UNEASY VISTAS When "Harmless" Things Scare You?

Do you ever see things that should not affect you and yet they poison the groundwater of your day just enough to throw you off? Here are just a few of the things I wish had no impact, but somehow, instead, stick to me:

- Perfect fields of one species of plant. No living things tend them.

- Plastic. All of it. Yes, even this computer.

- French Bulldogs everywhere. Who cares if they can’t breathe right or give birth without a C-section? And that’s not a sarcastic rhetorical question.

- American flags. Canadian flags.

- Bumper stickers, any of them. I feel queasy just seeing them. I try not to focus so I can’t read them.

- Signs for CrossFit. There’s an Amway aftertaste?

 - A gas station triangle or decoration freshly set down;  a dustpan pile of “ lawn scenery.” A fluffy flaming rust landscape gusset. It will dry out and become pocked with cigarette butts. Garbage will curve and shred around the bases of the flowers that will not be propagated. Clumps of mono-colored marigolds and those other hyper-pink and yellow flowers I can’t seem to remember the name of, choking in a little sea of dyed, shredded red cedar. They called it “beauty bark” in Washington when I was little. I can feel the splinters. My forearms itch like hell. The more groomed it gets the less satisfying it feels. It will dry out and become pocked with cigarette butts, then thrown out as one continuous scab… Just another median crime. 

- Related: The landscaped boundaries around power stations where no one lives or goes, yet still nicer than any house I’ve ever lived in.  

- Empty lots in cities. Just something to re-ruin?

- The GIANT plastic caterpillar tarps covering the hay in the countryside. It shreds and whips and chokes. More of the same will be purchased every year. Over and over and over…

What scares you?