Geoff Carter 4 January 2010 Seattle 820 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Since moving to Seattle from Las Vegas in 2002, I have come to enjoy sleeping. Used to hate doing it: I felt like the rest of the world was lapping me during my four to five nightly hours of compulsory, ah, regeneration. I hated going to bed at night and I hated waking up in the morning, and for a number of years I endeavored to push those two events as close together as I could get them. The easiest way to do that was to sleep as little as I had to, and I pursued that dream until my heart literally began to give out.

Moving away from Las Vegas and back into the realm of clocks, I remembered how much I enjoyed sleeping — particularly the act of “dozing off.” Being neither here nor there. Sometimes I doze off on the rush-hour bus from downtown Seattle to Ballard, relishing the feeling of almost-there for minutes at a time before the driver takes a hard left and some Lincoln-bearded programmer toting an REI backpack inadvertently grasps my shoulder for support. It’s tough for me to shut my mind off, but in those moments my mind shuts off, and it’s better than the best drunk I’ve ever had.

I have a folder on my iPod called “Anime for Commuters.” It’s filled with dreamy symphonic music from animated Japanese dramas, mostly by Yoko Kanno — she’s brilliant, you ought to look her up — mixed with pieces by Durutti Column, Aphex Twin, Nick Drake and a bunch of mellow others. It makes my interminable wait for the 28 Express or the 17 Local into something almost romantic. That’s usually when I experience — or suffer, depends on the day I’ve had — my bouts of “city love,” those times when I feel blessed to be standing in the drizzling rain in the middle of Seattle’s downtown core. Sometimes the sun peeks through and bathes the city in bioluminescent blues and greens; it’s like standing in an undersea world. You’ve never seen anything more beautiful. Some carry religious tokens, talismans. I have the music of the Durutti Column and Yoko Kanno to provide emotional underscore these episodes of perfect solace.

And they’re known only to me. Honestly, I’m doing a terrible job of describing these moments to you. I feel like Linus Van Pelt, with his security blanket neatly folded and tucked under his baseball cap.

I’m happy that I’m able to talk to you about this. I don’t write about these “City Love” episodes in my own blog any more. The last time I elaborated on these urban illusions at length, some anonymous fool butted in and accused me of going New Age. Far be it from me to allow some jackass to break my rhythm, but he made me leery of myself for a solid week. Terrible thing, not to trust your own emotions — to wonder if you drank some zealot’s Kool-Aid, and had your wiring messed with while you slept on the bus.

But then I let it go. He doesn’t know where my head’s at. He hasn’t had my experiences. He hasn’t been to the places I’ve been, and if he has, he hasn’t seen them the way I’ve seen them. He doesn’t savor an apple the way I do, or dream my exquisite and torturous dreams. He’ll never know how much joy and pain and lust and despair and the … the wonderful nothingness I feel in those moments waiting for the bus, adrift in a galaxy of lights refracted through raindrops, with only my earbuds anchoring me to the ground. His taste of the world is different than mine, and for that, I feel sorry for the guy.

I’ll bet he doesn’t know from sentimentality, either. One of the many, many delightful things about getting older is discovering what sentimentality really is. I’m usually the last person my friends call when they have a problem; I’m of no practical use to anyone, having no definitive advice to offer to problems legal, existential or romantic. But I do have friends who call me when they’re feeling sentimental, and I love that.

In the right mind, I can get sentimental over just about anything, which is probably another reason I’m so much in love with cities. I walk through Uwajimaya and I think of browsing the roadside vendors in Bangkok. I see the lights of Vegas on TV and I remember the night I watched the first twenty minutes of Akira over and again, then drove to the Strip to recreate it futuristic images using my Nikon. My sense of wonder is a living, evolving entity, and it’s matured to the point that when there are no new experiences at hand, it will find new ways of interpreting and celebrating the familiar ones.

I don’t have much more to say about this. Truth to tell, I’m not sure I had much to begin with — just this feeling, this heart full of purpose and longing and good sadness. I wish I could share these feelings when they actually hit me, but I’m not about about to make you drink my Kool-Aid. You have your own places to go, your own otherworlds to inhabit. Some time you’ll have to tell me about your twilight places, maybe tell me which bus I need to get there.

I’ll just say this last thing. I’m happy to be alive, happy to have apples and anime, and happy to fall asleep and to awaken. These are all good things.

- Geoff Carter