I wish I had a car so I could get the hell out of the city whenever I felt the need. Or was good enough friends with someone who had a car to have them cart me around at my every whim. Maybe if I had a friend that good around here it might diminish the amount of time I wish I could escape, too.
"We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
"The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
"It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First in the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just some kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV."
Or, on second thought, maybe I ought to be wishing for a motorcycle, instead.
"We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
"The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
"It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First in the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just some kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV."
Or, on second thought, maybe I ought to be wishing for a motorcycle, instead.
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
una:
thanks
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daniofthedead:
i remember you! 
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