more stuff I'm looking forward to

A couple of photos on the web site of my own cyber-Welcome Wagon, Jeff Lindsay, have got me thinking.

This one of a downtown alley at dusk.

And this one of a nondescript building out of town somewhere (easier to view as #22 of his Appleton Mystery Photos #2 contest).

These are very particular American landscapes, which you can see in almost every town in the country, but you don't see pictures of them in any of the real estate brochures or on the tourist web sites. But these are where I will live. They capture a particular era - when is it? 1940's? 1950's? They have a solidity to them. Somehow I can think of any structure I've seen in all of Australia that has the kind of solidity that that white industrial building has in that photo above. They are weathered. They do their job, with a kind of seriousness and resignation, but they also have a straightforwardness and a pride, and a humility.

This is making me think of other American landscapes I might inhabit. Divey bars, mediocre hotels, shabby but dependable diners. Pool halls. Proper, American pool halls with neon beer signs. I could learn to play pool, properly this time. I could get some weathered, serious but humble, honest gentleman to teach me the fine points, adn then I could hustle games in the next pool hall over to supplement my corproate marketing income. I could hang out in a proper, American, solid brick, divey pool hall.

How can you not be excited, when you imagine a thing like that?