What's being created in your Bakersfield neighborhood? - By N.L. Belardes

I was walking to work a few days ago and decided to walk down a back alley that parallels H Street. I was wondering what the neighborhood had created. Would I find manicured back fences intricately woven with rose bushes and vines like tapestries?

Would I find trash cans spilling over with the debris of our community lives?

I found two photos of interest in the many photos I took.

1: The Created Abandoned House


This abandoned house has an aire of poor man's neighborhood artistry about it. In a past blog I showed how a big gang-tagged rock and shopping carts litter the front yard. If melting, would surely look like a Dali painting of the HOOD. But with broken windows, I think this house truly has that abandoned look and feel. It could sure make top billing on a "Pimp Out My Neighborhood Crack House" TV show...

It's been created.

2: Alley Trash: Getting to know your Creator


This piece of Christian marketing literature 'being' trash says a lot about how this little newsprint magazine found its way into an alley. Sure, maybe it was so I could ponder my own spirituality and oneness with the universe, my oneness with even the randomness of alley trash. But what about the person who tossed the trash into the alley? Why did they do it? What value do they have in the question of whether they were created along with the rest of humanity and nature like a tuna fish can in a factory?

And why would Christian marketing literature ask a question it already knows the answer to?

Why would I need to be reminded of a basic question I should have known the answer too long before the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes came about?

I ponder such philosophic mumbo jumbo of detritis in an alley...

So I ask, what's being created in your Bakersfield neighborhood? (You can answer this question if outside of Bakersfield)