I’m writing this from the outside edge of the Minneapolis suburbs, almost at the point where suburb leaves off and rural area begins. To illustrate: Across the road from my parents’ neighborhood stands a farmhouse, complete with weathered red barn, guinea fowl and goats that wander the ditch, pensively gnawing scraps of fencing.

This is unremarkable; you guys don’t care about my neighborhood any more than I care about yours. What I find interesting is how out-of-place the farmhouse looks these days.

It used to have a farm around it, like you’d expect. Now it has an elementary school and a water treatment plant on its left, smug blocks of tawny brick, indistinguishable from one another except for their signs. The farmhouse’s right side is now a vast subdivision of beige houses, the kind where all tile is ivory, and the finished basement contains a really nice treadmill.

It’s not only that. Every corner seems to have a new strip mall: coffee shop, pet groomer, Curves for Women, greeting-card store. If not a new strip mall, a gas station with ever-more-digital pumps, even if this corner already has three gas stations.

If not a gas station, a stoplight. There’s a SuperTarget now, looming over a section of freeway where the only previous reasons to exit were to buy night crawlers and cut your own Christmas tree.

Parenthetically, why does Target need to be super? Will it protect the other stores by using its x-ray vision to give villains a hotfoot? What would happen if I walked in with a pocket full of kryptonite?

I’m probably being a curmudgeon. There’s no reason development should make me sad. It’s not as if I used to play color tag in the vacant lot next to the freeway or got my first kiss beneath a stop sign that is now a traffic light.

Many of my favorite memories take place in buildings. And I do, in fact, believe people should be allowed to own houses and businesses, and on the off chance I buy one of the two someday, I’ll want somewhere to put it.

Capitalism, free enterprise, good. And I shop at Target. It’s cheap. I just wonder, as the green places and the empty places are devoured by shiny, identical buildings, where it can possibly end.

Come to think of it, I wonder that about a lot of things. I’m the kind of person who, on a promising date, spends half the evening figuring out which heart will end up broken and when. Maybe not a productive method of thought.

As for the development, I figure it can go until we’re living in a movie set in the future, subsisting on vat-grown algae while the soulless dystopia rages outside, while the gangs of pollution-mutated orphans loot the houses of the dead amid trash-can fires, while the sun roasts us all slowly and our oxygen leaks into space.

If we try, I’m sure we can furnish a strip mall and accompanying parking lot for every acre of farmland. I don’t think that’ll happen. I like to think the human race is smart enough not to annihilate itself. (All evidence to the contrary.)

But there has to be an ending somewhere, doesn’t there? And that’s the only one that seems likely, based on current trends.

What about the near-continuous barrage of advertising in our society? Where will that end? During the football game I watched bits of today (not that I know who was playing), the network superimposed computer graphics on the field so it looked as if corporate logos were painted on the grass.

Does the network lose revenue for every second they’re not hyping a sponsor? Are the football players instructed not to run through the ad areas for fear of ruining the illusion? Can’t we all just wait for the commercial break? How long before corporations are approaching pregnant women to buy the rights to ad space on the babies?

I wish I knew where we’re heading — if we’re experiencing entropy or clinging to a pendulum. It seems to me that in some ways our world is zooming out of control at such a rate that only a headlong crash will stop it.

But if that’s the case, will the crash destroy us or just ricochet us back in the other direction? I don’t know. Nobody knows. This kind of philosophizing probably has no place in a daily newspaper.

I can hear the goats across the road; they sound perfectly happy, and chances are the world won’t be ending anytime soon. It’s just frustrating not to know how anything will turn out. Hell, I can’t even think of an ending for this column.

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.