I have said before that the area where I live is not a tourist attraction, nor anything like one, and that that’s just the way I like it.
Sometimes I think of it as ‘friction.’ You want to find a place where tourists and gentrifiers just slide on past, with no frictional attractions that might catch their attention and make them want to come round and turn the place into Portland. I like that this place is miserable, run-down, poverty-stricken and generally god-forsaken. Most of the time I wish it were more so.
And sometimes I want to just start wringing people’s necks at random.
I made the lengthy trip to town this morning – after an unrelated hour and a half delay – only to find that the whole journey was pointless. I’ve never before been to a place where “the internet is down” is really a phrase*, but this is one of those places. And when it happens, everything comes to a stop. The telephones don’t work. Every single card reader in town stops working. If you don’t have cash, you can’t buy food. Or gasoline. Or anything at all. Why are you here? Yes, apparently this entire town runs on one single data line. And it’s a far from trouble-free data line, too, because this is far from the first time it has happened. It’s just that this time I got caught with no cash.
So I lost most of an entire morning, and I’m glad I got my morning chores out of the way because I came back just in time for the daily terrifying thunder storm.
And now I’m going to sign off and unplug everything electronic. Later, if I live.
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*In America, that is…
“If you don’t have cash, you can’t buy food”
I woke up thinking about that line, and about exactly how fragile our economics system is. And why do we even think those numbered bits of green paper have value? After all, they are based on trusting a not terribly trustworthy government. I have made more than a casual study of economics and I still don’t understand these simple things. Perhaps they are best not thought about?
When you get right down to it, the only true currencies are food and labor.
In a subsistence economy, everything is a commodity.
Welcome to the space age, Joel!
I was a field service guy for point-of-sale terminals/credit card machines so I know a bit about this stuff. ‘Way back when, if your comms were down, you could still run a credit card manually using an old-style imprinter. Some places would even run a debit card manually, but most wouldn’t because there was more paperwork and you might be scamming them.
Something going on. I was just in our little mountain town to get gas and a couple things at the store, and the whole SE side of town was out of power. Safeway and Wal-Mart, among all the others, were closed. Weird, huh?
What you got against Portland? Is it our naked bike rides? Our liberals with guns?
But I see your point. I’ve long said, if I’m looking for a town to live in, I want one where there is an occasional dead car in the street. I hate, hate, hate the “improvers”.