Living in the city has taught me a few things, well actually, more than a few things. The most important of which is that I am hopelessly terrible at learning bus routes. I just can’t do it. No matter how hard I try, I’m pretty much shackled to this new smart phone of mine. Catch the 16, get lost. Ride the 44, miss the stop. I stick to walking as much as I can, with the excuse it allows me to see the city more.
White lies all around.
Though on these walks I have encountered quite a few characters here and there: Underpaid clerks, juggling runners, library-hopping intellectuals, dancing poets, musician squatters, suave businesswomen, and revolutionary street artists. All of which shared a bit of their lives with me—emphasis on the word “bit”. Each stopped, sat, or wandered with me while telling me a bit about what makes them Themselves. Those subtle understandings that are both mildly fictional and deeply penetrating. Tokens of a person beneath clothe and flesh.
And in a city of 650,000 or more, these quivers in preconceptions mean so much more. They accumulate, in a way, once you begin to take them into account. Sociological demographics begin to seem devalued, not in their policy implications rather in their personal origins. The streets emerge as a vibrating force of life. No longer are they merely the concrete assertions of an anonymous authority.
For instance: I met this City Planner right outside of city hall while I was trying to find a bus stop (with little luck). I turned and asked him for directions, and he looked up from his smartphone with a look of knowledgeable business expertise mixed against city-unease.
“Sorry, what did you ask me?”
“Do you know where I can catch the 16? North?”
He pointed with his whole hand like a restaurant host. I chose to pry with more questions—asking him, at once, why he looked so uneasy and what he was doing outside city hall. In retrospect these questions may have been a bit aggressive but he answered kindly.
“It’s the city, people don’t really respond well to strangers. And I work here.”
“What do you do here?”
“I’m a community space planner… or that’s my title at least.” He went on to explain that this title meant little more than to establish the ideology behind his repetitive job of organizing resources and people to work towards ‘probably’ getting something done. That something, he elaborated, was to plan community spaces to be more conducive to community organizing.
(Pealing away a few layers of complicated bureaucratic jargon, I found out that he in fact helped allocate more resources for a few city parks nearby my house.)
“…You do what you can…” He spoke as kind of concluding thought, in part to get me to leave. “…I worked to be a better person within the guidelines that were given. So I ended up here. Outside city hall.” He laughed.
I laughed with him and took that as an opportunity to leave without leaving any vestiges of awkwardness (which I often leave in these situations). I couldn’t help but think here was a philosopher of Seattle in the flesh. An ideology, awake to the situation that both produced him and that he was working to create.
Like the poet on the street corner trying to sell his words for a quarter, the city, Seattle, was the scene for these amazing, commanding ideas to take human form. Drifting out of the literature, stripping away the narcissistic fallacies of authors and readers alike, leaving a genuine (if not still a bit fictionalized) expression of life.
These hints of the freckles on our lives show through. On the bus we all hold ourselves in different ways; we sit or we stand, we sit next to the unwashed man or we don’t, we make conversation or we drift through the window inwardly. Some of us frantically check our GPS on our smartphones so we don’t get lost—me.
The bus, shakes not only with the dents in the pavement but also with the very passion that creates our greatest novels, our most immersive films, or our authentic expressions of love.
And walking through the streets of the city I have become better at moving with these subtle rhythms—not good, but better. The generalizations of metropolitan behavior slowly slip away, and the density of this odd, weird, and frantic pedestrian gospel becomes clearer. I begin to rouse from my philosophical dreams and see these ideologies already awake to the interactions around.
