there.
“Ya came up into the van and that was a lovely kiss on my lips.”
I’ LL TELL YOU WHAT it looked like in those neighborhoods before they became neighborhoods but while they were on their way. It’s men like me you have to thank for making them solid and tight.
Much of this earth, in those days, was meant to be built upon. I didn’t see much land that was pure and beautiful. A lot of it was sacred because the sacred part of land is the use you make of it, and most of this land was saying “use me.” There was so much developing or prospecting around that the world looked like it was going to roll up and leave, and if you didn’t hold on to it, if you didn’t put your boot down on the dirt and say, “That’s mine,” it would move under the boot of the next man who would change it. The earth knew it, and it made itself as unfinished and in-between as a twelve-year-old boy. Hills weren’t hills and rocks would barely need blasting. It was land that was either aching to be touched or aching to get back, and my choice was to touch it. And I’m not talking about some sort of Eden. It wasn’t a case of spoiling or leaving innocent or doing anything at all of bigger meaning than building a house for Mom and the kids and a building for suit-wearing Daddy. I already knew about the sweat of my brow. I know the Bible. I know about women and change and searching and evil, and none of it has to do with building a neighborhood, because a neighborhood, like the unused earth before it, is just a vessel.
So have a look on the map here and I’ll show you. From here, which is now Hunt Club, all the way over to here, now, see there, McCarthyStreet, was nothing but moving aching land, all, as I say, half land, half nuisance, half pitiful and perfect. There were some small farms but the rest of the land wasn’t even clean, a lot of it. There was a young boy drank from one of the puddles before we built there who lost his eyesight for a little while because of it. Sometimes land comes poisoned before you bring the machines.
Eventually that area was taken by eight different developers, including me. My point is that there was a lot of land and a lot of interest. This section here, from what is now John Street to Uplands, is what I wanted to put my boot on first. You hear about homeowners now—that’s what they call you people and me—who want their privacy, who want their hills and trees and all sorts of other things between them and everyone else, and I say it’s a big bag of shit. First thing they do is wonder who the neighbors are and it’s all the same in the end, love and gossip creeping over the hills as easily as straight across the yard. And you ask any developer even now with machines that can do anything what he thinks of a proper hill where he wants to build, and he will say fuck. It’s easier to make hills than build around them, especially in those days, and that’s why I had my eye on that section there. It was flat, my friend, like the palm of a friendly hand.
There was wet mud and dry mud and wild grass and dandelions and some cement laid down from years before when people had empty messy plans. It was land that people knew they could build on but hadn’t finished thinking it through. It started at a bit of a rise, more of a rise before I crushed it, over here from the northeast and slid down smooth across the south-southwest onto the back of the old suburbs.
Good soil, some of it. Iron in it. One old man I liked kept a little garden out there that he shouldn’t have and grew tomatoes, nice red ones. Wetter at the bottom of the rise but that’s where the old houses already were, so the earth I eventually moved was dry, light.
It was foresight, and I don’t mind pretending it’s a gift. Some of the other developers, Edgar Davies one of them, thought that land there was boring. They thought they had foresight. And they were right in a way because they thought the people would want the
“Ya came up into the van and that was a lovely kiss on my lips.”
I’ LL TELL YOU WHAT it looked like in those neighborhoods before they became neighborhoods but while they were on their way. It’s men like me you have to thank for making them solid and tight.
Much of this earth, in those days, was meant to be built upon. I didn’t see much land that was pure and beautiful. A lot of it was sacred because the sacred part of land is the use you make of it, and most of this land was saying “use me.” There was so much developing or prospecting around that the world looked like it was going to roll up and leave, and if you didn’t hold on to it, if you didn’t put your boot down on the dirt and say, “That’s mine,” it would move under the boot of the next man who would change it. The earth knew it, and it made itself as unfinished and in-between as a twelve-year-old boy. Hills weren’t hills and rocks would barely need blasting. It was land that was either aching to be touched or aching to get back, and my choice was to touch it. And I’m not talking about some sort of Eden. It wasn’t a case of spoiling or leaving innocent or doing anything at all of bigger meaning than building a house for Mom and the kids and a building for suit-wearing Daddy. I already knew about the sweat of my brow. I know the Bible. I know about women and change and searching and evil, and none of it has to do with building a neighborhood, because a neighborhood, like the unused earth before it, is just a vessel.
So have a look on the map here and I’ll show you. From here, which is now Hunt Club, all the way over to here, now, see there, McCarthyStreet, was nothing but moving aching land, all, as I say, half land, half nuisance, half pitiful and perfect. There were some small farms but the rest of the land wasn’t even clean, a lot of it. There was a young boy drank from one of the puddles before we built there who lost his eyesight for a little while because of it. Sometimes land comes poisoned before you bring the machines.
Eventually that area was taken by eight different developers, including me. My point is that there was a lot of land and a lot of interest. This section here, from what is now John Street to Uplands, is what I wanted to put my boot on first. You hear about homeowners now—that’s what they call you people and me—who want their privacy, who want their hills and trees and all sorts of other things between them and everyone else, and I say it’s a big bag of shit. First thing they do is wonder who the neighbors are and it’s all the same in the end, love and gossip creeping over the hills as easily as straight across the yard. And you ask any developer even now with machines that can do anything what he thinks of a proper hill where he wants to build, and he will say fuck. It’s easier to make hills than build around them, especially in those days, and that’s why I had my eye on that section there. It was flat, my friend, like the palm of a friendly hand.
There was wet mud and dry mud and wild grass and dandelions and some cement laid down from years before when people had empty messy plans. It was land that people knew they could build on but hadn’t finished thinking it through. It started at a bit of a rise, more of a rise before I crushed it, over here from the northeast and slid down smooth across the south-southwest onto the back of the old suburbs.
Good soil, some of it. Iron in it. One old man I liked kept a little garden out there that he shouldn’t have and grew tomatoes, nice red ones. Wetter at the bottom of the rise but that’s where the old houses already were, so the earth I eventually moved was dry, light.
It was foresight, and I don’t mind pretending it’s a gift. Some of the other developers, Edgar Davies one of them, thought that land there was boring. They thought they had foresight. And they were right in a way because they thought the people would want the
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