# Bloomfield (900 words) Some controversy, langauge, sexual suggestion



## wainscottbl (Jan 7, 2015)

A little excercise I did and something I think I'll put on my "Buffalo's Bull" blog. 


Bloomfield, Kentucky is an old tobacco town. I think the industry went down starting in the 90s due to anti-tobacco propaganda. The price of cigarettes sky rocketed, not for any economic reasons, but because the government said they had to be raised to stop youth from smoking. Like the war on coal, it was economically harmful, and for me it shows the blindness of the self-righteous busybody left mommy lobby. But whatever the reason, the economy of the town has gone south. There used to be a big thing in the town called the tobacco festival, but it died around the beginning of the new millennium because of the industry decline. There was a flea market, rides, food, and a parade. But it’s no more now.

The half-dead town has tramps who sit on the steps on the street corner. I don’t think they are prostitutes—the town is too small—but they are whores. No, sluts. A whore is honest about what she is. A slut plays the good girl when what she is called out, but everyone knows what she is. Deep down though she knows what she it. These girls loiter with their wannabe thug boyfriends, white guys who walk around with baggy pants that sag. They’re white trash, not the type of delinquents of the other race you’d see in the city. There’s a game hall and they hang out there sometimes. What a nice ornament for a small town, eh? I live in Bardstown now, the county seat, and it has been declared by a major publication the most beautiful small town in America.  

Coming into town, on the right, there are some once decent old houses, the white vinyl walls now covered in black, like soot. They house pill poppers and methheads. A couple years ago there was a bust of a meth lab, and I am sure there is at least one operating in the six or seven houses.

The whole town’s now gone to the dogs though. There is an antique store and a locally owned pizza parlor. And a local drug store, with the high counter, and stuff to shop for in the front. A few other shops, too. This is across from the side of the street the trailer trash loiter. So still some decency left.

There’s also a gas station on the corner, a Chevron called Bart’s Mart. If you come down Main Street from Louisville, you go through the light, and it is on the left.  Past it is the Baptist church, also on the left. It was my great-grandmother’s church, and much of my paternal family still goes there.

When I went there as a child there was just the church with an old add on with offices and classrooms. It blended well with the main church. Now the modernists, who seem to hate all tradition, and have such vile taste and judgment, have added this hideous addition. It’s like they have to change for the sake of change. The color does not even go with the brick of the old church, and it is big with a bunch of glass, as if to say “we’re open to all now!”. How bloody Jacobin, I say! I suppose they want to have the spirit of the megachurches. How far they have gone from their Anabaptist roots.

Past it are some more houses going of town. They are large and in good condition, but they are the only really beautiful houses in town. It all reminds me of one of those run down river downs on the Ohio River, which even when the sun is shining, it seems to be cloudy. On the right though, down across the creek that runs through the town, is a little dead end street called Riverside Drive with houses on only one side. One of those houses was my paternal maternal great grandmother’s house.

I’m not sure if I just saw Bloomfield through the innocent eyes of a child when I was younger, or if I have just become more cynical with age. Maybe it was always that way, and I was too excited about going to see Mamaw to see it. Or too young. Hell, I was only seven when Mamaw died. And though I visited Scottie up till 1997, when she died, we moved there in 1999, and I was just starting to put on the lenses of adulthood. I still say the decline in the tobacco industry brought the town to what it is. I am sure there was plenty of poverty before. But Marmeladov in _Crime and Punishment _speaks of a respectable sort of poverty versus what Hannibal Lecter calls the sort of poverty of trailer camp, tornado bait white trash. Because the pill poppers have their sooted houses on Main Street with one or two meth labs where the druggies cannot even dream of being Walter White. The tramps sit on the corner, trying to make it to Louisville perhaps so they can honesty sell their sluttery. And they all smoke in a town that once made its living on the tobacco they ruin their lungs with. But their souls are what are really being ruined, I think. It’s like a blackness, the blackness that has sooted the pill popper houses, runs through the city like poison gas.

Alas, poor Bloomfield. I knew her once Mamaw…


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## Plasticweld (Jan 8, 2015)

I like this, what a snap shot of your town and the way you perceive it.  I am convinced that towns grow, shrink and then disappear in one form or another on  a routine bases.  In New England there are all sorts of towns that used to be.  You can see it in the old mansions and buildings on Main Street.  Most fall into dis-repair and you have to use your imagination to see the grandeur that once was. 

I have always assumed it to be a New England thing and not something typical of south.   Here people leave all the time, they head south. 



Thanks for sharing, the work flows well and is very descriptive and makes for interesting reading...Bob


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## wainscottbl (Jan 8, 2015)

Plasticweld said:


> I like this, what a snap shot of your town and the way you perceive it.  I am convinced that towns grow, shrink and then disappear in one form or another on  a routine bases.  In New England there are all sorts of towns that used to be.  You can see it in the old mansions and buildings on Main Street.  Most fall into dis-repair and you have to use your imagination to see the grandeur that once was.
> 
> I have always assumed it to be a New England thing and not something typical of south.   Here people leave all the time, they head south.
> 
> ...



I have a friend from SoCal who loves New England. He moved there for a job. Anyway, he loves the different cultures of different American regions. He prefers New England, despite being rather conservative, and the idea that the Yankees tend to be liberal. Of course I think to those on the West Coast, New England is conservative and reserved. It is romantic  though. A lot of American history there. Literary  history is very deep there! It's an American writer's pilgrimage. There used to be something called ghost towns, but in the modern era towns to not become ghost towns, but sort of just run down.


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