Concrete the foe.
I stopped after a minute of my walk home. Went into the
bookstore because I couldn’t, just couldn’t, bear it any longer. The heat was
like creepy guy rubbing my arm.
I blame the concrete. Walking on concrete in 105 degree
weather is like pouring gasoline over a fire to put it out. Concrete makes the
heat no longer heat. Instead it makes a web of slime, a wall of bad breath,
something your body must walk through not in.
And the heat, the texture, the weight, its not air, its something else.
Like walking into a blow dryer, or drinking a glass of water somebody used as
an ash tray. You just know its not okay, its not normal. Good things are not
happening as you inhale and walk through this substance.
You don’t really notice concrete until it’s this hot. It’s
like not noticing car pollution until you’re standing in a city stuck in a
valley and the sky is black and smoky. Then you start to hate concrete like you
hate cars. I mustered my courage and walked out of the bookstore onto the
sidewalk. I looked at the concrete as I walked, wondering how, scientifically,
it was adding to the equation of wrongness.
And then I thought why do we have this concrete. And my gaze fell upon
the cars parallel parked on the street. We have the concrete for the cars. And
we have the cars for the people. So we have the concrete for the people. No.
The concrete is not for people.
Then I start to conjure up solutions, urban plans, materials
that are more natural, to comprise sidewalks, like the stuff they put in
playgrounds and around tree roots, flexible, soft, and more able to ingest and
cool the heat, like the path in a forest, made of old trees and grass and mud.
Mud. Mud is cool. Mud.
And the sun. You could make a videogame out of us
pedestrians, trying to dodge the sun like it was a space ship with a missile.
The sun becomes a strange radioactive burning laser that makes concrete meaner.
And suddenly the lack of trees all around is apparent, like we are in the last
phase of hunger games with nowhere to hide.
Posts
