Friendly Cement

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with a supremely interesting young man, young by what an old person’s standards would provide, over a casual cigarette and homemade cider. We sat there, with a tape recorder alternating between old blues and contemporary alternative. My buttocks was firmly planted in a soft cushion of half-dead grass, still fighting the urge to pop out before summer. My feet played with a pail, suburban cement tinged with coffee stains and still echoing the acoustics of the day. I was on the outskirts of a coffee shop habitat, a bank habitat, a residential habitat and, first and foremost, a parking habitat.

We were discussing something grand, some aloof scheme of rhetoric concerning the nature of life, when I couldn’t help but look at the cement and realize the triviality of it. Not the Naturalist triviality of it nor the Pollan triviality of it but the ideological triviality of the space. It occurred to me that it was altogether pompous to not consider this parking lot nature. To ever believe that my peers could conceive of something unnatural in a world which is only natural is the most troublesome of ideas. It occurred to me that the only reason we consider a parking spot unnatural is because of our own selfish need to be able to create something unworldly. We are essentially formulating something inorganic, that never had life nor could lose life, and immortal. Through the perceived constancy of this space we ourselves took some idea of immortality from it.

If this view sounds illogical and coy it’s because it is entirely illogical and coy. Logic has been made readily to serve just as cement or modern architecture or ceiling fans have. Why would man ever dream up, for logic is truly such a dream, a frame of thought that would belittle his utterly unfathomable importance to the Universe? We are rude to our other mammalian counter parts to think them not capable of the same dramatic feats of “manipulation” that we have achieved had we not evolved to be the lesser evil instead of the greater (evil existing for a moment under the dim witted pretense that this essay seeks to debase). Perhaps all of mankind is not centered around the need for survival but instead the need for power. Power is a much more give-take proposition that life or death and would allow for the desegregation of man from nature. Environmental racism is probably the most untreated atrocity on the planet. Heaven forbid the ceiling would ever shatter and nature given it’s rightly place; we would all be ought of a job.

I said some of this, to my well-traveled friend, and he nodded his head and for a moment raised his cider. Such a worthy statement had I made, so drenched with the smell of burnt cocoa beans and hand-rolled cigarettes, as to merit the highest of coffee shops honors; agreement.