I guess these things happen to me because some sadistic part of my psyche is not content to let the dreams stay in my head. It has to put them on paper. But in this case, on a page for a local construction company's website. These things happen all the time in the most innocuous ways. This time I was looking for an address for sweetie to file unemployment. He'd only worked for the company for a month. His regular job laid him off weeks ago. So there was nothing sinister in attempting to help. I got online to look for the address and ba-da-ba-boom ba-da-bing... there it is.
In glorious technicolor, which unless something changes between the artist rendering and reality is not the exact colors in the dream, this amazing building stepped out of my head and onto a webpage just so it could wave at me. It is in the location that I dreamed. It will be used as I dreamed. And will be the leading vision of the changes that will happen for our downtown.
The developer has a great eye. I cannot deny that. Nothing he has built is horendously incongruous with the feel of our downtown cityscape or the larger area around Traverse City. A lot of what he does commercially is modern but without the stark Bauhaus blocks typically found throughout Europe. And it all retains some of the traditional feeling that we like here. But that I can see that this is happening years before it does is unsettling to say the very least. And it all ends badly.
This new building that I saw eventually becomes a stop on a subway line that runs between Traverse and a few distant communities. In particular it runs to Kingsley where the low income working poor have to live because we lack the style and grace to live in town. The artistic and undesirable live here with their bright colors and outlandish tastes in clothing. While they don't want us to remind them that there are those upon whom they depend they don't want us too far away to serve either. Kingsley by car in heavy traffic is 20-30 minutes away. On the subway of the future it is only 10 no matter the traffic on the roads.
But I see where the chinks in their placid translucent armor are. The great and shining Metropolitan Emporium of Commerce and Tourism that becomes downtown Traverse City is repleat with Escher Terrors and Bosch devils in the detailing: stairs the go no where because its cheaper to throw up walls and cut out holes than to rebuild a whole bock of buildings, grotesquely carved and painted collumns where a business failed and the "unworthy" took over a space, garish lights and boxes of detrius for sale in piles in cavernous galley styled spaces. In one building designed as an Entertainment Emporium there is a movie theater, a multi-plex cinema that feels so much more like a haunted house because the tatooed and pierced are only allowed to have attendant type jobs. Oddly enough I saw some lawyers faces on bodies in these degrading jobs. I presume somewhere they too have tatooes and have been demoted by the new Stepford Aesthetic Establishment... an unholy SEA if there ever was one.
I wish that had been a consciously built pun. I'd feel better about these dreams. But my subconscious is writing it all for me. And that is the the problem. Losing originality.
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