project 365 #101: malachite

project 365 #101: malachite
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I took this for work today: a big beautiful chunk of malachite. That has little or nothing to do with what I'm about to discuss, which is whether or not Asheville has changed for the worse in the past few years. My daughter and I are having this conversation right now and our consensus is yes, it kind of has. There are just so many damn people here now, and it always seems like more than half of them have no visible means of support yet they can afford big fancy giant homes and cars. Where do they work? Where do these people earn their money? Where do they spend it and can I get some?

I've just been priced out of my house and my neighborhood and yeah, okay, I've made terrible various mistakes in my life over the years which, if you really want, I could enumerate, boring us all to tears, but still. I've lived here for seven years. I've held a couple of fairly high profile "upscale" jobs downtown for most of those seven years. When I moved here it was still a livable if a little decrepit city where you could rent a beautiful old bungalow for not much money or a grand apartment in Montford for even less. And I look around now and everything's been cleaned up and fixed up and some people are making money hand over fist, but the rest of us are not in great shape. It's unfortunate that all my mistakes led to me not having the money or the credit or the ability to buy a house seven years ago when they were still in my price range but that's the way it was and frankly, my income hasn't risen one iota in those seven years and now I'll never, ever own a house. I don't know if I can even find one to rent.

And I don't like gentrification; I never have. Yeah, I like good coffee and good beer and those supposed hallmarks of gentrification were already here a long time ago. Better coffee and beer, actually, because I miss Bean Streets and Vincent's Ear and a couple of Starbucks and an Indian restaurant (okay, it's a really good Indian restaurant, I give you that) haven't replaced them in my heart. I confess to being tired of the eternal snotty hipster scene (who are these people? Why are they so obnoxious? Where do they buy their clothes?) and the early retirement baby boomers (to quote the Bobs, first I was a hippie, then I was a stockbroker, now I am a hippie again!) and I don't really want to live in a town where the working classes are increasingly forced out into ever more distant and depressing trailer suburbs.

So more and more, I don't know if I'll stay. I have family here. I moved here because of my family; I've been coming here my whole life; WNC is a big part of me. My friends are here and I love them; I've built a whole life here. But I'm not certain, anymore, that this is the Asheville I've known and loved and I'm not certain either whether I belong here anymore.

project 365 #73: tree by biltimore forest ingles

project 365 #73: tree by biltimore forest ingles
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Why doesn't Asheville have a decent alternative radio station? Preach to me not of WNCW, oh my brothers and sisters, for I have been stalwart and yet finally, the twang and the jazz have defeated me. There is only so much bluegrass anyone can take and my limit has been reached; besides, they play jazz all the damn time now along with that horrific 1940s cowboy music and I can just no longer pretend I'm cool enough to enjoy it. I'm not that cool and I hate jazz. I hate swing even more and fashionable faux swing? First up against the wall when I become the evil overlord. I'm terminally uncool and I want to hear what was called, back in the day, rock n' roll music. All day long at work on the computer I listen to WFUV out of New York and I weep when they play music I can't hear locally and cheer when they play the traffic and weather because, thank the gods, I haven't lived in New York in well over a decade.

Seriously, though, it sucks. I was stuck in traffic on the goddamn McDowell Street bridge for like 15 interminable minutes this evening attempting to go visit my mother and I had a choice of boingety boingety twang twang jazzgrass on WNCW, Behind Blue Eyes on the clone classic hits radio station (Noone knows what it's like to be the sad man. . . yes. Yes they do. All 50 million of them who have been forced to listen to that fucking pathetic song thousands of times over and over on classic "we can't be bothered to own more than 10 CDs" rock radio, corporate whores of the demonocracy) and car ads on the other station. Or jesus. I could always listen to some asshole telling me about jesus, but he doesn't love me and I like it that way, thanks.

To add insult to injury, I dragged all my old cassettes out of the house and back into the car which, among other things, dumped dust and grime all over my black pants, only to discover that the cassette deck makes everything wobble and shake even more heinously than I, no serious audiophile, can stand. I mean, can you believe it? You don't clean a cassette deck for 10 years and then try to play a bunch of crusty 15 year old cheap ass cassettes on it and it's all wobbly? No pride in craftsmanship, I swan. So I'm in the market for a tape deck cleaner; I can so totally imagine how many of those there are around now. If you have one, I need it. I have a Men At Work tape from 1982 that's dying to be heard on Hendersonville Road.