JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2006
Observations
While Attempting to Lurk
I spend a significant portion of my
time attempting to find deserted places wherein I can walk and think about a)
myself, b) nature and c) not the wretched, intrusive goons who comprise 99 percent
of the human species.
There’s a grand garden cemetery near
my home; a lovely arboretum, too. They’re considered giant back yards for
crapping, wildlife-scaring dogs by the overprivileged, child/slave-substituting
set.
There are charming, brick-and-gaslamp
streets around town. They typically contain prototypical East Coasters who will
slam head-on into you; people wandering under the influence of cell phones;
joggers with iPod Doppler effects; beggars; cars parked on the sidewalk with
impunity; and/or someone wearing enough perfume to evoke a bad day at
The deserted places, of course, do
not exist absolutely. All is in flux, everything is under exploitation, and
people will always pop up where you least expect, or accept, them.
But desertion does exist for brief
times—on a sapling-shrouded glacial ridge, on a street mantled by dusk and mist
from freshly spent rain. When I search long enough, those moments find me.
And then, do I have my exquisite,
gem-like thoughts; poignant, nameless emotions; incisive yet wonderstruck
observations of the cosmos?
Yeah, you bet I do. But mostly I
think the aimless, disjointed thoughts that follow, just like I do the rest of
the time.
Sigh.
The Birth of Fascism
On a sunny summer day several weeks
ago, I was downtown with a fast-food lunch in hand, looking puma-like for a
safe place to eat it. I discovered a relatively thin berm of grass in the shade
of a church, elevated above the sidewalk by a wall. It was nice spot, but not
inviting per se—which is why I chose it.
I nearly made it through lunch
pleasantly enough, with my book and a couple of sparrows as company. Then two
women arrived and sat on the edge of the wall, within 10, perhaps even 8, feet
of me, talking, violating every precept of proxemics and otherwise annoying the
hell out of me.
I looked around. The shaded part of
the wall and grassy area was at least 50 feet long and otherwise unpopulated. I
was near one end of it. There were plenty of other sectors they could have
chosen. And yet there they were, right there.
“But I’m right here! Why?!” I
thought in protest.
Then I realized I had answered my
own question, and was gazing upon the paradox of pioneering and the death of
revolutions.
Epistemology
We can never know more than we can
imagine, but we can imagine more than we know.
Architecture, Tenuous and
Tenebrous
One of the nice things about being a
poorly socialized doofus is that nobody ever told me it’s hokey to find
melancholy in strolling past houses at twilight.
I like their sense of mysterious
other lives, other ways, their safety and their strangeness. I pay them mind.
I’ve been around old houses my whole
life. I tend to think of them as solid, permanent, ancient, even in this era of
two-by-fours and Tyvek.
But over the past year or so, the
opposite reality has begun to intrude on my naivete: how short buildings last.
It’s 30 years before major renovations, if you’re lucky. People tear down
20-year-old structures without a thought. Even on the grand old houses that
remain, how quickly did the decorations and fillips wear down? Certainly before
my time; but also, I now hazard to guess, within that of their original owners.
Constructing a house or an even
larger building is hard, complex work. It establishes a home for a family or an
institution. Its completion is considered a triumph for the laborers and the
owners alike.
And yet, how rapidly they decay, how
even more quickly we demolish the vast majority of them.
I’ve noticed this firsthand thanks
to my own ever-increasing age, which perhaps is on my mind as I contemplate
this architectural disintegration and disregard.
But there’s another, vaguer yet more
familiar feeling as well—a sense that somehow I have misread the builders’
intent, and that there is darkness in it.
Some houses are haunted, at least
according to the facile ghost junk that fills entire cable channels. Haunted
houses are always ramshackle houses, which perhaps speaks to the melancholy of
such things.
But I think it speaks to something
else as well. We had a “haunted house” when I was a kid, of course—a decaying,
pine-veiled Victorian with terrifying dogs outside and an elderly couple living
in just a couple of the rooms inside. Back then, that was just “spooky.”
Every town has a house like that. There
was just a story in the news about an
That’s another perspective that
changes with age. You get a better handle on horror. Some houses are indeed
haunted—by poverty.
Rooftops bring me much cheerier
thoughts. On flat-topped apartment buildings and factories, you can see those
ventilation pipes capped with a ribbed cylinder slowly rotating under whatever
mysterious vapors or heat rises from within.
Those things, whatever they may be
called, along with water towers, were staples of “Spider-Man” comic books, and
still symbolize to me their air of gritty freedom. (Perhaps in latter days
those perpetual-motion vents remind me of a more realistic superhero,
Ninjalicious, and a more concrete brand of freedom, “Infiltration.”) In the comics, rooftops
were so high they were invisible, so industrial they were desolate.
They were desert places, and superheroes
always perched on them to think.
1 Reported by Associated Press, Aug. 24,
2006.
Posted Sept.
6, 2006.