Remnants del ‘hood, El Paso – March 14, 2010
There ain’t much left.
Mostly the pickins’.
This was the Grand Highway, the Spanish Trail, the beginning of the end of the long journey from East to West or vice-versa, the tip of the arrow into the dart board that was Downtown El Paso.
Interstate came and went around, population moved to new turf, businesses followed, but the old Highway 80 lingered, going from Consumer to Warehouse and beyond. A modern day Babitt, Ohio.
The barrio came and replaced it all, I came to the barrio, time came and went and came and went, Paint peeled. Signs for companies that used to make things stayed while those corporations started selling ghost products, financial paper, tech dreams, an accounting company in search of a product, a purveyor of the so-called communications bubble: the plan was that the Information Highways of the world would replace the old highways of our world (of America’s world, anyway). Imagine GE, before it was a political player ass-deep in presidential campaigns, before its main product that touched average people was heavy duty machines, not pieces-of-crap $9.99 wireless home phones sold at Wal and K Mart, before it was just a joke by mean comedians delivering their writer’s lines about management on late night talk shows (talking about nothing), waiting for their dayss to end because the kids don’t and won’t be sitting and watching a bunch of phonies on TV.!
What-the-hell-ever.
This old stretch of Alameda and Texas Street that cuts through my ‘hood is a good place for a Sunday morning early Spring, Daylight Savings Day, walk.
I peck away at the artifact scraps of recent antiquity.
Screw the past (and the future)!
This is a ghost road in a ghost city in an empire that used to be.
Suits me fine.
