Under the Overpass

I waited at a stop light in a rust-belt town last week, squinting into the hazy sun and staring thoughtlessly at the overpass ahead.

To my unconscious mind, it must have looked like any other riveted steel tunnel in America; I didn't notice the details.

Looking through the bug-spattered windshield, a freight train began passing overhead - which was interesting enough for a picture, which I deftly took and e-mailed to myself.

Only after I saw the digital version of the setting could I see it with a different perspective.

We've been conditioned to associate "urban" with grungy and cool; active and exciting.  Bars, restaurants, night life.  Starbucks and night classes. Transportation.  Ethnicity, diversity.

Urbanites ignore panhandlers and street cons.  They don't see the traffic or pollution or construction; all are necessary evils.  The sounds of ambulances and police cruisers are just a frenetic background, although mostly unheard, to the excitement of city life.

The urbanophile will preach the benefits of living in the foreground - of fostered individuality within a shared and diverse society.  There, in the foreground, you can become John Travolta swinging paint cans and hips on a city street to the music of Stayin' Alive.  You can become self-actualized by teaching in city schools, walking a police beat, or by working at a methadone clinic (one was right across the street from my hotel this week).

But behind that veneer of trendiness and ideology, there is a decay.  A decay of sagging and naked wires strung low between tilted poles. Of vestigial, forgotten construction projects marked by fading orange cones and potholes.

And there are parades of billboards that showcase vast moral and social erosion.  Stopping racial crime, hiring an accident lawyer, fixing a credit score, or testing baby DNA to get the daddy to pay up.

And other signs.  For sale signs.  Empty storefronts. Abandoned homes, lines for shelters.

We need better places to live better lives.  Places where people can see not just the promise of the future, but the goodness of today.

We have too many weeds, too much rust, and sadly, too much resignation and acceptance.  The half-dead infrastructure is as despairing as the new generation of the homeless and the masses of the unemployed .

Will the next stimulus, with it's new wave of shovel-ready projects, begin the renewal?

Can the urban psyche even be repaired?  Or, will the next immigration movement come not from Mexico or Europe, but from the eroding towns in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois to places of hope in Texas and Florida?

Or, there's another option - and it requires no money and no commitment: stand under a decaying overpass in a cloud of diesel fumes and lead paint.

And act like it's glamorous to be today's urban yuppy.

Teen-Blaine and the Escape of the Sane

Teenagers.  Seriously God, what were you thinking?

Maybe the explanation is that it's a divine but careless chemical experiment.  Someone stacked too many beakers of combustible hormone cocktails - in a meth lab - and right over a fault line - and the next emotional tremor is going to shake the room and tip all those chemicals into a giant mixing vat.

When that happens, the synapses snap into an ADD-like frenzy of neuronic activity.   While mine are erratically sparking like your grandpa's old lawn mower, theirs are red-bulling and overflowing in Niagra-like torrents of ones and zeros.  Mine are pausing on whether to choose regular or decaf.

Feeding hormones into the teen brain is like buying every twelve-year-old a new yellow Camaro, throwing them the keys, and saying, "I bet you can't get that thing over 90."  I mean, whoever set this thing up could have just used a little restraint.

“They are a plague upon humanity,” I lament, exhaling and complaining to my wife, who is more skilled with 10-somethings than I am.

Yeah, I know, it's only temporary.  I can see the horizon, and, although distant, it looks like a teen-free Camelot.  Until then, I can only watch for the Monty Python weight to fall from the sky - and seek escape into my underground bunker.

An escapist's world of cowboys and Jack Reachers. Of UFO's and ghost podcasts. 

I can escape.  But I can't win.

Because my teens have used their Dr. Evil minds to develop an amazing skill; a David Blaine-like sleight of hand.  The ability to make responsibilities disappear like doves into top hats.  To put your account number on their overdrawn bank statement.  

The trick is to make a typical teen problem, let's say - hmmm - an I-phone dropped into the pool, a speeding ticket, a suspicious substance, a bad grade, an emotional outburst, a general (and common) lapse in common sense, a bad attitude, etc. – not really their problem.  

During the discussion, the object of discussion begins to blur.  Mesmerized, the simple adult's eyes are drawn to a fancy silk handkerchief waved by the teen.  As the distraction is regarded, the real problem disappears.  From the silk, out pops a rabbit.   A cuddly little rabbit which further diverts the attention of the audience. 

Now, somehow (although no-doubt facilitated by hormones and energy drinks) the focus is switched to the parent - who until then had merely been the observer of the problem.  The magician now has a rube volunteer take the stage in his place - to be sawed in half or to climb into a box through which sharps swords will be driven.

The teen and the adult's positions are now reversed, and the observer's own actions are placed on the scales of justice.

This illusion is all the work of the magical teen-Blaine, who abruptly vanishes in a column of fog and is transported from stage to audience.  

Now, justice is measured by the audience – has there been fairness, impartial temperament, rationality, and adequate sympathy?  Is the observer even capable of meeting the high standards expected by the audience?  What about the observer's gestures?  Eye movements?  Vocal tone?  Were there hidden meanings behind the observer's choice of words?  And so on. 

The audience seems to agree, and settles upon the just vindication of the teen.

But now there is a growing rumble off stage.  The audience feels that somehow, the observer has caused this problem in the first place.

I have?

Wow. 

Time to escape to my ghost stories and crop circles.  Or maybe that 3-hour podcast on the Kennedy assassination.

Just like me to walk away from my troubles.