Lakewood is lost in the Greater Abyss

damn thats nasty; human cancer

When Lakewood, California was established as a community, it was an escape from the evil world of the city into a holy land of purity and solitude. At least that’s how it was marketed, in reality this city was a man built Mecca, a soulless land, built by soulless people seeking to make a profit on others desperate for a place to rest their head. This matrix like block of land really did not offer a peaceful retreat; instead it furthered the false ideality of a happy suburban life and made people prisoners to a pointless place. Yet the beauty and mystery behind Waldies memoir is that he finds life in a lifeless place and enables one to see that each place has its own special meaning in the hearts of those who inhabit it. Waldie was born into Lakewood and for that reason alone Lakewood is a part of him, as he is a part of it. The feeling of being an integral part of a larger scheme of existence drives the heart and soul of his book, as he connects religion, with family and a sense of place and home. For Waldie, and for most Americans there is a love-hate relationship with the place they come from. No place is perfect, but it is a place none the less, a place that occupies space, and a space that enables life to thrive; a place for babies to be born, for personalities to evolve and expand, a place to learn, a place to breath, a place to exist within a greater body of human beings. But this greater body of human beings is the larger problem behind the seemingly peaceful suburban lifestyle that humans are manipulated into believing is “the good life”. Coming from Santa Monica, California I’m about as close to Lakewood as one could possibly get and yet I barely know that it even exists. This town of 20,000 people or more is nothing in comparison to the super-mega metropolis of Los Angeles. Lakewood, which was, once isolated, is now just a peace in the ever-expanding puzzle of human growth that is draining the natural world of its ability to thrive. So ending this rant of a blog, I have to say that something must be done to stop the ever increasing excess of modern western human existence. How holy can a land be if it is built on the destruction of the natural world, and replaced with the material suburban.

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