Nomex

Growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, it didn’t take long for
wanderlust to set in. One of the things that my similarly minded friends,
and I noticed and despised was a profound
lack of ambition in the residents. There is and was a large
petrochemical  complex in Lake Charles, and much of the motivation
was to get out of school, and “...get a job at the plants.”We called
these people sloths, not for the sake of the jobs that they aspired to,
but for the lack of any other higher goal at such an early age.
Olin, Firestone, Cities Service, Hercules, and PPG were the cities on
a hill, the place to which you arrive. Now I have seen more of the
world and know that most cities have a similar industrial corporate
mentality, whether the goal is Boeing, Kellogg, Steelcase, Busch, or
even some government agency, it is all the same...but I still think that
in Lake Charles this phenomenon is more insidious, more
genetically encoded. As for the connection to this photograph, the
costume is a Nomex jumpsuit originally issued by PPG industries, and
bought for 75 cents at a Lake Charles Goodwill  Thrift Store
on a recent visit.