John Wise

The illusion of newness is an artifice and betrayal of the reality that everything is in slow decay. Only from the perspective of an undeveloped, inexperienced mind does it seem like the world and our place in it are blooming as though they arose from out of nothing. The cruel truth is you are not new, nor are your perceptions, as everything is part of a continuum that has no regard for our sense of wonder of finding things we paint as revelatory and claim as new truths.

What you hold in your mind is an extension of the meanings and ontologies distilled from those who came before you and imparted this knowledge upon you. In turn, you use those tools in your attempt to reach their level of awareness, and if society is lucky, you will leverage what you’ve learned to share with someone else who can extend those ephemeral bits of information in such a way that it might lend a lesson forward.

I cannot write this from nothing or from purely my own experience, as I do not know how to see the world from only my perspective. Take the rail line across the street; steeped in my image of trains and their routes are fragments of history that include Chinese labor, steam locomotives, gunfights in the Old West and robberies, heavy freight being hauled over vast landscapes, industrial accidents with chemical spills, head-on collisions, bullet trains in Japan, a maglev in Shanghai, super civilized 1st class travel on German Intercity Express trains, subways, rail-crossings, rusty disused tracks, defunct bridges, and a multitude of sounds. Before I could ever write about the train, I have all of those sights and sounds in my mind’s eye, influencing to some degree or other my language and imagination regarding what I could say. And so it is about anything else I might want to share.

Your opinions are not really your own, they arise out of the amalgamation of fragments you are built upon, and depending on where you are in life, you are either still building your tower of knowledge or you are in the throes of slow decay. This eye of the needle I’m trying to thread might be clearer if explain the previous sentence. When we are young and devoid of all knowledge aside from our instincts, we spoon up the intellectual gruel that’s bombarding our senses. At that time, we do not yet have a foundation and so we are hungry to consume more of the cultural fodder that those around us seem to revel in. Soon, we start to recognize certain icons and symbols and can share with those around us a sense of certainty that we are on track to understanding their world and the one we’ll inherit.

At a point, though, we’ll likely stop pulling in much of what we see as the immediacy of what surrounds us has been habituated and only acts to affirm what we know. This goes for television and by-and-large video games, too. We are no longer building upon our foundation; we are simply applying paint, trying to maintain the illusion that things are fresh. The reality is that the roof is at risk of collapse, the pipes are rusting, and the appliances are drawing too much current from the archaic wiring. Our home is in decay; we are in decay. Left to its own devices, weather and time will reclaim the structure until that time someone comes along and builds anew on top of what can no longer be seen.

We are the same as architecture in that most of it goes away. Pyramids, caves, cathedrals, and great monuments, even when worn after thousands of years, can still offer a glimpse of the magnificent when the collected ideas of a culture are able to convey some sense of place well into the future. There are also some humans who have endured the sands of time as their ideas speak to us from long ago. They are able to find this small amount of immortality because instead of being satisfied with the shadows in the cave as being their reality, they ventured out and brought in a new language of communication by discovering the hitherto unknown.

In that sense, they remain a small child well into the advanced cognitive years of adulthood, where they add their story to our panoply of knowledge that filters into our ears hundreds and even thousands of years after their existence. This act of continued learning like the child instead of going forward with certainty about what we think we know could be compared to the idea that we have enough for the basics of relating to our peers, but knowing only 26 letters of a 100-character alphabet is hardly adequate for spelling words and forming sentences with the other 74 letters you have no idea about.

This is where the majority of humanity lives with their adequate-for-them amount of rudimentary knowledge. So begins the slow decay of the house made of straw.

Every day, often in failure, I try to see, hear, sense, read, stumble into, discover, or taste that which I don’t know. There was that time early in life I didn’t know the sweet, sun-ripened flavor of the strawberry picked fresh from a field but once I had, I knew I was in love. Reading a book of non-fiction, it’s inevitable that I’ll taste the experience-ripened flavor of thoughts drawn from the field of knowledge and will again fall in love. This phenomenon also strikes me as I’m exploring the terrain of a landscape that speaks to my eyes and ears with a seductive geometry of patterns emerging out of its story about nature; here, I fall in love again. Should you counter this argument with the notion that one book is like the next or trees are trees, then this is but one small example of your mind in slow decay.

I meandered up the road this afternoon on a short drive that took a long time. Along the way, I passed many a hovel, and I’m reminded that, at one time, our ancestors lived in caves. My contemporaries also live in caves with foil-darkened windows that allow the occupants to hide where the only light that reaches them is from a few light bulbs, a TV, and a phone screen that are illuminated by a trickle of electricity that has been dragged out here from some far away generation station for a convenience and the illusion of modernity.

The description of their home as a hovel, while a tad condescending, feels like the most accurate way to convey the chaos in front of a nearly dilapidated shell of a mobile home propped up by cinder blocks, the roof held down by tires and windows where the glass is mostly gone, boarded up with plywood from within. Middens offer defensive structures to potential intruders and are more indicative of a time pre-civilization when trash wasn’t hauled away.

At work out here are those of our clan on the margins, who see no need to belong to our conformist culture, at least in regard to the environment they live in. Ironically, while they eschew living like the Joneses, they are dialed into the stream of satellite-beamed pap that is their constant companion, ensuring they are on the same wavelength as the next neighbors of the cave zone.

I can’t say that these people are part of any decay as I don’t know that they were ever willing participants in the cultural hegemony I was bludgeoned into being a union member of. But to a degree, they must be closer to me at this stage of evolution as they are choosing some of the same tools and conveniences I also use instead of going full native by throwing off the yoke of any collective homogenization.

What I do know is that they are not a part of the ascent of humanity other than what they might be doing to support the local infrastructure that allows my arrogant self to pass through, casting aspersions on people I don’t really know. If I were a less biased snob, maybe I could appreciate their presence, but instead, I see the squalor and cringe at the blight. Maybe my compassion is suffering from this slow decay I’m writing about today.

Nor should you conflate that my sense of love springs from a Christian ethos; it comes from the recognition of how much richer and magnificent my life is when I’m with the person I love and how a smile from her can remove the overcast sky that would otherwise cast a pallor over me and another potentially amazing moment exploring our world together.

Sadly, I have to leave the comfort of my relationship in order to find the tension that allows me the space to try to discover why I am so content. Comfort breeds a kind of laziness where it’s easy to take for granted this most precious thing called love that, in moments together, arrives in absolute abundance.

So here I am, over 200 miles from home, with four hours between us and a commitment to stay where I am for five days. I feel that I have no choice if I’m to find what I’m looking for out here, and so I commit to exploring what is not immediately in front of me. As for what exactly I’m looking for, I still don’t know.

It’s a sad and tragic logic that by fostering environments of failure and isolation, they should become key ingredients to forming the character of a person in order to develop hate and self-loathing just so that they may do our bidding in war, dangerous jobs, and the ugliest of tasks that people with opportunity, bright futures, and the chance for love could not bring themselves to do.

Positive environments and the appearance of love are not guarantees of a person’s security and self-confidence. I’m well aware of plenty of examples of that to be true but I can’t believe that growing up in torment is a key to happiness.

In my attempt to commit this to paper or to the screen I feel that I can already sense the desire to shame me for this simplistic look at such an allegedly easy path to happiness. We need not emasculate ourselves or our culture as when there are two healthy sides of our nature instead of one dominating angry nature that will only be satisfied with destruction and self-destruction, we can start to repair our slide into mental illness.

There is an underlying masochistic need to my writing: to reacquaint myself with my own uncertainty, because I fear that what I commit to from out of my head will not be worthwhile, yet also opening me to the ridicule of failure. I persevere because further down the road, when I return to these musings, I not only sense where I’ve grown and progressed in trying to craft something meaningful to me, but I appreciate my own honesty in trying to share potential insights that highlight a time in my life so that others, who have not gotten here yet might read them, allowing me to serve as a shortcut to their own awareness.

And then there’s music. While nature’s tune is another bridge to the senses of those in love with its beauty, it is the melody created by people that becomes the path to moments in life where, hopefully, more than a few notes linger on the heartstrings of those affected by the passions. Today, on a drive to nowhere in particular, I brought up some music familiar to Caroline and me and found it clawing at my sense of missing her. Colors, shapes, weather, nor plants trigger my senses quite like a smile or a song. How music’s poetry can drive our emotions to well up, and pathos to spill out is part of the magic in which this amorphous thing called love has meanings that transcend gruff exteriors and callused feelings. Maybe what’s missing in my writing is the melody and poetry of the song as I beat my drum with the force of a hammer.

The day goes by without anything worth noting, but by the time the night is nearing its end, there’s a void from not having sat down earlier to jot down some thoughts. I pull up the blog editor, which I often use to write, though sometimes I’ll start with a word processor for musings I don’t believe will be ready to hit publish by the end of the day or maybe even by the end of the month. A strange phenomenon about older writings is how they become tired and worthless to me if they linger too long in digital storage while the things I publish amuse me well into the future.

So here I am, uncertain what to share, half mindless, and trying hard not to be distracted by one or more of the dozens of tabs I have open. It’s evening, and I have a reluctance to start on something that might drag me in and hold on to me staying up late. This need to be considerate of waking at 4:50 to get my metabolism working before the heat of the day kicks in is a nod to aging as I’m trading late evenings burning the midnight oil in studied focus for an uncertain promise of gaining a bit of longevity or at least some quality of life as I move into my later years. Should anyone say that 57 years old is too young to think about this heavy subject matter is either living in denial or hasn’t turned 45 yet. The devil on my shoulder, who honestly feels like the smarter entity, says, “Get yer life on with gusto and take advantage of midnight merriment as one never knows when the curtain closes,” while reason, which only feels lazy as it makes a logical appeal to my stupidity, is trying to convince me that I’d find myself tired and unfocused anyway so I may as well get a good night’s rest.

But the restless nerve impulses that drive my fingers to find a kind of comfort as they intuitively search keys that I occasionally stop on to draw small circles to affirm their smoothness give me a sense of peacefulness. My mind (or maybe it’s actually my fingertips) is delivering instructions to my hands, waiting to convey whatever it is that will materialize here on my screen. As I search and stumble, finally capturing a bit of momentum and a modicum of discipline to ignore those pesky tabs, like a bell going off ringside for boxers engaged in their art, my phone in the distance bleats its summons for me to satisfy a curiosity about who texted me. I know full well I’ll waste my time answering the empty message that will likely end up being an annoyance only working to distract me, but I must give in as though compelled by a Pavlovian tone that demands I overcome my will. I can use the excuse that I’ll hit “save” as the PTSD of using computers 20 years ago conditioned me to be leery of these digital systems, although they rarely, if ever, crash anymore. While my PC needs a few seconds to do its work, I will lie to myself that I can jump up and be back before the task of storing these bits is done. Off I go.

Small talk with a friend is mostly always good as during these times of continuing self-isolation, it’s either me needing to talk to someone or it’s the other way around, so I try to be available. Expecting the seasonal text message about the election, it was instead a friend wanting to chat about something or other. Upon my return to letting my fingers glide over well-worn surfaces in another attempt at getting them to stab at keys while a twitching thumb gives space to form words, I am here with nothing much at all, so maybe it’s best to say good night.

The city we live in is a type of economic prison fenced by roads that act as walls to both a sense of prosperity and mobility. In Germany, autobahns often have the same width as this very common main street that cuts across our neighborhood in Phoenix. At the distance of a mile between each artery, these 25-yard/23-meter wide streets dissect the entirety of our city. It is a smart and relatively easy layout with 17 east-west corridors running from the 101 freeway in the north to the 17 freeway in the south. The city is cut in half by Central Ave, running north and south paralleled by numbered Avenues on the west side of Central and similarly numbered Streets on the east. The grid pattern of avenues and streets forms squares that are roughly one mile or approximately eight blocks long. For example, driving west on Thunderbird Road from its corner with 43rd Avenue (west of Central), you will travel west eight blocks before hitting the next north-south thoroughfare of 51st Avenue. All east-west roads north of Washington in downtown Phoenix are designated as being north, while south-of-Washington addresses are on southern numbering. To continue with the logic of the grid, addresses on the north side of streets are numbered evenly while the southern side is odd; similarly, the west side of a street is even, and the east side is odd.

Seems perfectly convenient, doesn’t it? Well, it is if you are in a car. Before COVID-19, we were always in a car. When we’d see someone waiting at a bus stop, we’d pity the poor soul who had to endure the extreme weather and the homeless who use the stops and the bus as shelter. Gridlock would make the bus appear lumbering and inefficient as they seemed mostly empty. For those riding bicycles, we were aghast at the distances in a city that is approximately 20 miles (32km) by 32 miles (51km) the bicyclist might need to traverse. We only knew how inhospitable our city was to alternative travel from the air-conditioned comfort of our car.

Okay, for the sake of honesty, walking around our city from October through the end of April would probably be fine because of the nice weather and little rain; of course, we don’t see any snow here in our corner of the desert. But after months of driving, we are so conditioned by being in the car for convenience and speed that it has become impossible to consider traveling any other way.

After nearly six months of walking every day without fail, I’ve come to believe that we could get around on foot, e-bikes, and scooters if it wasn’t for the fact that our antiquated grid system here in Phoenix is effectively a prison. We are locked into 1-mile squares where escape is treacherous. Sounds dramatic? Let me explain. For a good while, we walked west of home to a smaller secondary street and headed north to an even smaller tertiary street that connected to a main artery that would bring us back home. This mile loop served us during the cooler months as we could walk it multiple times a day with the benefit of never having to cross the superhighway that widens to three lanes in each direction in front of where we live.

As the days were heating up with the approach of summer, we felt that we needed to change how we accumulated our miles as we’d figured it would be too hot to walk around the block at midday. So, we started waking up at 4:50 to get a 3-mile walk finished before the heat became too oppressive. Walking our 1-mile loop three times in a row would get boring, so we committed to crossing the major intersection nearby. This is a dangerous proposition as drivers turning corners are not accustomed to people in crosswalks as nobody walks in Phoenix, especially at 5:15 in the morning. We had to be sure to make eye contact with people wanting to turn left as they were the most dangerous as they raced to beat a car coming right at them and their impatience to wait another 10 seconds. For those wanting to turn right, we could tell that they were measuring where we were in the crosswalk and calculating if they could whip around the corner before we got too close to reaching our objective, and that’s if they even saw us. This crosswalk was and remains our gauntlet.

Once we are across the street, we now have a mile to the next major street, half a mile to a secondary thoroughfare, a mile back to the really big ugly street, and then a half-mile home, so in about an hour by 6:15 we have our first 6,500 steps and feel like we did a little something to help our metabolism.

Being out on these streets, even though we are, for the most part, now safe from crossing the danger zones until we have to cross the street to get home, things are not always very pleasant. Motorcycles, muscle cars, and diesel trucks are the first order of discomfort. When a nearly unmuffled Harley opens its throttle wide as it races down the street, enjoying that burst of speeding up from 20 mph to 80 mph as quickly as possible before having to slow down, they can emit a roar that to the person riding the bike must feel like the exhilaration of power. To those on the street, it’s a scream that can literally hurt the ears. I know, man-up snowflake, but consider this and reference what I said in the first paragraph: we are effectively walking on the shoulder of an autobahn or freeway. Sure, we have sidewalks as some perfunctory obligatory nod to pedestrian civility but walking on poop and trash-strewn slivers of concrete next to cinder-block walls is anything but nice.

Then I consider the people brave (stupid) enough to pedal their unprotected asses right next to drivers behaving as if they were on a stretch of race track that was going to award them eternal bliss if they could just make the next light while still slowing down just enough so that if a police officer happened to be waiting at the intersection, they’ll be spared a ticket before they mash down on the accelerator again and race for the next major intersection a mile further. Those bicyclists, if they are lucky, might have 3-4 feet of a lane carved out for them, but the cars that are less than that away are traveling next to them often at speeds from 55-65 mph or 90 km/h to 105 km/h.

These broad streets, where uncontrolled speeding is the norm, and unregulated intersections encourage serious risk-taking, can be considered playgrounds for those in vehicles but make for a hostile environment for those who are waking up to an enjoyable pace of getting around by alternative means. Where I thought it impossible to endure the distances or the extreme heat, I’ve learned something different, and I’m not alone as we’ve seen a big increase in foot traffic in our neighborhood, and I’m hearing from others that they see similar trends in their own areas. I could see Caroline and I enjoying e-bikes here in the city, and maybe we’d only be really comfortable with them ten months a year, but imagine the fuel and pollution savings. The problem is that we wouldn’t do this without dedicated and isolated bike lanes that remove us from being so intimate with race cars.

But who am I fooling? This won’t happen in my lifetime, and that’s tragic as I might only have about 20 years left, and I’d like those to be the best they could be. This brings me to my original premise that this grid layout is a prison. It’s difficult at best to get from place to place, it’s downright discouraging and feels 100% safer being in a car. Moving somewhere bike-friendly is not really an option as those places are often economically depressed in some way with poor weather and expensive housing; I’m referring to Portland. And while Seattle is booming economically, it’s incredibly expensive, only has 152 sunny days per year, and is reported to be one of the worst places for people experiencing depression.

Europe is an option, and while we are working on our strategy to get there, it’ll take time while we here in America drag our feet with issues too overwhelming and impossible to find consensus for improving the quality of life and so we’ll just skip the dialog and hope the population quickly returns to having their heads in the sand, or worse.