Standing amongst this immense complex of wires and shining pipes, water is dripping into the red sand where I stand and the brightest white steam pours from stacks into the gleaming Florida summer sky. A high-pitched mechanical whine fills the air, taking away all ability to have thoughts, and so the time passes quickly in a state of perpetual escape. Get away from this. Not a conscious thought, but burning inside me as if it's the energy that keeps my heart beating.
I am filled with a strange battle between immense curiosity and loathing. I want to see this infrastructure, I want to know about it, to truly feel the hideous face of all that I hate so that I may never come to love it again. But I really hate being exposed to all that I most oppose.
I almost feel like anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who attempted to spend some time with the Ik tribe in Africa, whom he calls The Mountain People, who are probably the most hideous people ever documented. They laughed when others got hurt, they disowned their children when they turned 3, they hid and stole food from one another, they were compulsive liars, manipulative, deceptive. I wonder how long you can live amongst such ugliness without being affected by it. How much repulsiveness can one experience in the name of inquiry, thought, knowledge?
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