Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sweet Smell of Manure


I live in a small house on the border between a city and a rural area. In preparation for a collapse of GM as I know it, cin and I met with a realtor to investigate selling our house. I never realized just how small our house was until she started measuring everything. I am not bitter. I am perfectly content in my house that is just one click above a trailer. I don’t even have A/C. All the houses in my neighborhood are similar so I don’t feel out of place. I even have curtains so I secretly think everyone else envies me. My road rides take me out past farms. They stink. Manure doesn’t offend me, it’s not like I would use it for aftershave or anything but still, it doesn’t bother me.

The corner stone of my training plan this year is to fit in a ride every chance I get. I started leaving my bike in the truck. When I drop the kids off at dance practice I take off on a road ride. They dance in the Canton/Northville/Plymouth area, neighborhoods much nicer than mine. I observe the neighborhoods on my ride.

Garages, bigger than my house, filled with Toyota Prius hybrids so they can solve global warming, attached to huge houses that take three A/C unites to cool. The names of the neighborhoods crack me up. Where is the ridge in Pheasant Ridge? Probably filled in with the hills they removed from Fox Hills, and the pheasants and foxes were scared away in the process and probably scurried over to Pine Cove, that does have pine trees, but they are planted in perfectly straight rows and that just isn’t natural. North Pointe is just confusing, it is smack dab in the middle of Canton; it is as far south as it is north of anything, and I don’t see the pointe. And their bikes, shiny new bikes…do you really need full suspension for riding on perfectly paved paths? Why are the handle bars up so high? Why is everyone so smug? Then it occurs to me, no manure smell, no smell at all…their shit really doesn’t stink.

9 comments:

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  2. Nice!

    If it is any consolation, I own two GM vehicles.

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  4. Right Bob, I noticed you have a Solstice, very nice. I went on the Media drive in Portland where we introduced this vehicle to the various magazines, a month before production started. Somehow word got out we were going to be there and people from all over the U.S. started showing up just to look at the cars. People begged me just to sit in them. When we sent the cars to Europe (re-badged as Opel GTs), Europeans mistook them as Bugatties (spelling?). Pontiacs mistaken as Bugatties? And these cars are doing very well in the SCCA race series. And GM is going out of business. If it didn't hurt so much I would laugh.

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  5. The names crack me up. Down in the plains around denver you have "ridges" and "pointes" where nothing but flat prarie is to be found. My rule of thumb for a snooty neighborhood is when it has the word "at" attached. ie The Village at Stony Point. The Brooks at Broadlands...

    In boulder you have the dual Prius with stop global warming/bring our troops home/ban mining/save our forest stickers in 6 car garage attached to 10,000 sqft houses that still cost 3 times what they are worth. I wonder how many quarries supplied the cement, aggregate, and stone..forests supplied the tree... coal mines supplied the power for the heaters and AC.. oil wells supplied the plastics...strip mines provided the copper, aluminum, steel, drywall, etc.

    Hipocricy is alive and well!

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  6. So is bad spelling apparently...how about a little Hypocricy...

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  7. While you are looking up "Hypocricy", can you look up "Bugatti", you know, that Itillian sports car company? Better look up "Itillian" too, I am kind of on the fence on that one...I went to public schools.

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