Another in a series of posts that need finally to either die or exit my draft folder by publication. This one was composed sometime in the summer of 2014. -Nate
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I gather myself in the presence of others though not in their company. They pass me by, a harmless goomba on their screen. Rush hour is the quietest. A thousand throbbing glimpses of privacy flash by, a thousand people I need never meet. Rarely one car breaks its windows, and like that horror movie trope, the tv speaks to me: a friend slows down to become human for a moment so quickly again gone, rushed away in the pounding surf.
A lonely mountain, perhaps, is where some simple people seek solitude but I’m too lazy for that or perhaps too near a substitute. I find my quiet in the inhumanity of the car’s deafening rage. It’s not quiet so much I seek perhaps but loneliness in labor far from home, a break in scale, flying to the super- and inevitably sub-human. The best walks aren’t what the urbanists would tell you. They’re too long, at rush hour or in the middle of the night, along highways and train tracks, hopping fences and stepping in shit. They’re death-defying, smelly, lonely, silent and loud.
I crouch beneath an underpass and no one sees me and I am alone.