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When I got into my car to drive to breakfast it had a flat tire. What a drag. The temperature was already hot when I started changing it. I got the front right side jacked up almost enough to change the tire, and the car started rolling over the jack. Luckily there was a concrete block near by, and I was able to shove it under the car before it sagged to the ground.
Once I did that I was able to reposition the jack and take the tire off. It was immediately apparent what caused it to go flat. There was a metal screw right in the center of the tread. I mounted the emergency tire on the car and went looking to get the regular tire fixed. I think I got a good deal on that. $5.
The bothersome thing about having a flat tire to get fixed early in the morning is that once I started sweating from both the high heat and my inefficient labor, I knew I was gonna stay sticky until I got back home. Since my initial plans got interrupted by the flat tire, I ended up having lunch at the Pizza Inn. That's how depressing it got.
I didn't know what a pizza was until I joined the Navy. I certainly never had the opportunity to eat pizza until I was almost a grown man. The rural areas of the mid-Atlantic coastal plains were isolated by rivers and impassable swamps. The people all eat the same "soul food". No pizza. The only roads from the mountains to the coast ran the same route as the rivers.
The rivers and swamps of the coastal plains contained little ridges that were farmed. In the southeastern part of North Carolina where I was raised there were not any roads going north and south. The little farming communities could not afford to build many bridges due to Reconstruction. It was only after the end of World War Two that the South started receiving federal funds for roads.
The one concrete paved road in the area I lived as a boy ran right beside the first house we lived in when we moved here from Mississippi. It was called the "government road" or the "military road". It was built to connect Fort Bragg, the Army base, and Camp Lejeune, the Marine base. the federal government used the military as an excuse to build expensive paved roads. It's the same way the Roman Empire did it.
Roads in South America are built by capitalists who are only there to take the natural resources for the profit in it. Oil companies. Mining companies. The fact that these third world countries don't have strong governments is what allows the money changers to desecrate their homelands. Nevertheless, once the roads are built the indigent peoples pour into the usually inaccessible hinterlands.
Roads are what killed the tropical forests all over the world. Once the financial investors build roads to haul out the timber and minerals they can't keep the squatters out. The huge timber companies clear cut all the profitable trees, and the squatters cut the trash trees the timber companies leave for domestic purposes.
Firewood. Subsistence without firewood is an especially hard row to hoe. Once all the trees are gone the roads that got the people there are useless. I suspect that's one of the reasons those huge lost Mayan and Incan cities were abandoned. Looking for firewood within walking distance of those cities soon took away people's reason for living there anymore. No blame.
Another reason for abandoning the relatively sophisticated big cities was probably excrement and trash. It not only contaminates the drinking water, but it attracted wild beasts looking for a handout. Taking out the trash was probably a man's job for a good reason once upon a time. It might have required a weapon. Humans hang out at trash dumps too.
It's probably true that I've lived as a wild beast, but I never thought I was one. Wild beasts were my competition when I was homeless. I guess we kept outta each other's way. I'm not so sure that many people who saw me back then didn't think I was some sort of beast.
I was so far down in the bottom of the barrel it made a lotta people feel high class to realize that, at least, they were not as "bad off" as me. Since I avoided people who seemed frightened of me, I never really knew what that sort of person thought. The old saying I became a believer of is, "A scared person will hurt you."
Sometime the people who felt high class around a bum like me seemed like they were afraid other people might see through their pretensions, and not just me either. Self confidence is an odd expression. To me it comes through individuation, and is not necessarily itself an object of pride. That's why it's so hard to fake it. It's not a mask one puts on to wear, but an understanding that has it's own ground for being.
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