CITY MOTEL

There is beauty in clutter! Well done David.

Dave, it looks like one of those places where you can rent a room by the month or by the hour, depending on the need. Your processing somehow reminds me of an old color postcard.

Thanks. Nice to see you here.

You're absolutely right. It is on a road that was the main north/south route through central California until they built a new more modern freeway just west of the existing road. That spelled death to this and many similar places. Gas stations, restaurants and motels all lost out to the new and improved fast food joints, and Holiday Inns. Then came the prostitutes. In the seventies, you could cruise this area and there would be girls strolling (trolling may be a better word) the streets offering a good time for a little money. The motels made enough to survive on then. But, along came the police and drove them off to some other place in their self-congratulatory manner of crime fighting, and then there wasn't much left for these guys. A lot of these old motels now house the castoffs of our society. Warehouses of human misery and failure.  

Fresno has a homeless population of thousands (I do not exaggerate). Many of them beg on street corners. The other day I stopped to give a small donation and chat with a sixty year old (just guessing, as it's hard to know the age of these people) woman begging at the exit/entrance to a McDonalds. She had her dog sitting there and he was well behaved. I asked her if she was homeless, and she told me she was one of the "lucky ones." She had a mid-sized motor home. Old, but serviceable. Of course she can't afford to drive it, but at least she has some form of shelter and security. Many of the homeless have dogs. Those dogs undoubtedly are the most important thing in the world to them. They give the homeless unconditional love, and don't judge them as failures. 

People like me shouldn't go lurking in places like that. My rage and depression are not medically controllable when I see suffering like that. I lived in a small rural community in Colombia in the sixties, and there were many people who were poor. In fact, most of them were. But they weren't swept under the carpet as our impoverished are. It wasn't a mark of shame and a sign of failure to be poor. They lived in a poor country. Poverty was the norm.

And we have people who live better than 90% of all people ever to have breathed earthly air, who dismiss the poor as having made wrong decisions and being drug addicts and winos while they not only refuse to see those in need, but fight tooth and nail any tax increase upon themselves, and any tax money going to help those worthless shells of human beings.

Now there's the daily rant. I wish I could say it made me feel better.

An articulate and appropriate rant. We need more people willing to see, and willing to rant.

I must have tsunamis on the brain because that was the first thought that occured to me about this picture. Obviously this isn'r wave-tossed debris but it sure does have that feeling of thins haphazardly strewn around.

I've come back again to thank you for your lengthy comment on the poor in our society. I think you put things very well. The lack of compassion in America is astounding..

I agree, David, thank you for your eloquent rant. 

The idea is not bad but the colours do not work.

The picture is very flat and the post processing does not help. If you have the chance, try to make it again on sunrise or sunset of a clear day.

L.

Thanks for you comments. I appreciate that you viewed this differently than I. My concept was one of trying to make this look kind of flat, depressed and just plain unappetizing, because this is the sort of place that is totally depressing. In a place like this, the only residents are abut a day away from being homeless. A sunny day and bright blue skies would kind of take away from the concept. But I understand what you're saying, and have no problem with the fact that it doesn't work for you.

David, I agree of every line of yours. I learned  to use my brain, try to isolate  the brainwashing of the propaganda, witch is like a deluge, sweeping blank, most of the peoples mind. I grow up in a poor  country, being poor myself, but  never have seen homeless people around me. Now,  they are all over, and  lots of  them, even in a so called  rich america. I have seen a lot and learned a lot, and  some time as you said, I'm depressed to see the word as is  today. Media, never  talking about this. You doing a good job, and I wish, we had  more of your kind. I read a lots of  books of similar subject, but  the last I just read is; American Holocaust by David E. Stannard, and A people's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  You wanted to be depressed, read those books.

Have a nice day.

Bela