Looking at people we don't know

    I was watching a hockey game on television earlier today, and was fascinated watching what the people who attend these events do when they're there. Hockey fans are pretty well known for banging on the plexiglass that surrounds the ice rink, but what really interested me was that some of them will suddenly stand up when the game has paused near them in an effort to be seen from afar by one of the cameras broadcasting the game. When a person stands, who are they hoping to be seen by? Is it by someone they know are watching at home or in a bar, or is it just to be on television?
   If I choose to watch television, or read a newspaper, or look at a blog online, chances are that I will see someone's face that I have never met personally, and when I look at them, there is generally a recognition that the fact that I am seeing them outside of my immediate physical space (for example, the street I may be walking down) is 'normal' and acceptable; in other words, it doesn't shock me or seem strange. But what if I were to see someone on television that I know? Why should this seem so unusual?
For me, the strangeness would be that my personal experience with someone interrupts the fact that I have become used to having relations with images of people that I don't know, and the artificiality of that relationship becomes apparent when the physical and represented in front of me. It's like seeing a celebrity in line at the grocery store that you've seen on television many times; you know that they must really exist outside of the television, yet the reality of their existence is absolutely shocking. The space between the represented and the actual has become, for me, a space where emptiness and surreality allow me to be human, and to feel temporarily free.
   To be 'recognized' by strangers, in front of other strangers, and somehow still to feel real to myself, is an idea that I am truly a fan of.

Disorienting landscape

Morongo Valley wind turbines seen in a non-disorienting way

  

When I am in unfamiliar surroundings, I sometimes feel disoriented. I might not know which direction I am traveling, and at times can even feel unsteady on my feet. I dislike these feelings intensely, and because I suffer from bouts of vertigo on (luckily) infrequent occasions, I have learned to recognize the signs of disorientation coming, and have acquired certain techniques to deal with the effects. I've also learned that once I feel unbalanced, I can really do very little about it. 

   I recently returned from a vacation in my adopted state of California, and while near Joshua Tree National Park, I was driving on Twentynine Palms Highway from the town of Joshua Tree to Palm Desert when I experienced an intense feeling of disorientation, but this feeling was different from any previous I had experienced. It was a feeling of weightlessness, rather than dizziness, and an intense feeling that I was in a place that was so foreign, it was as if I was on a new planet, with different laws of gravity governing it. The feeling seemed to be brought on by the experience of the nearly pitch-black road I was on, from the strange plant life doting the sides of the road whizzing past me in the periphery of my headlights, and by the small, flashing red lights barely illuminating the hundreds of wind turbines covering the landscape around me.  As the road descended and wound back and forth, my car on it, these small lights actually seemed to move and float, and the blades of the windmill, though virtually invisible, must have registered a kind of slicing terror within me. 

   I have never experienced a feeling like that when not under the influence of a mind-altering substance, and the only substance available to me on that day was the world I inhabited. 

Memory city

   Yesterday, I returned from a vacation to New York City, the place where I was raised, and where I spent the first 42 years of my life. I say that I was on vacation there, rather than visiting my hometown, because each time I return it feels like more of a vacation. This is partly because the longer I am living in another place, the more that new place feels a little bit more like home, but I think that it is also due to the fact that each time I visit, New York City seems more and more unlike the New York City I knew. Of course, not all of New York City has changed as fast as parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, for example, but those places are the most familiar to me

   I have always thought of myself as a New Yorker, no matter where I've lived, though now it is difficult to think of myself in that way. My idea of New York doesn't seem to exist in reality now, and it's quite strange to feel that the place that I am from still exists, but seemingly in an alternate way, known yet unknown to me. To no longer be able to physically visit what is in my memory is sad to me, but it also feels liberating to know that my ideas about myself can change, like the city where I was raised has.

Detail from a cellar in Soho

In space

   The photograph above is from the astronomy picture of the day, a website presented by NASA that I look at regularly. I know very little about astronomy, but I find the idea of the otherworldly very beautiful, and the photographs often visualize this nicely, though rarely do they ever show people, as this one does. The image is not meaningful to me because it contains a figure, but rather because this being looks so unreal and out of place in it's landscape, ungrounded, as I often feel. The environment appears cold and barren, yet also inviting in the solitude and quiet I imagine there, away from all other things.