There’s a part in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s Phil Connors is talking with two Punxatawney derelicts in a bar, who knows how long into his confinement in the town, where one of the derelicts says Phil strikes him as a “glass half empty” kind of person.
Phil, lost in the neverending small-town hell, replies: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
The other derelict, soppy in his beer, responds “That pretty much sums it up for me.”
Phil, of course, escapes his exile in small-town hell as he gives up the self-pity and self-loathing and loses himself in service to what he discovers are the delightful characters of this small hamlet in western Pennsylvania that make the town pleasant, appealing, and definitely worth living in.
At the end of his film, having won the heart of his long-long-ed-for Rita, he says, “Let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.”
I’ve just finished reading Shaun Prescott’s “The Town,” set mostly in a dusty kinda central Australian town gradually being lost, footpaths, fibro houses, and listless, useless inhabitants and all, to a mysterious shimmer never really explained.
At first I saw Phil and the two derelicts in the town, in the story, and thought, “Well, maybe there’s redemption somewhere along the way.” I had my doubts – Prescott’s story was compared to Kafta, famous for no redemption whatsoever.
And I went with that feeling – but not with allusions to Kafka, but more with allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously wrote “Hell is other people.”
The concluding idea to Prescott’s story is similar, but perhaps even more gloomy: Apocalypse, it seems, is other people.
Because Prescott’s town suffers a nameless, formless apocalypse wrapped in the metaphor of holes appearing and causing blocks of the town and its inhabitants to disappear, but the story is really an apocalyptic tale without the apocalypse, as the people his characters encounter are a far worse fate than any mysterious shimmer could ever be.
There’s a lot about belonging to this tale, and at the end, well, nobody really finds it. There’s no surcease from the hell of the small town in the city.
Early on in the novel, we get this:
“People might be wiser to cower in towns. Maybe they wouldn’t be so devastated when the sea water rose. Maybe when everything became desperate, a small town would finally live up to the qualities that everyone believed them to have: Namely, that everyone would help one another out. Maybe the town would have tea parties during the apocalypse, while people in the city tore each other to shreds.”
Of course, people in the town tore each other to shreds, whether through a grudge, a fistfight, or general disdain. When the apocalyptic shimmer arrived and claimed victims, no one seemed too bothered, as it wasn’t them being lost forever.
The protagonist and Ciara, another small-town denizen, flee to the city, and quickly discover this:
“[Ciara] told me that everyone in the city speaks about the city in the same way that people in the town spoke about the town. They say the city is not what it used to be. If she asks what it used to be, they simply reply that it used to be more like a city.”
The apocalypse of people find them in the city, though the shimmer is long left behind. And it not needed, as the apocalypse is there all along.
So this isn't good.
Or maybe it's not all *that* bad, but it might be.
Ignore the airbag light. That's a sensor we should replace, but they're hard to find. More worrying are the check engine and VTM-4 lights. Who knows how much that's going to cost to get fixed.
We'll find out. We've got 264,000 miles on this thing so it has fought the good fight, but if we could squeeze another 50,000 or 75,000 miles out of it' I'd be happy. But it's all going to depend on what's wrong with the thing. It's been very reliable up to this point, so I hate to see it go.
It does have a few other problems: Leaking power steering, and maybe a tie rod that's causing some unusual wear on the front passenger tire. We did get it to our mechanic today, so at least that part is over.
Don't want to break the bank. But Isaac says he wants to use this car when he gets back from his mission in 2028. We'll have to see if that happens.
And for this Honda Pilot, 2005, I do mean reliable. Aside from tires and regular maintenance, we've replaced the starter. Everything else has just been hanging on.
Here we are in the West, where hyrdropower abounds -- the city next door generates more than half of the electricity it needs through hydropower -- yet Rocky Mountain Power generates on. 4.8% of its electricity from hydro. That coal number is a bit unnerving.
Interesting that 10.7% of the energy it uses is unspecified. The legend on the other side of the chart says that the unspecified electric generation comes from renewable resources that the company itself doesn't own. I wonder if that's where customers like us, who have solar on the roof, fit in?
I'd be curious as well to see a breakdown on the sources of the market purchased electricity.
They are toying with nuclear at a spot near Brigham City, Utah, but that's only in the talking stages. While next door in Idaho Falls, they're a little bit beyond talk as they've got a memorandum of understanding for a number of small modular reactors to be built near the city's gas-fired peaking plant.
So this morning I rebuilt it, raised it a foot, and it's a lot better now.
I might add a third rail at the bottom, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do that yet.
Daisy tested it out and, like the first iteration, is completely indifferent to it.
From Butt-Head's "I'm not sure but I think this sucks" department:
A year ago, we had a pine tree in this spot, but we had it cut down because it was huge and dropping sap everywhere and covering a third of the neighbors' driveway (let this be a lesson to not only recycle more frequently but also to plant new trees further from the property line).
Many years before I placed an attractive array of river rock neath the tree, spreading out in fanciful swirly patterns.
Nature, favoring entropy, used the pine tree to cover said swirls with inch upon inch of pine tree debris, which I am now sorting through to rediscover the rocks so they can be cleaned and reclaim their former glory around the stump of she who covered them o'er.
I've done two hours of this today and only reclaimed two buckets of rocks
This is going to take forever.
Since I have to redo everything anyway, I'm thinking of changing things. But it's going to take a lot of work. Once I've got the rocks cleared out, I have to finish chopping up the rest of the logs and removing some roots that were interfering with the original project more than a decade ago.
I'm reading "The Town," by Australian author Shaun Prescott.
It's got echoes of Kafka, but in the small-town setting where nothing really happens and nothing that anyone there does matters, I'm getting more of a Groundhog Day vibe. But without the humor.
Not to say I'm giving up on it. I'll keep going. But it really is falling hard for the "small town people are either tragic losers or losers in that they don't realize how much of a bunch of losers they are" trope, and it's not all that entertaining.
Maybe it'll get better.
News item:
The US House of representatives has passed a bill to make Daylight Saving time permanent in the United States.
Nevermind that their decision, if approved by the Senate, will make for sunrise times as late as 9:05 am in the depth of winter locally. They believe, bless their hearts, that they're doing the right thing.
From a guy who already suffers from seasonal depression, let me say thank you. I don't know what we'd do without them in charge.
