Moving Slowly Among The Industries

I've been moving around with some intention these days, silently, slowly.

I picked up the habit back when I was nosing around the industrial sections of various towns and cities. Maybe it's from some superstition that the video cameras won't see me if I use a lot of stealth. Certainly the guards, who are more interested in where their next doughnut is coming from, and who are used to people showing up with a lot of authority, tend to miss someone who's silent as a cat.

But in those days -- which aren't necessarily over, but they're over for now -- I had something to lose, being an outsider looking in, and being an antagonist to the whole industrial enterprise. They could've nailed me to the wall at any second. As it was, I was beset upon by a number of first responders from their response squads, including a number of underlings and even fewer supervisors out near my pussy willow trees. You might remember, they were firing fireballs over my house...

These days -- thanks in part to Paul Krugman, but probably more now to the passing of time -- they're leaving me alone. But I still walk slowly and with deliberation. (Oh yeah, when I was sneaking out with my bike and computer in Grandma's clothing, a couple months ago, I needed to walk like a still vapor.) But these days, I don't have to move around like that, yet I still do more or less.

Instead, these days, with more and more residential industrial facilities in the neighborhood, I'm an honored guest, with some real privileges of movement. They look at me as a kind of oracle, since I was right there putting forth the teachings of residential industrialism from the first. I stumbled on to it, meaning it originally as only a logical retort to industry as society had been practicing it, i.e., scattered industry and a narrower opportunity for people to take part in it.

The logical exercise, however, gave way to literalism -- as doctrines tend to do, with the average man barely able to exalt himself above fundamentalism, given his lack of time and inclination for study and a more serious consideration of mysteries of every stripe. So with literalism, we quickly went from the logical question, "If everyone can't have his own industry, why should anyone have one?" to a literal response of, "I want my own industry and I want it now."

So, like I said, I've been moving slowly, deliberately, with there being no hurry.

I'm able to wander at will through my neighborhood, the neighbors scattered the various directions from my home: South, West, and East. In my wanderings, I admire the many different industries that are very new, including tire factories, electrical generating plants, etc.

There's a brand new disposable diaper factory just up the street, south of the Butlers' house, in what used to be an empty lot. They're working with the folks over by the school who've been manufacturing plastic and some other folks just beyond them who are making the soft absorbency stuff. It's all being trucked in those few blocks, where Joe Butler and his kids are assembling it all into finished diapers. Mrs. Butler, having a newborn, surely enjoys getting them at cost!

In my slow moving forays through the neighborhood, I'm amazed at the majesty of the newest smokestacks.