Thoughts of a Midnight Rambler

People often ask me what it's like to have lived in the same place for so long; I've effectively lived in the same room, rather consistently, for two decades.

Well, I'll tell you: it's not as comfortable as it seems. There's nothing sheltering, easing, or innocent about staying in one place whilst everyone else moves around you, past you, and elsewhere, including just about anyone you ever cared about. It's hermitic -- it's absolutely isolating.

Sometimes.

Sometimes it can be a blast, knowing the contour of the sidewalk, the history of a building, the feeling and memories of some late-night escapade seeping upward from a moist streetscape. You laugh, you see smiles, and you smile back. You listen to a record and you know ever word, every vocal nuance, every missed beat, every record crackle. You look into an old shoebox full of memories you wrote down and forgot about -- but didn't, really. You're home.

Other times, home is downright lonely.

New smiles remind you of other smiles you never see, like you're that one cop, that one solider who's still posted to some outpost somewhere where everyone dies, transfers, or simply disappears into the great, dark nature beyond. You're that last officer on duty; you're locking up premises, meeting the morning shift as the sun comes up and you walk home tired. You meet newcomers, remember your old friends, and then remember the newcomers as they become old and wrinkle into questions: "what's that building? Is this a good bar? Where's that? What are your plans in life?"

Living in one place for a time when none of your peers do the same is eerie. It's an uncanny valley of familiarity, ease, and extraterrestriality. Your sense of self-perception becomes very adult. You, crystal clear, sober as a stick, remain in focus and in place. But everything else is as if trapped behind a badly-made lens; you're stuck in a turnstile door, going round and round, while a filmmaker captures you in regular speed and everyone else in fast-forward. You can't put a name to a place or a place to name because the place is the same and the faces are many; a dozen rainfalls won't wash them away, but all the chiseling in the world won't make them any clearer, either.

The Spring Garden curb, the Barrington bench, the church wall by Pizza Corner, the drive over Magazine Hill; the stones, the blocks, the bars, and the sewers begin to tell you that you're the only stagehand in the production, and the cast has since turned to dust, ghosts, phantoms and apparition, remembered in photographs tacked up on the box office wall.

It's time to move on, stagehand.

But where?

"Place" isn't just form and structure; it is people. And the parade can be disorienting, sobering, and isolating even as it marches in and out of the harbour, out and to the airport, waiting in terminals, staring at arrival times, sipping coffee and sitting on badly upholstered benches. You don't need to remain in one place to understand what an alienating, bizarre, flukey society we live in. Social connections, the lifeblood of human interaction, are sacrificed in the face of professional ones. We trudge off to jobs and bills but do not think of humans. How many friendships out there have been squandered? How many loves lost? I am no alien. Materially, I am in one place. But in spirit and in body I am not. I can leave, walk into the harbour, step onto an airplane, and find someone else's mid-insect, mid-ruler, mid-transit treadmill. And I can keep running.

But would it be any different?

Sometimes, I feel like a nomad who has never left his home. Where is here? And what is this place other than the people who do not live here, or won't tomorrow?

Other times, I perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't give up this life for the world.

Most times I feel both at once.

One thing in life, it seems, can't be expressed by the formulas — and that's the basic dichotomy of it all, the absurdity, the sadness, the hypocrisy and the madness, and the confluence of all that (and more) into a taste and feeling and rhythm and time that makes one feel older, wiser, younger, and more vulnerable all at the same time. It's 2+2 = 5. It's a tired, jubilant sunrise. It's new memories and old memories stacked in shelves. And I suppose it's wonderful nonsense, so long there turns out to be an finish line for the treadmill somewhere over the horizon, and bit of luck for me to get there.