Tyler tells me, public infrastructure is a path to public destruction.
Imagine a disease hitting a city population numbering in the millions, all biblical plague, and only those on private wells don't come out the other side drooling and pissing through an artificial kidney.
The power in owning land, Tyler says, is nothing except the illusion of having rights in your part and parcel scrap of government leasing.
If you're rich, solar panels, a wood burner, and a private well are a novelty and a navel gaze towards the future.
Otherwise, it's a code violation.
The reality of it is that not enough of them actually care to exercise this power they have.
One day, Tyler showed me where the fuses are on the powerlines. Like a huge paperclip holding two sheets of lightning together, all neat and obvious.
Electricians can't wear plastic because it will melt into their skin. Almost everything we wear is made of plastic, now, so those clothes are special order.
If you touch a powerline, a minimum of 600 volts will lance through your hand, burning a hole through your flesh. Electricity always has an exit wound, and it might be your foot. This damage is mimicked in your internal organs, so it might also be in your heart.
Tyler tossed me a hot stick and told me to get at it.
The thing about Tyler's burgeoning interest in the public good is, once I started seeing it all, I can't stop.
Wellhouses. Watertowers. Lift stations. If I had a pair of bolt cutters I could make sure the shit never leaves silicon valley for months.
Tyler croons, he tells me we've grown too big. We shit in our water and we drink our shit. You can't buy your way out, because're we're putting it right back down in the ground. Imagine all the water for the next thousand years, five hundred years in deficit already and cut with industrial sludge. Even the private wells can't run from that.
Tyler says, really, what we're doing is a kindness. It's all going to come falling apart, and if we do it now, maybe there will be something left to build from afterwards.
At the rate we're going, there won't even be kudzu to creep up the Sears tower.
It's all with a gentle fact, the things Tyler says. Like there's no reason to be worried, or to try bothering to convince me. Tyler's never tried to convince me of anything.
He knows I'd never doubt him. Or maybe he just doesn't care. I don't factor in to his vision of the world imploding in on itself, the ruptured veins of civilization spewing water and sewage out into the streets.
Fuses can be put back rather easily. They're a nuisance call. They're supposed to blow. County workers report a startlingly high monthly total of overcurrents, no one else bats an eye.
Tyler's got thoughts about becoming a bloodclot next.
