Vance Creek Monuments

Vance Creek 2009, originally uploaded by lmpicard.

Vance Creek Road race is in a rather odd location. Its located in Elma, WA, which is southwest of Olympia (our state's capital). It's the site of where US tax payers fed $96 million into a concrete landscape for some nuclear power plants. The project ran out of cash at the same time public sentiment waned... so now its the site of weeds, decomposing concrete parking lots, towering concrete forms AND an annual bike race. Its rather eerie, and it remains here standing as it would cost way too much to demo.

I think about the presence of these monuments on the landscape. It symbolizes the erroneous notion of progress - thinking such things can make our lives easier - when really they make our lives enormously complex and in many cases damaging. I thought about the cell phone. How it becomes so convenient for us to do 20 things now at once (including the ability to tweet when I'm at a stop light). How we can be late and and just text ahead. How we can blame our missed appointment on it not being in our calendar. Sometimes I think if I just stayed home, tilled my yard, canned my foods, grew my daily, weekly and year sustenance... life would be so simple. AND giving up blogging would probably get me to bed a hell of a lot earlier.

Good night.