Fresh Kills _ Landfill - Day 22

Landfill - Day 22

It was the largest municipal landfill in the world on Staten Island.  They had recently closed it, was were going to ship all of New York City’s trash to empty coal mines in Pennsylvania or dump it out in the ocean past the legal limits? I don’t remember which now or care. I’m dead.

It is not that the other four boroughs picked on the “forgotten borough” SI.

It’s that it’s being on the Jersey side of the bay made it a quiet place full of sleepy factory villages and farms up until they built “the bridge” over from Brooklyn in 1964 built by Trump’s father.

There were towns in the late nineteenth century.  Parts of the north shore were bedroom communities of the thriving downtown Manhattan Wall Street area.  And it was usually cooler here on this side of the bay every summer before air-conditioning.

But somehow this “garden of the world”, this paradise as described in some British’s officer diary during the Revolution had always been hills and swamps and not much in between.  Don’t buy a house with a basement here unless the ground is elevated.  Otherwise the swamp comes back and seeps into that basement.

Where better a place to start a dump in the thirties or forties than here in rural, disconnected from New York City, Staten Island.  Disconnected from “the city” except for the ferry boat always crowded with tourists, with the best, cheapest, view of the Statue of Liberty in the bay.

Most tourists come over the boat and go straight back on the ferry. Not much to see except for some very steep hills in St. George.  Of course SI is three times the size of Manhattan and almost the exact square mileage of Singapore.

Too bad I had to die.  I wanted to see the secession from New York City movement happen and build a great new mighty American city, Singapore like republic, here in the garden of the world and stick our middle fingers up, back over the bay at all the Manhattan snobs who get all the tax money spent on their turf in this so-called city of five equal boroughs.  And every time it rains in Staten Island, the whole island seems to flood.  Whatever.

The Fresh Kills landfill is back open temporarily and they are sifting through the rubble with bulldozers.  Bigger pieces of the stainless steel skin of the dead WTC are easy to find.  Scrap metal to be sold overseas, remelted, recycled into forks, knives and spoons no doubt to be made in China.  Boy, is that bubble going to bust and blow up in their Wall Street faces one day.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Wall Street back together again.

Here, there was a bubble here when I died. I could not afford a house.  We, I said we, good.  We went out to Arizona a decade ago to be near mom in an adult care center.  Well, we went to visit but somehow in that boom and bust thin redneck economy, I could only find suitable employment a hundred and twenty miles south in Tucson.  When we could get the time or really the gas money together to visit her three or four times a year. 

My older sibling was her guardian and lived nearby her.  There was friction of course between the siblings thing over mom’s care and taking time out to go to county guardian meetings, doctors’ appointments etc.  In the end, she died and we got tired of the thin economy there and moved back east. 

One of my jobs in Arizona in that boom and bust thing was the mortgage business.  Well, to put a long story short, they did not learn one thing about the Savings and Loan Fiasco.  When I went from a legitimate mortgage company to one run by insurance salesmen types, I saw that putting phony documents into a government guaranteed mortgage was the norm in that company.  I had to quit and move on to preserve what I thought was a clear conscience.

Coming back to New York City and on Staten Island in particular, with what I knew about how the basic mortgage business I learned out west, I could see a real estate bubble ready to burst and at any moment.

This makes me think. This is winter.  This is 2002.  The bubble must have burst by now. And with it being a war zone? War zone? Housing prices must have crashed by now and especially on the front lines of a war zone in NYC. I knew something but had not given it consideration yet.  I did not have to yet face certain facts about my death.  I had many, many more days to face the truth. War zone?

What is truth?

It is point on which the whole yin and the yang of all things sit upon.  If you want balance the good must swing into the bad.  The pleasureful must swing into the painful in order to maintain the balance of all things, the universe.

In a way, God in some way must be a fluid energy but a balanced energy, if all things must go forward, on some imagined universal time line, time having really nothing to do with that formula.

Truth is the doorway to all energy, things, lives; delusions must cross over into really in order to keep the mechanism, the machine, of the universe going.  White becomes black. Black becomes white. The two sides of all things reveal the truth, when all things are in balance.

The creative hand claps.  The other, the me, we, nature must clap back and in correct coordination in order for the tick tock, tick tock of everything to chime out in harmony.

Truth about my death, my life, I am refining, approaching in some manner to the doorway across the path I have designed and built to go onward.

Truth is that when the price of a workers house, a working class house, go up twenty five grand every six months, something is not in balance.  Doesn’t the Fed know that this is inflation?  Why aren’t they reporting this inflation?

Well if you can get all your relatives to co-sign a mortgage you can afford overvalued property.  When you as an unskilled laborer, as primary mortgage holder can skim off tens of thousands of unearned equity every couple of months and buy SUVs and dually pickup trucks, who is to worry?

Except maybe you and all your relatives are illegals and the mortgage company does not even check the legitimacy of a Social Security number of the primary mortgage holder, the bubble has got to get bigger and bigger.

It is going to pop, sooner or later. Sooner than later.

The nastiness of some seagull picking at my earthly remains, at the Fresh Kills landfill only at first bothered me.  Then a realized that only some, very little, really nothing of me was part of the bronze scrap metal.  In fact, a remark of a searcher who picked up the object remarked how much bronze was selling by the pound for scrap. 

No doubt I had hitched a ride over here to Fresh Kills.  The greater part of me is spread out all over the place.

I find it ironic that the Dutch word for river, rivers is Kill, Kills.  I find it irony that they have nature and bird preserves here amidst the trash and what is left of the basic SI of swampland and estuaries, that it all sounds like it is about death.

And of course I was not killed yesterday.  I am no longer a fresh kill.

But this, for what is left of me; Fresh Kills is my final resting place.

Oh dear.