edges

Over the past few years, my family has migrated to the edge cities of Dallas. While happy to be with family, I am often reminded of how sterile the place appears, as it is in many of these kinds of places all over. This is a world of freeways and well planned cross routes, of asymmetrical roofed tract homes, and a rich variety of franchise and chain stores. Of malls larger than one can imagine. In such a place, indigenous, native architecture or food or experience is discounted for the numbing sameness of whatever is considered new and up-to-date now (and unthreateningly bland).

These kinds of places are laid out, are experienced as if their very existence was enough to deny the physical place, in this case gently rolling prairie grasslands, with live oak trees, and little else to crowd out the sky. But who has time for such a modest landscape? That is not important.

So a fake world, an immodest world of unimaginative sameness is built, cultivated, tended. We are reduced to being shoppers, where all the passion of life is nothing greater than that.

Or so it always feels to me on drives to and from the airport.