As The World Turns, Everything Becomes a Blur

By Greg Evans

I sit and watch them churning up the land, laying down and stacking the trees, slicing up the hills to be flat like a parking lot.

I sip my black steaming coffee and watch the workers lighting cigarettes, and sipping cheap black coffee. They chuckle and make dirty jokes, their breath noticeable in the chilly mountain morning air.

I see the swells arrive, the developers in charge, with their salt and pepper hair slick as wet pavement, blue jeans medium-starched and pressed. It is a grocery store they are building today, a Publix, as if this small town needs any more grocery stores.

The farmland in the corner of this intersection at Boones Creek Highway and Christian Church Road was once lush with weeds and shrubs, blackberry bushes and honeysuckle, old trees and tall yellow grass, thick red clay and ancient wind that blew through these unguarded and unmolested fields and forest under wide open skies. That’s all gone now. Like much of this place.

The swells have taken over. Non-productive land and rolling hills and silent forests aren’t precious and cherished and nurtured. Not here. Not in these times. Not anymore since the swells arrived.

It doesn’t matter where this specific place is because it is everywhere. I heard the preacher on the radio this morning, 93.7 FM, calling to the Lord for help. Stop this progress drowning humanity, our morals(societal rules about what’s considered right and wrong)  and values (our personal beliefs and principles), and “the iniquity of thy traffic”. Amen! With the remodeling of God’s country to resemble that of the devil, comes with it the crime, traffic, soaring cost of living, and the extinguishing of all that is sacred.

Take from that what you will. Most of you will just scoff and eat another pot gummy. Just be glad the soft-hands don’t have access to that silver moon or it would be sliced up like a fat mango and sold off by the acre.

The swells eat up the land up and shave it down like an aggravating wart from dawn til dusk and people cheer the horror that follows the progress. The darkness with their bulldozers and cranes - crows always eat little birds.

The horrible roar of commercial lawn mowers drowns out my sanity. I long for sausage links and buttery scrambled eggs. Thick slices of bacon and toast and the endless acres of the silent woods of upstate New York. The smell of rustic cabins and freshly lit fire in the fireplace. In a world of progress, nostalgia is more soothing than any liquor.

Can you hear the hyenas laughing, out there just past the new condominiums, where blacktop starts. Here in this concrete jungle in the mountains, the gurgling sounds of a dying utopia. The cacophony of progress, of construction, of maintenance of human constructed environs, of the end of times, and of unadulterated avarice. No prayers on Sunday morning are going to rescue this place. It is doomed. And as the world turns, everything becomes a blur.