Thoughts of you keep me up at night.
When times were tough -- really, really tough -- the only thing which kept me from sliding into oblivion was the hope that I might see you, touch you, once more.
It's painful to be alone.
I try not to live in the past, but memories often color my perception of the present.
You were most beautiful in the morning, without makeup, in pale yellow sunlight.
I measure all my creative musical and artist efforts against yours.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
A City Without Streets
I want to share something important to me.
It's a story about an experience I had years ago, simple and powerful, one that would influence my thoughts about the world in profound and subtle ways (though I didn't know it at the time). Strangely, the particulars of the experience -- the exact time or date, other minute details -- have faded since it happened. But the sensations I felt -- the ideas it sparked in me -- remain vibrantly clear. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it is easy to see now how a seed was planted within me by this experience, one that has only recently started to grow to bloom as I nourished it with greater learning. After I tell this story, maybe the reason I think about cities so much will be more clear, too.
I was a college student at the University of Iowa, living in Iowa City. It was late summer, I think between my second and third years of college. On this particular day, there had been a large race of some type. Half-marathon, 10K, I don't remember for sure now. What is important is that many streets in the city around where I lived were closed off. Some of them were part of the race-route, but it seems to me that other ones were closed for spectators, or maybe some sort of street carnival.
The race itself had been held in the late morning and gotten over some time around noon. It was now later in the afternoon. I was going somewhere (I don't recall where) with a few friends.
So... we're walking along, and I noticed something odd. It took me a few minutes, but I was able to pinpoint it: there were no cars. None. The cars one might have expected were nowhere in sight, because the streets were still closed off from the race earlier in the day. There weren't even parked cars along the street. (Looking back now, I remember other times streets were closed for large events, and I believe the IC police towed cars that weren't moved from the streets to be closed.)
The next part is hard to articulate... except to say that I felt an unusual, beautiful, sense of freedom. Not just because I could walk down the middle of the street with no traffic to worry about, although maybe that's part of it. It was more like a sense of "doing something right," being "all natural," choose whatever hippie euphemism you like. It just seemed very, very COOL.
I had a vision that day. Maybe it is crazy, but it is special to me: I decided that one day, I wanted to build a new city. One without traffic. In my mind, I called it "A City Without Streets" although that name is inaccurate. There were streets, but they had no motor vehicles. They were, rather, paths for pedestrians on foot or on manual-powered devices: bicycles, rollerskates, even skateboards.
Although it was crude at the time, I started to try and imagine how to plan such a city. How would it be laid out? What would it look like? How would public services, particularly emergency services, be handled?
Sadly, I never pursued the idea much more deeply than this at the time, and never committed my ideas to paper, though I think I shared it with a few friends around the Wesley Foundation. The reasons are myriad, but not the least of them were my relative immaturity and my relative busyness. I was young and in college, preoccupied with my own chosen course of study (English Lit.) and my extracurriculars: the Wesley Foundation, getting laid, drinking.
But like I said, the seed was planted. I almost forgot it was there, until I happened to pick up a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. That book was like the first spring rain; it lead to other texts in the same field. In particular, James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, with its expansive historical view of the effect of the automobile on the American economy and American communities in the 20th century, lead to great blooming of that little seed.
So if you've been reading my blog at all over the pst few months (all two of you!), this event is a big part of the reason I have such an abiding interest in cities, design, and the urban landscape. The external event was simple and almost unremarkable; the interior changes wrought by its sparks have been wonderful and almost mystical.
It's a story about an experience I had years ago, simple and powerful, one that would influence my thoughts about the world in profound and subtle ways (though I didn't know it at the time). Strangely, the particulars of the experience -- the exact time or date, other minute details -- have faded since it happened. But the sensations I felt -- the ideas it sparked in me -- remain vibrantly clear. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it is easy to see now how a seed was planted within me by this experience, one that has only recently started to grow to bloom as I nourished it with greater learning. After I tell this story, maybe the reason I think about cities so much will be more clear, too.
I was a college student at the University of Iowa, living in Iowa City. It was late summer, I think between my second and third years of college. On this particular day, there had been a large race of some type. Half-marathon, 10K, I don't remember for sure now. What is important is that many streets in the city around where I lived were closed off. Some of them were part of the race-route, but it seems to me that other ones were closed for spectators, or maybe some sort of street carnival.
The race itself had been held in the late morning and gotten over some time around noon. It was now later in the afternoon. I was going somewhere (I don't recall where) with a few friends.
So... we're walking along, and I noticed something odd. It took me a few minutes, but I was able to pinpoint it: there were no cars. None. The cars one might have expected were nowhere in sight, because the streets were still closed off from the race earlier in the day. There weren't even parked cars along the street. (Looking back now, I remember other times streets were closed for large events, and I believe the IC police towed cars that weren't moved from the streets to be closed.)
The next part is hard to articulate... except to say that I felt an unusual, beautiful, sense of freedom. Not just because I could walk down the middle of the street with no traffic to worry about, although maybe that's part of it. It was more like a sense of "doing something right," being "all natural," choose whatever hippie euphemism you like. It just seemed very, very COOL.
I had a vision that day. Maybe it is crazy, but it is special to me: I decided that one day, I wanted to build a new city. One without traffic. In my mind, I called it "A City Without Streets" although that name is inaccurate. There were streets, but they had no motor vehicles. They were, rather, paths for pedestrians on foot or on manual-powered devices: bicycles, rollerskates, even skateboards.
Although it was crude at the time, I started to try and imagine how to plan such a city. How would it be laid out? What would it look like? How would public services, particularly emergency services, be handled?
Sadly, I never pursued the idea much more deeply than this at the time, and never committed my ideas to paper, though I think I shared it with a few friends around the Wesley Foundation. The reasons are myriad, but not the least of them were my relative immaturity and my relative busyness. I was young and in college, preoccupied with my own chosen course of study (English Lit.) and my extracurriculars: the Wesley Foundation, getting laid, drinking.
But like I said, the seed was planted. I almost forgot it was there, until I happened to pick up a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. That book was like the first spring rain; it lead to other texts in the same field. In particular, James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, with its expansive historical view of the effect of the automobile on the American economy and American communities in the 20th century, lead to great blooming of that little seed.
So if you've been reading my blog at all over the pst few months (all two of you!), this event is a big part of the reason I have such an abiding interest in cities, design, and the urban landscape. The external event was simple and almost unremarkable; the interior changes wrought by its sparks have been wonderful and almost mystical.
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