I grew up on the outskirts of a small town in northern Wisconsin.  When I think about the places I could have grown up I shudder and feel physically sick, and any feeling of good-time fun I may have been having goes right out the window.

Imagine, for instance, growing up in the heart of an American city, surrounded by nothing but asphalt and concrete and noise… to say nothing of the people, endless herds of the damn things, everywhere you look.  And crime, such a reality in your day-to-day existence the local news doesn’t even cover much of it anymore, unless it’s really bad.  And the lights, second only to the people in terms of a city’s worst features.  Those lights might help some to alleviate that crime, yes, and keep the rapes down, but in the city you can never see the nighttime sky… and that is unacceptable.

Growing up in good old Oconto, Wisconsin, population 4500, I was in possession of the nighttime sky every night, whenever I wanted.  All I had to do was go out to the backyard and look up at that great blossoming explosion of stars and planets and galaxies that seemed to swirl around and practically engulf me as I stood there.  City lights mask all that, and it’s unfair.  I mean, it’s unfair to all those kids who will never look up and see anything beyond the tips of skyscrapers… or maybe, at most, the brightest objects up there, like Jupiter and the moon, weak and pathetic ambassadors for the real thing, which is so immense and beautiful it will break the heart of the coldest engineer alive.

When I went outside on warm summer evenings and gazed heavenward, I was made aware of my place in the Universe… which was no place, of course.  I was insignificant.  We are insignificant.  We are small and fragile and useless to the whole Shebang.

But city kids will never have this realization, and it’s this basic fact, I believe, that leads to all that crime.  There arises the opposite mentality in the city, a great egotistical bent that swells and swells throughout a young hoodlum’s life until he becomes absolutely certain that he not only can take whatever he wants, regardless of who owns it, but that he also deserves to take it.  He is better than everyone else and goddamnit the Universe better just start showing some appreciation.

Chicago is a city rife with political corruption.  Likewise New York and D.C.  Oconto has its own corruption, I’m sure, but it’s not the same… and anyway, Oconto has the sky, and the sky trumps all.

–TmC (2012)