Today’s Theme Music

I’m visiting ‘home’.

The area was home to me for three years, culminating in my high school graduation and subsequent military enlistment. That was childhood’s end. But this is where my wife’s mother resides, so here we are.

Its patchwork roads connect patchwork towns. Old schools have been re-purposed as hopeful enterprises but they already look enervated. As I drive around, noting changes and the lack of change, I’m reminded of cancer. So much of the area strikes me as blighted. Fast food businesses and gas stations dominate with their neon, plastic and bright colors, as the businesses of the last century lay barren beside them, empty and crumbling. It’s sad art, expressing the truth of the area, and America in general.

Remembering ex-classmates, I peer at each face about my age and wonder if I know them. I doubt few of them planned to live a patchwork life, and mock myself for thinking, that because I moved away, I’m living more than a patchwork life.

Out of that cesspool of reflection comes some Green Day. From 2004, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.