Image by A.Larrimore
Remember this: Never build more structures than you need or will use.
Every so often I will walk to the local park. There sometimes I will find a covered picnic area occupied by several older black men that come to sit and shoot the breeze. Okay, they gossip. About drunks, dysfunctional families, accidents, and any other thing that runs down a grapevine. Yes, Angelia gets an education on everyone's business: even my dad's.
Who is out at the club? Who is cheating in the woods? It's a buffet of useless information unless I plan to blackmail someone.
One little old black man that has got to be 80 yrs old rides his Schwinn in middle of the day heat with a chicken sandwich from the local eatery. He doesn't have teeth but must have been in the war. He yells what he is saying so you have to listen close. The other is a 56 yr old man who has a car like a teenager and diamonds in both his ears. The last is an old married man that drives a truck carrying the mail. He looks like a Afro-American Colonel Sanders moved up from Cajun country with a serious southern accent. Nicest people you could ever meet. Someone still needs to come get their Unc.
Truth be told. I don't remember their names. Shame on me. I can remember a lot but not short term sometimes.
The mail driver was sitting out in the heat, so I decided to stop by and say hi while drinking a coke. We got to talking about waste or maybe I should call it development.
By development, I mean any area that was once wildlife habitat that someone bought then slapped a concrete building on it and mowed down all the green followed by a parking lot. I include subdivions, abandoned golf courses, and any other thing just 'sitting there on the landscape' racking up back taxes. You'll know it. It is screaming eyesore.
There is an old elementary school right there. My son told me they closed it because of black mold. I told the Mail driver that the building had been there when my dad went to high school. Now they wanted $165,000 for it. He told me by the time they brought it up to code the monetary figure would be well up there. I told him you could drive anywhere and there is land with abandoned buildings on it; unused that could be converted back to untouched land. If the building is going to be unuseable it's better to tear it down. Let the forest take over or at least keep a good clean field. Either way, you'll be stuck with a moneypit or have to start over. Money in is money in. It's not coming back to you. That is not counting on whether you have to turn enough profit to make up for the loss you put into it just opening it. Businesses love it when they finally see it on paper that they have made a profit.
Abandoned buildings everywhere. Just taking up space and someone is paying the taxes on them.
It's like I've always heard. A house unused falls to rack and ruin.
We discussed the landfill and how New Jersey doesn't want to be responsible for their trash so they haul it down here and put it in our ground. No wonder the river is full of contaminated fish?
Development can be great but when you look at the long term of it, it's not. Businesses fail and then they do nothing with the property the building sits on. It's like dead space.
People are taking up more space everyday but people don't want to stop breeding. That means more area is put up for development while areas that have been developed just sit there like ghost towns. It doesn't make sense.
I see it online all the time. The government wants to make public areas available to sale to private owners so they can develop. No, we don't need another empty building in a year or two. Not to mention whatever waste or pollutant was left behind.
I wonder why something is not done with post-developed areas so other places that are untouched stay that way. It's like a hunter that can't be still in one area of forest while he hunts. He has got to move and move and move until he's screwed himself looking for a better spot.
I decided I needed to go home. I told the mail driver we as humans should be ashamed. There are insects that only have lifespans of 14 days. They travel a distance, lay eggs, the babies hatch and go the next distance. When they finally get to another country the generation that lives turns around then every generations after that makes it back to the original spot. Neverending biological ping pong. Some insects only have hours or a day to get everything they need to do finished. Here, we as humans, have been outdone by a mere fly.
Maybe people are just meatbags walking around like the empty buildings that no one occupies.
Written By: Angelia Y. Larrimore