The setting of Mayor of Kingstown is as much a character in the series as are the humans with acting roles. The town is bleak in every way. Individual houses appear to have been neglected for years, after having arisen from the dirt as brand new minimally habitable shacks. Public buildings, too, are in various states of decay and disrepair. Fading paint, chipped bricks, litter in gutters, and the bent and broken signs tell the town’s ugly history and predict its equally hideous future. Each scene is gritty and brown and grey, as if the video camera’s lens was smudged with dust and oily fingerprints. The town’s main attraction is a large old prison, deteriorating as quickly as it companion public buildings. The largest employers—implied but not explicitly expressed—are the prison system, the law enforcement community, heavy industry, and a shadowy “mediation economy,” all of which are infused with a necessary collusion between people who consider their roles embarrassing, demeaning, and hopeless. Without all its supportive corruption to grease the wheels of illegal or immoral commerce, those distasteful Kingstown attributes would swallow the people, leaving them nothing but scraps that remain; failure after failure after failure.
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As I ponder what I’ve just written about the setting serving as a character for a piece of fiction (written or video or whatever) production, I wonder whether I would be able to write a “personality” for a setting that would adequately support the fundamental theme of the story…but which would not be so obvious as to be a slap in the face of a reader? That’s one longer-than-necessary sentence. I have begun to write such a character/story. But it’s extremely slow in coming. I think I was in my sixties when I started writing it.
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After almost every fairly powerful windstorm, many of the streets in the Village are littered with broken limbs and branches. The places on the streets onto which the trees shed their storm-battered appendages reveal how rotted and decayed the trees were. Light-colored “sawdust” is visible on the street all around the broken branches. Recently, during an especially fierce night, we heard a loud noise, as if a branch had fallen onto our house. When we were able to see outside, the next morning, we saw at least two trees whose trunks had broken at least ten feet above the ground. The rotting upper part of the trunks could have caused some serious damage had they hit the house directly. Our good fortune was that the sound we heard was (probably) a branch just brushing the roof.
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A few days ago, we saw a mangy coyote crossing the street in front of us. It was the first coyote spotting in several months; maybe longer. The rarity of rabbit sightings obviously correlates in some way with the fact that coyotes have been seen around the woods around us. Coyotes, carnivorous beasts that they are, have an appetite for small dogs and cats and any other creatures that can overpower them. For that reason, we do not willingly let Phaedra out of the house. Lately, though, she has begun slipping out whenever a door is opened; she is far faster than I realized, making it tough to stop her from leaving. But, she is willing to let mi novia pick her up and bring her inside.
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I feel a tad achy, probably due to my sleep position last night or to sitting on the loveseat, watching television, for too long. My approach to the matter will involve satisfying my sweet tooth with a tiny treat, followed by a return to that bed and “napping” in a more comfortable position.
