Remsen, ah Remsen

I'm dog-sitting for Meredith out in Remsen. Anyway, before that, I had Just finished driving Meredith down to the airport. We had been singing old Journey and Def Leppard songs. Nostalgia is a frightening thing. "Faithfully" and "Don't Stop Believing" were the two songs of choice. I did my rendition of Neil Schon's whining guitar in "Faithfully". . . . it sounded something like meow-meow-meow-meow. Needless to say, it was a bad but funny rendition.

We also talked a bit about why there aren't any big corporate businesses in Utica. As much as I resent them, I understand that we seem to think they are associated with healthy growth for a community. One of the things that I thought of was the fact that this region is heavily unionized. It would follow that corporations who are trying to make a profit would try to forego situating themselves in an area where the labor is unionized. This is a bad thing. As much as I like having the selection that comes with entities like Border, Barnes and Noble, etc., they hurt union workers. I remember the Mill area during my days at Arizona State University. I liked the Mill because it had one-of-a-kind shops like Changing Hands Bookstore, independent coffee houses, independent shops. This past year Papatya, Sue, and myself drove by the Mill area and it's been transformed into a strip mall. Very disconcerting.

I've been filled with socio-economic programing for the past few weeks. There was a documentary on LINK TV a few days ago tracing the development of a disease entited "Affluenza". Prior to that, another Michael Moore was on the air at IFC, called "The Big One". It's interesting to see the development of this consumer environment . . .

My mind's still coming around to processing all these things. More later.