Edge City Is A Place

by Dennis Green

Edge City is a place without minarets or church spires. A place where big, pagan bonfires burn throughout the night. A place without commerce or currency, where goods and services are bartered, or simply stolen by raiders on horseback.

Edge City is a place without locks on your doors, or home alarm systems. Where the only things of real value are in a person’s heart. Edge City is not on the cutting edge, it is the very blade itself.

In Edge City, the dream shall never die. But the people do, graciously and gratefully going to their eternal rest. And all of them, even the least of them, are honored in their passing and remembered for what they have done. In Edge City, there are no preachers, or ministers or priests. Everyone is a brujo, a sorcerer of the first rank.

And everyone is a writer here in Edge City. We know that we need to write just to know what we’re thinking and feeling, what stories we have lived and heard and witnessed, what forces come coursing through us from the farthest reaches of the universe.

In Edge City, there is no giving or taking in marriage. People who pledge their troth do so privately, and part of that pledge is to follow their heart’s true desire, keeping family and community out of their business entirely. Men and women are discouraged from regarding one another as property or to expect their relationship to generate any economic advantage for either party. If they part ways, they are expected to be independent and stand on their own two feet.

In Edge City, the very notion of private property is unappealing. All land is public land, and people who choose to dwell in more permanent housing than teepees, campers and lean-tos are deemed squatters without homesteading rights of acquisition. The natural acquisitive instincts common to human beings are satisfied instead by the collection of various works of art, handcrafted goods and ancient artifacts acquired through bartering and trading of goods and services. The community store in most neighborhoods is the local trading post.

As a result, in Edge City, people who make things with their hands are highly honored and most successful in the eyes of the community. Painters, sculptors, weavers, jewelers, carvers, knitters, seamstresses, musicians, piano tuners, dancers, actors, makeup artists, set builders, augmented reality software engineers, and poets are among the most highly-regarded members of the tribe. Since everyone is a writer, the work of the poet. the word picture, is acknowledged as the most difficult and most highly-prized.

In Edge City, usury is forbidden, charging or expecting interest of any kind. Since there is no currency, larger purchases are made over time, using bartered installments of goods or labor, but no fee may be charged for allowing these deferred payments. No stocks, no bonds, no derivatives.

You see, ultimately, Edge City is not a place at all, any more than Noh Time is a moment. They are states of mind, outside the ordinary limits of our perceptions, un-places and un-times I love to visit when 3211 Otis Drive and 2010 are too much with me. And sometimes, just for fun, just for the hell of it, which isn’t a place either.

©2010 Dennis Green