In article , "Charlie"
wrote:

You're so pathetic! How is having a trailer outside someones house a
problem? Maybe in the UK we have different trailers to you, or maybe it's
because I grew up in the country where farmyard trailers were pretty normal
sights around peoples homes. Whichever, it's up yo him how he lives his
life! Why don't you take photo's and put them on a webpage so we can all
see when a terrible crime he's commiting.

You'd have a field day here - we have a meadow part of the garden, the
planting is all skewiff and a car on the driveway that's never moved - but I
LOVE it here!

I'm definatly glad people don't force colours upon us - our old window trims
are the same untercoated grey that they have been for years where we never
got round to finishing painting them.

I've never heard of restrictions on this sort of thing. America really
puzzles me sometimes.

Charlie.

I don't like trailer houses myself. I seriously believe even "po' folk"
could be more aesthetic than that & an old wooden shed, a lean-to, or a
teepee could be beautiful in a way a trailer house never can be -- so
being poor isn't excuse enough to trucking in a square tin house &
plopping it down on a fourth of a lot right next door to another
quarter-lot just like it. There are exceptions. I've seen some vintage
trailers that have none of the horror-associations of doublewides & mobile
homes; people make fun of silverstreams that look like toasters, but I
think those are beautiful. You don't see that many. What you see is
rectangle tin boxes & doublewides that just reek of ugly.

Another exception: In Eugene there's a community of people who live in
cedar-shingled trucks & buses that people live in full-time, teency little
homes on wheels cute as the devil, an enclave mainly of old-time hippies.
Beautiful homes those are! And because very small, they live
minimal-consumer lives without nearly the number of harmful impacts
against nature.

But there's just no excuse for one of those rectangle tin boxes or a
double-wide. A metal doublewide that goes BANG CLACK! every time the sun
bakes the metal roof is built ugly & stays ugly, & being poor is no excuse
unless someone is saying poverty makes people inherently tasteless & ugly.
To live inside such ugliness makes way too many of the people therein
ugly.

But it isn't livin' poor makes people white trash, it's livin' ugly.
I've been in some back-wood areas of the Olympic Penninsula & even in the
woodland areas not far from Portland Oregon, & people are living in
hand-built shacks & cabins & log homes of the most extraodinary beauty &
charm, & I'm sure some people think of them as gobber-toothed hilljacks &
hilljanes going "hyuk hyuk," but I think they've selected a gorgeous way
of living without needing much money &without using up many of the earth's
resources.

So when I find myself thinking of terms of "Trailer Trash" I don't mean
the working poor or the rural minimalists or the shack-dwelling Snuffy
Smiths of the wilderness -- I mean ugly people in ugly tin houses living
ugly drunken lives, with a growing pile of beer bottles & tin cans just
off the porch where some alcholic Klan member tosses his empties & the
bean cans from the cold dinners his bruised-eyed cousin-wife opens for him
as dinner.

Rural farm life, though, with meadows instead of creepy lawns, THAT's an
aesthetic ideal to strive for, & the shocking thing is how many of the
ordinance-passing-small-town-politicians & home-association-nazis are
horrified by what in essence is an IMPROVEMENT over the life they'd rather
impose on everyone in the name of Property Values.

More & more people DO realize that Rustic is Better, but unfortunately it
is also not aesthetic to spend a lot of time arguing politics with morons,
so the morons end up passing the ordinances, & rusticity gets defined as
"run down" so that that wonderfully funky wooden garage by law has to be
torn down, though an ugly tin garage with a tin door is perfectly all
right. All the green margin trees get zoned as too close to a sidewalk or
not permitted overhang the road, so are all cut down, but paving over the
green margin to park on it is all right. Every meadow gets legally defined
as a hiding place for vermin & gets herbicided into dust, but turning your
property into a gravel pit is okay. Appling high-maintenance
chemical-devouring lawns are REQUIRED, when it's the noisy air-polluting
lawnmowers rather than the meadows that SHOULD be outlawed.

So when people start talking about the evil neighbors lawns being unmowed,
or a basketball hoop nailed over the garage door that has GOT to go, or a
Model T used as a giant planter, or whose window trim is painted an
unacceptable color -- you just know that these whiners' have sterile
imaginations & meaningless lives & will not be happy unless they can
impose their way on everyone until, as Malvina Reynolds put it, "they're
all made out of ticky-tacky & they all look just the same."

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/