque places are also the most depressed places. At least until they discover tourism.

I wonder what happens to all those roadside Golden Arches a hundred years from now? Will they be still be standing? Will they be repurposed like so many of the old bank buildings in the towns I’ve passed through? Will people see beauty in them? (Not post-modern, ironic appeal but actual soul-stirring beauty?)

Beauty is, after all, a totally relative concept; it’s not absolute. I see beauty in 19th century Belle Epoche architecture but that’s purely as a function of having read Victorian novels obsessively throughout most of my life: it’s not as though their lines are any purer from an architectural point of view.

I’m just so curious about what comes next. The narrative of history, doncha know. Not my own life.

I’m still kinda debating what to do about LJ. When I deleted it yesterday, it didn’t feel right. But it doesn’t feel right maintaining it either. I’ll go on writing in any case – it is the blight that man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for, etcetera – but what do I possibly hope to gain out of making it public? Dunno.