My Superpower

My dear reader, it is with the utmost honour I bring to you, this most auspicious post announcement - This is my 150th Substack post! Yes, my Substack fangs have lengthened to that degree, it’s true. And it has been a great pleasure for me to have been accommodated so welcomingly each week. And I have tried very hard not to leave a trail of destruction, but everyone has been so friendly as if it was just a little baby puke. A bit of bicarb perhaps.

For such a special occasion, and I have been waiting for just the right time to tell you, I have this superpower. And it’s one I hope to share with you so that you too may come to see what I can see so terribly clearly. For it is the superpower to read the landscape - kind of like a book. And doesn’t it have a tale to tell sometimes. It’s positively itching for an audience. Ready to sing like a canary dear reader.

So out the door and down the street we go. Let’s find ourselves a landscape to talk to shall we? We pass by all the homes where the front yard is revealing a little too much about its residents. Oversharing. Boring.

And now we come to a special place on the street. Most streets have them. But today I have noticed something new. This vacant lot has a ‘For Sale’ sign. A fresh one. I suspect it won’t be fresh for long.

This is long vacant land. Surely it will be snapped right up. But then what? What will happen to the thorny bushes, the tangled vines? Where are the crows to take their spoils? Where else will the unsavoury, antisocial and unmentionable acts of the street take place? They need homes too. And everyone thought there was some kind of agreement. A way to keep the rest of the street in some semblance of order.

Or so I’ve heard. Believe me dear reader, it’s not the kind of place I’d hang out. Let me get that straight. Behaviour that’s too mutinous to be called witchcraft. But when they’ve been cleared out of under the bridges and flushed out of the drain pipes, where else can a self respecting troll go? Where indeed? People go to these places to express their resentfulness. They’re resentful that the world never set aside a place for them. What happens when those spaces are taken away? The resentfulness goes away no?

They’ve even removed that bombed out old car shell, left abandoned down the back under the trees. They’re serious this time.

But while I would never linger in a place like this, and I can’t see its charm, I do see something. Or maybe I smell it more.

These spaces are like windows. Like standing on the outside looking in. We bring home all these shiny new things and stack them on top of one another. Accumulate them. Then over time things change. The bright new and shiny comes in and the tarnished decaying things we shuffle out. And here, between the homes, the vacant spaces, it seeps out from under the covers. All the discards of a wasteful society must collect somewhere. And that’s where the crows congregate. And the smell of the seepage attracts the unsavoury, the antisocial, and the desperate.

I was going to graze my donkey on it. It won’t be happy being bailed up on my small balcony for very long.

It’s like common land. There have been some really common people gather there from time to time. They share common speech. From such frequent use of the F word they’ve worn a place where the upper front teeth meets the lower lip. And it is by this specific trait you can tell a true commoner. Unless the top teeth have worn away completely - then I don’t know how you tell.

But what if I become tarnished? What if I scrub and scrub and it won’t wash off this time? With 150 Substack posts down, hopefully at this rate I will live forever and won’t have to worry about it.

It’s not as if this kind of waste will just drain off. If there are no outlets then the refuse just backs up. And it backs up into our living spaces. But it’s not as if we must give up the new shiny and useful things… and they all rolled over and one fell out… so therefore we waste. What kind of world doesn’t have new things anyway?

Oh they go on don’t they? Landscapes say the darnedest things. Maybe you don’t want this superpower after all. Sometimes I wish I could shush it.

I really must thank you for reading every week. Week in and week flaming out. Tuning in to what ever bee in my bonnet I have this week. I appreciate it.