I pause by three tattered tents wedged between a black steel fence and a pillar below the interstate, a nameless village in The Town. The pavement ends beyond the fence giving way to dirt, more livable than concrete because you can plant things in it like stakes and flowers, burry things in it like shits and nutshells. In contrast to the bare earth, the pavement is intended for efficient passage from the parked car to the office, then from the office for a quick bite or a coffee, or to the store at the end of a long day. It lubricates the path of commerce, a social contract of efficient passage through acceptance of the status quo. But, if you try to make the pavement your home, its cold hardness makes for a hostile reception. It responds to your plea for life with a rebuff for you to carry on and be about your business, like everyone else. Who do you think you are? On the other side of the fence lies a disembodied piece of a car parked in the driveway of an American home, a fender, whose job it is to protect, abandoned on a sidewalk. How did it get there? Fender, fence, village on the fringe of one reality, where it does not exist, and so its existence is tenuous, though undeniable in itself, begging the question is no man, woman, or child an island? Few will heed this place without a placard or address. Few will think of its people, although they have faces. One day it will be dismantled on the whim of an officer of some kind of so-called Justice. Who then in passing will so much as fancy its image as a memory conjured by the dust haze of dusk?
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Beneath the interstate 880 in Oakland, CA. On Sunday March 5, 2017.
poesastre 