(Self) Transported

While walking in Oakdale, you might cross one person, someone you've likely never met before that likely lives just a block or two down from where you wake and sleep. Your interaction will undoubtedly be awkward, them dressed in sweat pants and being dragged along by a dog they can't seem to let go and you witnessing this in full force and view. As you pass an unnecessarily large illuminated marquee proclaiming the divine existence and authority of THE DIVINE BEING (hereafter TDB), wondering all the while why such a divine being needs that kind of publicity if he/she/zhe were all that divine anyways.

But that's aside from the point, and if you look too closely anyways, you must just be struck by a marauding truck, some monstrous beast of a vehicle that exists nowhere else on the planet except for warzones and this city, and while it careens on by, defying every extant cost-efficient, friction-reducing design and engineering recommendation, one can't help but sympathize - if just for a moment - with how cool it might be. But for every moment, there are ten others that stink of environmental degradation, general noisiness, obnoxiousness and unbridled masculinity. So this is what people think of you.

As dusk wears on, fewer people stroll the sidewalks, and more white and red lights dominate the streets. This is when one must be hyperviligant, observant on all sides of lurking beasts: you never know when one might pounce.

...

For a moment after passing the bike-topic mini-mountain hastily constructed outside of a 7-eleven in anxious anticipation of a slurpee, you recognize something that had been there all along but that from which all of the other sights and sounds had been distracting you: the profound stillness in the air, a cold coming on slowly but not forcibly or meanly, greeting you on your walk home from school or work (or both), casually talking up your flank as you tiredly shoulder the increasingly burdensome bag that you can't seem to empty too quickly of books. But that is your lot, you know, and you accept it, even welcome it. To cafes, to bars, to places where it really isn't socially acceptable to sit and read; even propriety doesn't stand in your way, old friend, you bookish one you.

This is how you end your days, sometimes how you begin your days, and you look forward to its anchoring function in your life, the time when you can think, reflect and ponder, make sense of and order your life, like you order your days with calendars and clocks; if only existential desires might fit the same kind of form. And you try to do that very thing, with varying levels of success. Let's see how it works this time.

Oh how common is such a world.