Yesterday, I was over at YouTube looking at some EverQuest raid videos. Looking at the "related videos", I saw a documentary bit made about EverQuest players (in two parts; quite old-- it appears to be Velious era, from the fan faire footage). From there, I went on to a documentary by the same guy about Centralia, PA. From there, I watched a whole bunch of other videos about Centralia, from TV clips to road trip videos. Somewhere along the line, I wandered off to bits about the "axe murder house" in Villisca, Iowa where 8 people were murdered in 1912.
I have insatiable, morbid curiosity about destruction, decay, and death. Perhaps that's weird, but maybe it is also just human nature. It's what makes people slow down to get a good look at a car wreck. It's what makes people watch horror movies and CSI. It is what makes me crawl from one video on YouTube to another, following where my curiosity takes me.
My cousins used to go into abandoned houses and stuff just too look around, but I was raised to be too "play-it-safe"/scaredy-cat to do anything like that. Still, I can't drive past an abandoned house without looking, wondering, and wanting to see, even if there's probably nothing really there. I am fascinated with abandoned farmhouses out in the country, boarded-up rowhouses in the city, and foundations in the woods where houses used to be. I wonder about the people who lived there. I imagine them eating breakfast and going about their chores, unaware of what time will do to their home.
I wonder about the fate of the house my great-grandparents built, currently owned by my mom and my aunt. I remember my great-grandmother having a box on her porch with little chicks in it when I was about 3. I remember many Christmas Eves with my grandparents after they moved there. The roof of the garage is caving in now. I wonder what will happen to the house as the years go by. Will my mom really move there? Will it get sold to someone else? Will they restore it or tear it down? My mind is full of the ghosts of what-was, what-will-be, and what-might-have-been.
When I was a kid, I hated the desolate, grey landscapes of Delaware in winter. It snows here only occasionally and it melts within a couple of days, generally, and it rains quite a lot, so everything is flat grey, brown, and lifeless. As I got older, I started to see things differently and I find that desolation beautiful... And now we are moving away.
Not that there are many landscapes of my youth still visible, now that they are building McMansions everywhere that farms used to be and relocating wetlands (i.e. destroying wetlands and putting man-made wetlands elsewhere). It takes a 20 minute drive to the west into Maryland (The Eastern Shore) to see landscapes like the ones I grew up in. The development (and over-development) around here is a different kind of destruction, and it breaks my heart. The people moving in are from PA, NJ, and NY, and they think they are moving out into the country, but they are really just bringing the sprawl in with them. Everything they move to escape, they bring with them.
/sigh
Heh... I guess they are just revamping the old zones around here. They are Freeportizing them.
MMORPG.com writes:
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