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. 

Behind the word

   Looking out of one of my living room windows, I see at a street sign I've viewed many times, both from the front and the back. The sign reads, "Arguello", with white letters on a green background with white trim along the edges. This is the name of the street where I live. The sign is probably meant to inform people driving or walking east on Cornwall Street that they have just arrived on Arguello Boulevard, but looking at it from the back, as I currently am, it seems that this sign is intentionally keeping things out of view from the people and cars approaching. Visually, it doesn't allow them to see the construction of the sign as I can, or how it is affixed to the light pole that displays it. Beyond the visual, it strikes me as only showing one side of itself, the informational side. Because I live in an apartment behind the writing, I see the sign in a different way, precisely because the word is not visible to me. I see the construction as purely informational, because the word printed on it does not make me forget that I am looking at a sign.
   Thinking about the sign in this way leads me to think about how language functions as I seek to think about and describe myself to myself, and how it leads me to believe that it has no function other than to make my thoughts and feelings concrete. In reality, it seems to me that the words in my brain are not unlike the one printed on this sign. They provide a sense of reality to me about my existence, but they are more tangible than the feelings I am trying to understand. In back of them is a construction invisible even to me, who is supposed to reside there.

An in between place

   If one wants to make contact with another person, whether a friend or stranger, how does one do this? Certainly, they can go for a walk, or perhaps make a transaction in a store. They can go into a coffee shop and look at the people around them when they drink their coffee. They could also sit and look at pictures of people they feel close to that aren't there while drinking their coffee, or go to a drugstore to buy a pack of gum, and talk to someone 200 miles away and the person in front of them at the same time, interchanging between the two. With email and social networking available on people's cell phones, it's easy to connect with people who aren't there without speaking or emoting in any way.

   In my own case, it seems that the more comfortable I become talking to people that aren't in front of me on my smartphone while I am amongst other people, the more skillful I become being in two places at once psychically, or, at being in neither place. It's a strange feeling when I really think about it, to be in between places. I often feel quite related to the world after talking to a good friend on my phone, but while engaged in conversation, I often have a sense of being nowhere, although it seems that I am physically. 

   When I am with my wife or a friend in a restaurant or on the street, and they are on their phones, I often feel like I am not in their world at that time, even though I am in very close proximity to them. Even if they give me some kind of sign to show me that they will be terminating their conversations soon, it's like they're saying to me that I will reappear in their surroundings when they finish their conversations. It's a strange sensation to have one's sense of placement in their own bodies' be determined in part by someone present, but not here. 

North Face jackets

The North Face outlet store, San Francisco

   I recently discovered that The North Face company began in San Francisco in 1966. Is that an amazing discovery? Not really, but really informative for me, as I've been wanting to jot down some thoughts on the abundance of North Face jackets worn by the people of the San Francisco bay area, and have been stymied as to why these garments are so omnipresent in this city I live in.
   I've read that this brand is very popular because the weather in San Francisco is so changeable, being a city of micro climates. That may account for part of this company's success, but I believe that there's another, more determinant reason; casualness.
   San Francisco is a city located in the northern part of a laid back state, of which it may well be the most laid back city. People here like to 'dress down', and it seems to me that North Face clothing is the clothing de rigeur of the laid back. Wearing one of these jackets is like a red tie and dark gray suit for a Wall Street power broker. I know that casually dressed people (of which I am one) probably dislike intensely the idea that they may wear a suit of some kind, but I'm afraid that they do. It's just a casual suit.

Stopped

   I have been fascinated for years by the markings found on the street. Commands, instructions and symbols are just some of the things I've seen below me as I walk or drive. The paintings were done at some point in the past, and although seemingly well thought out and planned when executed, the time elapsed since then has often altered or amended their original designs.

   If pavement needs to be replaced, the new patch often obscures part of the message or markings around it. When a manhole cover needs to be removed, the workers who put it back don't seem to care or notice if it is returned in it's original position, and so the original design is changed. It is in these alterations that I can see the passage of time, and understand, at least temporarily, that people often collaborate without the same goals and work together unknowingly to create something new. Although I find these new markings to be beautiful illustrations of time, I am at the same time disappointed that the cooperation is unintentional. While it is true that I witness cooperation often in my daily life, it strikes me as existing generally to avoid violence, chaos, and usually serves the mundane. When participation is beautiful because it is difficult or hard to name, it is by and large moralized or belittled.