Beautiful Mess

I know that blogs are a dime a dozen, so I won't even discuss that. A professor once told me that having a blog is a really good idea for a writer, so I suppose this is long overdue. It's beyond me who would read it, but who am I to be self-deprecating?

So thought for the day: I cannot ever live in Rockford. Not in peace, anyway. Here's why:

Human beings are messy. People are messy. From what I can tell, nature can tick on pretty well by itself, most animals don't need us (unless they're cockroaches who have migrated to Chicago) in fact, when we whine and complain about nature, it's not about nature itself, nature is fine, it's us whining about us. We're the ones destroying the environment, we're the ones making animals go extinct (to a certain degree, natural disasters also do this, so keep that in mind.) Overall, people are messy. And I'm messy, very messy. I think people spend as much time making messes in their lives as they spend on damage control, depending on the ratio of how messy one is, of course and how much time we have to clean. In fact, we can't fix our messes completely. We can mop them up and sweep them under the rug, but ultimately our greatest fear is that other people will discover how messy we really are. Isn't that why so much of the church seems so artificial? It's because we're messy people trying to pretend that we're not.

Yuck. This leads me to why I cannot live in Rockford. Beloit, Rockford and Janesville are the three major cities closest to me. I would rather not live in Beloit (and technically I don't, I live in Turtle township) but I would live in Beloit because there is something gritty but honest about Beloit. B-towners know exactly how crappy Beloit is, and they don't try to hide it or make apologies for it. We are what we are. Janesville, on the other hand, is very nice and they know they are very nice and they are cool with becoming nicer and expanding and knowing that they have things they ought to fix and change like everyone else, but at least overall they're very nice. Rockford, however, is a strange hybrid of the two. Rockford is two-faced. On one side of the river, they're very nice, oh, they're better than nice. They have everything your little heart might desire. But on the other side of the river. Eew. But that's still Rockford. In fact, that's original Rockford. No matter how hard I squint while I'm looking at the corporate, upscale half of Rockford, I can't avoid seeing the Rockford on the other side. Rockford is messy, and they pretend that they aren't, and I can't stand that.

This messiness is something that I will probably be thinking about for a while, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, if you're thinking about moving to Rockford. Don't.