East Flagstaff Daydream

You hear them gunning up outside your wall, the early morning engine warming F-150 crowd, gushing the carbon footprint into your nostrils, and you feel your tragic gift for technological intolerance to warm up, right along with the invisible drone of their new, hah, "Ecoboost" engines. But you, like Sherman Alexie, the Native American writer, take the following tact to the vision: Just close your eyes and maybe it will all go away. And so then, there you are, in the post-apocalyptic dream of the real America, and the clouds break, the sunlight hits your windows. You are now alive, if wide awake, in the continental dream, and you've got to get outside the whitewalls fast or you will go mad.

You are in Walmart world, Wally World, the Disney land of the walking dead. Your head is running fast from the echoes of the crazed Craig Ferguson is echoing in your head, a mad Scottish King roaring with laughter and insanity, but the body is still is moving slow. In the dream within the dream. You are the subplot, sure. Much smaller than you can possibly comprehend, but a hero on your own time. Time to get out and shop, drink eat or feed. And if there's one damn thing you are going to do it's this: You are going to spend local. You will not feed the Box Box. Big Pharma. Big Anything. You want to find some island of Mom-and-pop-ville to drop your daily dime. This is victory. Defiance. Success for the ninety nine percent now, and you want it now.

In Flagstaff, Arizona, you have a number of choices in this category. Cheap regions of town unmarked by the daily beasts of the corporate Big Box, meganational this, the this and thats of the invisible borders of the nation now trampled by the unloving capitalist greed dogs slurping up every borderline, which were always just theories backed by gunpowder, the gun, carved up by the colonializing powers of a bygone age, anyway. But today our lottery pick is the number seven. Which means Route 7 of the Mountain Line. You are the professional pedestrian, or the radical bicycle time racer, too. You will not accomodate the zombie technocrats of smog covering the Earth in any way shape or form.

But you are still, a consumer. Not a citizen so much. Not in this country. That is not what "they" call us. Not citizen this, comrade that. There's nothing to vote for today. You just get up, and to avoid going WTF all day, you must choose. And that's Route 7, lucky boys and girls! You get to ride on what's now regarded as the best small town bus line in the nation, as chosen by a panel of experts; whatever that means ... Continue ...