At times, it felt as if there was nothing to do. That was the main curse of them and the superabundant, unyielding technology of their generation; the malediction even of their life and times: that of idleness.
And the idleness and uncertainty of what to do and where to go and at what speed marked them, marked their odd, disjointed approach, as they staggered almost blindly and certainly witlessly up and along the sidewalks so soldierly, so precisely flanking the street, the main street of the tiny, slumbering, rural city; a city whose boundaries contained everything from great, altitudinal wooded hills, to vast estuaries, to great, seemingly endless plains, to tiny forests-copses really-to flatlands, to near-mountains, to dead forests at the edge of and choked by briny, saline swamps and cesspools, to places where all seven land traits and terrain distinctions/districts mightily yet haphazardly converged to the very urban centers-at least for such a small New England city-in which they now tread, yet all the while they were highly aware of the converging territories, the intermingling terrain that utterly surrounded them; indeed, off to the west they could clearly see one vast, almost unbroken wall of rising, gradated black that could only be a series of wooded hills.
Yet there was something else to the west, something closer and more approachable that caught their collective eye and on which the group en masse converged. The focal point of their eyesight and their destination was an odd yet ordinary thing: a somewhat normal locality: a diminutive asphalted parking lot, utterly devoid of even motile vehicles, along the outer edge of which stood a simple, unadorned steel pole of modest height, whose terminus was not straight and pointing heavenward, but which ended somewhat abruptly-before the steel capping-off point anyway-in an odd squarish thin board, at the end of which protruded a simple orange metallic circle from which dangled, depended a few torn bits of white mesh netting; in other words a basketball hoop and net (and board) and the epicenter of a possible activity for the disenchanted troika, yet the apparatus stood in an outlandish zone, along one side of which stood the whitish, rising bulk of a tall, classic, steepled church, and just above which was a junction, a nexus, a convergence of dozens of lofty electrical cables and wires, routed all of them, through a steel box on a nearby wooden telephone pole, which sported at tiny yet very potent orange lamp all it's own whose odd light threw grotesque shadows in all directions-including those of the perpendicular network of wires whose sides seemed to scrape and drape along the ground-and made the rusted nimbus of the basketball pole and board seem bloodstained, perhaps even somehow sloppily ensanguined.
And yet it was to here, to this eerie yet exciting locale............
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