The title is, of course, not referring to the Who song “Fiddle About.”
Whenever I have a half-hour of spare time on my hands—enough time to do something small, but not enough time to begin a major project—I tend to fiddle with things on my computer. I sort files and throw away useless ones. I get on the blog or the website and tweak the layout. Nothing huge or time-consuming; nothing significantly creative. Just something that’ll kill a brief bit of time.
I’m sitting in the wonderfully air-conditioned Mocha House in Vacaville, looking out the window at the shopping center’s equivalent of fiddling with things. For some reason that never makes any bloody sense to me, they’ve decided to take certain little portions of the street, rip out the asphalt, and replace it with bricks.
Most of the cities in Solano County, California have decided to renovate their downtown areas. The current fad is to make them look old-fashioned… but not really. Y’see, in California in the 1890s they looked a lot like old Western movies. I’ve seen the photos: Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks, wood and brick buildings (back then they didn’t know how to build earthquake-proof buildings like they do now), and dust, mud, and horse feces everywhere. Any automobiles were given a speed limit of 10 miles an hour because of all the dust they generated. Any towns that have an Old West downtown look like novelty tourist spots, like Old Sacramento. So the only towns that do this are tiny, near-extinct Gold Rush towns that can’t attract any business otherwise.
The rest of them, like Vacaville, have created this kind of faux old-fashioned feel to them. The buildings are renovated with enough old-fashioned touches to resemble something that’s indistinctly old; from sometime in the past, but no actual historical period. Lots of decoration, but no obnoxious Victorian gaudiness; lots of bronze and brickwork; and for some reason, red concrete sidewalks and those stupid bricks at every crosswalk.
Don’t they realize that bricks break? Don’t they realize they’ll be replacing those bloody things every decade? Don’t they further realize that nobody has ever paved their streets with bricks before the late 20th century? Bricks cost too much. Before asphalt, there were cobblestones, gravel, concrete, and in some parts of the U.S., boards.
It’s not really about authenticity anyway. It’s about the illusion of age. Actual age is inconvenient; like I said, those old buildings weren’t earthquake-proof and are constantly in need of repair. Fake age is the thing today, much like fake youth is so popular among socialites.
So the shopping center, which is less than a decade old, is adding some fake age to its environment.
…Or maybe, ironically, the developers are recognizing a new trend of putting bricks in the driveways and is getting on board with the fad. I can never tell anymore.