And Her Name Is Jules 1c

Ten years, twenty, fourty-nine to one hundred, it doesn't matter. They were born here. The frozen hell that lies to it's inhabitants. Promising a better fortune next spring. Oaths of leaving are cast at the hands of summer fortune and autumn storms ruin. The cycle repeats. Can they escape? No.

This is just how it works now. You are born into a place for which you cannot change your caste. The water trickles down and freezes on your nose and rather than flying south for the winter, rather than following the evolutionary path of ages. This is what happens.

And Her Name Is Jules 1b

Behind the white washed picket fence, and under the ground, there is something else. Something special. Something you should feel as it starts to rain. As you run down a hill at full gait and top speed.

Jules felt it then. Watching the darkness fly by, the neighborhood lights flew by more like funeral lights than beacons of hope from a world that most of us don't know. There's  no surprise, these lights aren't for us. We don't keep company with those that live this close.

When someone describes the American dream, the stereotypical Americana that everyone pictures is something else. It is not the grime, uniform buildings. It is not the soot covered children running across lawns covered with the entrails of the wealthy's previous-generation machinery. It is not loud screeching call of the carnivors that pick the bones from those who dare stand in their way. It is not the rotting metal bohemiths that disrupt any hope of a single good night's sleep.

And yet, in a moment's notice, the new landscape takes hold. Rain turns to ice, city lights fade, and the carion call echoes louder. This is death.

And Her Name Is Jules 1a

If you stay in one place too long without looking outward, you slowly become complacent in your thinking and apathetic to your surroundings.

This is what Americana is. America was once a place where people came to seek their fortunes. Now this land is just another sad gloomy no nothing place where people grow up, work, and die. In the same place that their father grew up, worked, and died, and his father before that, and his father before that, and maybe his father before that. There isn't anything special about it. It's a dark, gloomy future of the world globalized. Box stores line the streets of every suburb and city of the land. One place to the next, you cannot really tell where you are. You are in the fat, happy, American utopia as seen on TV.

This is what you see if you fly in. It is a facade. The wild west conformed and integrated into the rest of society. Old men wishing for some sort of retirement that wear the facade of wealth: the BWM, the Mercedes, the Lexus: three cars and a boat fill the drive of a five bedroom, four thousand plus square foot house, carefully designed and manacured landscaping to compete in some sort of rat race with neighbors that they actually have never met, all financed through nearly unbearable debt levels.

This isn't what you should be looking for. You are looking for something, right? That's why you keep reading, and shuffling through the papers. There isn't a happy ending - I'll let you know up front. This story doesn't end well.