The road is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don’t want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular.
—James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, pg. 131
(Quote from the excellent Geography of Nowhere, like it says. I just finished the book, so I’ll whip up a review for the curious [sooner or later]. Till then, this quote will have to suffice.)