Location: Dallas, Texas
Weather: Hot
Reading: Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Watching: Arrested Development (retro television pleasure)
I used to live in Dallas, Texas. I was one so I don't remember anything but I believe that my first word was McDonalds. Enough said.
Twenty-five years after we lived in Dallas, my Mum and I returned. Sitting on the stoop of 1714 Treehouse Lane, Plano, a slew of thoughts ran through my head. A smattering of my stream of consciousness...
Reading: Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Watching: Arrested Development (retro television pleasure)
I used to live in Dallas, Texas. I was one so I don't remember anything but I believe that my first word was McDonalds. Enough said.
Twenty-five years after we lived in Dallas, my Mum and I returned. Sitting on the stoop of 1714 Treehouse Lane, Plano, a slew of thoughts ran through my head. A smattering of my stream of consciousness...
...Community pools are nice. Unless the kids in the community pee in them a lot and there is not enough chlorine...
...Everything in Dallas is a chain. The gourmet sandwich shop is a chain. It feels like an oxymoron to have a gourmet chain. Even the houses are a chain. I saw a housing development of hundreds of identical Tudor mansions. I would hate to try and walk home drunk. There is also a Home Depot on every corner. Why do they need so many Home Depots when their houses look exactly the same- surely they could just borrow from their neighbours?
...I enjoy people who like to air their beliefs. Texans enjoy this. One house had an Uncle Sam on a bike with moving wheels on its lawn. Its owner sat on a chair, drinking a beer (at 10am) proudly guarding his wares. Another had a path of star spangled banners leading up to a sign at the top saying "He is risen"...
...Everything in Dallas is a chain. The gourmet sandwich shop is a chain. It feels like an oxymoron to have a gourmet chain. Even the houses are a chain. I saw a housing development of hundreds of identical Tudor mansions. I would hate to try and walk home drunk. There is also a Home Depot on every corner. Why do they need so many Home Depots when their houses look exactly the same- surely they could just borrow from their neighbours?
...I enjoy people who like to air their beliefs. Texans enjoy this. One house had an Uncle Sam on a bike with moving wheels on its lawn. Its owner sat on a chair, drinking a beer (at 10am) proudly guarding his wares. Another had a path of star spangled banners leading up to a sign at the top saying "He is risen"...
...Refer to final sentence above. Interesting use of the English language. Americans don't speak English, they speak American. A man on the plane did not enjoy this observation.
Supersize me
Everything in Dallas is huge. Houses are beyond mansion proportions. Cars are trucks. A humble salad could feed a small third world country. It would be difficult to absorb such a super-sized city without concern for the immense energy that must be required to sustain such an obese society.
Our delightful South African come Texan host commented that Dallas only exists because of oil and air-conditioning. The city was built because of the discovery of oil but could only flourish because air-conditioning meant that people could work in the stultifying heat. With these beginnings global warming is an inevitable outcome of Dallas.
Supersize me
Everything in Dallas is huge. Houses are beyond mansion proportions. Cars are trucks. A humble salad could feed a small third world country. It would be difficult to absorb such a super-sized city without concern for the immense energy that must be required to sustain such an obese society.
Our delightful South African come Texan host commented that Dallas only exists because of oil and air-conditioning. The city was built because of the discovery of oil but could only flourish because air-conditioning meant that people could work in the stultifying heat. With these beginnings global warming is an inevitable outcome of Dallas.
It is not however the oil and air-conditioning that perpetuate global warming, it is the attitude that huge is acceptable, that there is nothing wrong with driving a car that eats a tank of petrol a day, or that the shopping centre needs a fully maintained ice-rink in the summer.
An attitudinal change could easily alter Dallas’s environmental influences. The Dallas summer penetrates an intense heat that could be effectively harnessed as solar energy. Furthermore, Dallas has a noticeable emphasis on community- groups of homes share recreation facilities and churches and temples litter the landscape. Utilising the community lifestyle would be an easy way of lowering carbon emissions.
Mum said that Dallas was a ‘nice’ place to live. Values are entrenched, convenience is religious and life is comfortable. It struck me that one could live in Dallas without any awareness of the world around them. The very concept of global warming would only disrupt this ignorant utopia.
An attitudinal change could easily alter Dallas’s environmental influences. The Dallas summer penetrates an intense heat that could be effectively harnessed as solar energy. Furthermore, Dallas has a noticeable emphasis on community- groups of homes share recreation facilities and churches and temples litter the landscape. Utilising the community lifestyle would be an easy way of lowering carbon emissions.
Mum said that Dallas was a ‘nice’ place to live. Values are entrenched, convenience is religious and life is comfortable. It struck me that one could live in Dallas without any awareness of the world around them. The very concept of global warming would only disrupt this ignorant utopia.
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