There are certain sectors of the city, makeshift urban funk holes, that seem to be constructed from stale air, shattered glass, filthy plastic rags, the grimy detritus of the day echoing with the mindless, inchoate shouting of human litter: the hoarse latitudes, as it were: zones of hopelessness that no matter how rebuilt, redeveloped, gentrified or whitewashed will always attract the destitute and itinerant, those vacant, migrant minds incarcerated inside self-crippled, unwashed bodies, tottering and lurching forward haphazardly in their own timeless space, led like the drunken sailors in Shakespeare’s Tempest by some mentholated spirit of the air, by some invisible hobo Ariel, to the same concrete arena of dejection, gloom and depression to which they and their kind have always been drawn. There is such a place in Boston’s Government Center district, always windswept, it is a paved pit of ordure whose rectangular boundaries are four weather-beaten, crumbling concrete benches and emaciated sprigs of dying greenery amongst which only the eternally incapacitated sit, all day and everyday, staring at the products of neglect. Meanwhile, not twenty feet away, heavily deodorized clerks in polyester pants are processing new social security numbers for the next generation.
(When I write about "social affairs", I write about social affairs - not about the theater like some other websites I could mention)
great bit of writing there
Posted by: Rando Calrissian | February 17, 2005 at 23:53