Posted 9:43 PM by Gene

Today I had to tend to a personal task (more of which later, perhaps) that took me to Bala Cynwyd, and nearby City Ave., the strange diagonal mark on the map that is one of our northwestern borders. You notice right away most of the offices and two upscale department stores are on the suburban side, and we are stuck with nonprofits. It was once a serene neighborhood, but the Schuylkill Expressway and the idiot Babbitt desire to lay waste to every last forest and farm have made it one continuous loud traffic jam. Upscale apartments dot the area but I'm not sure I'd want to live there; it combines all the disadvantages of a city with all the disadvantages of the burbs -- think crime and cul-de-sacs. You can see America may have undergone too much construction lately at the Target, which replaced a skyscraper hotel torn down for God knows what reason, one with the peculiar name and logo no one could figure out except to suppose them obscene. Nearby at the intersection with Monument Road are an old glass box and a turret that house two of our city's former mints -- broadcasters. Passing by The Pillbox That Ambassador Walt Built (now owned by a company nominally and mysteriously named for another Walt) you notice that TV stations can become eyesores in ways even beyond the ethereal toilet-flushings; a microwave tower (I believe) juts nastily from its center, as if ready to shoot down enemy media moguls, and out back sprouts an horrendous eyesore of four huge satellite dishes. Looking at those dishes today I became instantly convinced they're dead technology. TV is moving back to its prehistory, to a high-tech successor to the coaxial cable that will render cable obsolete too; we will soon not need such centralized garbage dispersion units as everyone will have his own home electronic waste dump. With that spectacular collision in orbit one must wonder when space junk will render satellites unusable anyway. For better or for worse (I say the latter) the media increasingly belong to the rabble, and if the negative is we cannot blast our way through the accreting sludge of tens of millions of morons even with dynamite the positive is it will dissipate some billionaires and their toys, as it has already.

On the intersecting Belmont Ave. and behind the bus stop that connected me home (across the street from a building that housed a bank that no more exists; it was part of the pile of bad assets Wells Fargo had to buy at federal gunpoint but still bears its initials: GSB) there's a huge reservoir, part of our city's water works, and a couple of ducks were swimming or cleaning themselves peacefully, oblivious to the mad nonsensical rush around them. They, at least, had a good idea.