Have you ever been somewhere – visited a city you’d never
been to, stayed the night in a little town on the way to your ultimate
destination, or even just seen a picture of a place you want to go to and
immediately fallen in love with it – just knew you belonged to that place and
that place belonged to you in a sort of symbiotic relationship that makes even
the deepest of love stories seem tame by comparison?
Me neither.
I’ve always wanted it to happen. I have this romanticized
idea that one day I’ll just up and leave Irvine and move to some wonderful city
whose culture will compliment my personality perfectly and inspire me to write
some great American classic like The Great Gatsby, The Godfather, or Ferris
Beuler’s Day Off. I want there to be this perfect place, a place meant for
me, like my soul-mate, but a city. And I always expect it to be somewhere else.
New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Venice, Hamburg. Cause each of
those places has this legendary charm. Your great people come from great
cities. Or at least get there eventually.
But I live in Sunny Southern California; I’ve been to
Manhattan; I stayed for a week in Connecticut; I drove all the way across the country,
from Ukiah, CA to Orlando, FL, seeing amazing cities like San Antonio and New
Orleans; I’ve walked the streets of Seattle at one in the morning. I’ve been to
all four corners of the country and most places in between and the closest I
got to falling in love with a city was when I was stranded for three days in
Mississippi. After we left New Orleans it was getting dark and as we hit the
Louisiana-Mississippi border it started raining. And after about five more
minutes driving in Mississippi it started pouring. Well, pouring actually isn’t
the best word for it. Torrential-downpour-of-some-domestic-animal-way-larger-than-cats-or-dogs
is much more accurate terminology for this particular storm. Anyway, we were
driving through this storm when we realized we needed gas so we pulled of the
freeway. And my friend who was driving, who I shall not name, but you know who
you are, took the off ramp at a speed that was entirely unnecessarily fast and
then, as the inevitable stop sign suddenly leapt into sight, he slammed on his
break in a puddle whose depth must have rivaled that of some man-made lakes. We
lost traction, spun out, hit a curb, and a wheel broke off the car – OFF the car.
We waited for hours for a tow truck driver, who arrived at
the same time as a cop. Now we hadn’t been drinking or anything, but we were
all young, clearly from out of state, my other friend (whom you can see peeing
in a cave here) was vomiting all over the side of the road as a result of
sucking some bug poison off his fingers in an attempt to cleanse them of some
post-car crash Pringles dust, and our car was lying in a ditch on the side of
the road, and so I definitely expected a breathalyzer test or something for all
of us, never mind who was driving. Nothing. The cop didn’t even ask. Not if we
were drinking, not to see our licenses. Nothing. All he, the tow truck driver,
and a hundred people who drove past our wrecked vehicle while we were waiting
for the tow truck driver, did was ask if we needed help. Throughout our entire
three day stretch in Mississippi, which was not a particularly attractive place
(old run down buildings, air so humid a landshark was not just a horrible,
impossible nightmare, but something that was in all likelihood possible, and
just ridiculously hot) every single person we met was friendly to us. It was as
if they actually trusted us. And the environment was amazing. We spent hours
and hours just sitting at the mechanic’s shop chatting with the secretary.
Random people who worked there offered to go out of their way to drive us to
our hotel. We were treated like we were fellow people. Not some sort of foreign
entity that is not to be trusted, as I found was the case in nearly every other
city I’ve been to, with the single exception of the small town I grew up in.
What made Biloxi, Mississippi bearable, and indeed enjoyable, was not some
artistic culture that encouraged me to create, but just people treating other
people like people.
In Irvine, which must
be the most unoriginal, least creative place I’ve ever been, I have been far
more productive as a writer than I have ever been previous, due to the people around me
who enjoy my writing and online communities like Nerdfighteria that encourage
me to think and try and improve our world through that thinking. And while I
absolutely hate Irvine for its architecture, city planning, culture, and
corporatization, I think the reason that I dislike Irvine most is because
people are afraid of each other here. We don’t talk to strangers here. We don’t
help other people here. And I’m part of the problem because I don’t actively
fight against it. Louis C.K. pointed it out best I think in his show Louie in regard to his friend’s cousin
asking a homeless person if he needed help with the comment “No, no, he needs
you desperately, that’s not the point. We just don’t do that here.”
I believe that the ‘city soul-mate’ doesn’t exist. Cities
aren’t great because they’re inherently great. Cities are great because people
allow them to be great. The best place I’ve ever been was just that because the
people there treated everyone else like people. If we can begin to treat each
other like we are all the same. Like we all have the same problems, think the
same thoughts, and are just as human as the indeterminate “they” are, then I
think we can make any city great. It’s not about finding places that foster a
loving environment; it’s about creating that environment ourselves. My friend Alliey
described this phenomenon as “we are all alone together.”
In conclusion, though I desperately hope I get out of Irvine
after college cause I hate it for more reasons than the one I have just
discussed pretty thoroughly, I don’t believe I will ever just find a place that
will make me happy, cause places don’t make people happy. People make people happy.
And I think we can move onto a world where everyone feels as welcome as they do
in Biloxi, Mississippi if we just remember that everyone else is just like us:
looking for a place where they are accepted for who they are and for someone
who will love them just because they simply are.
No comments:
Post a Comment