I Walk, Don’t Run, When I Drive I’m on Drugs…

I Walk, Don’t Run, When I Drive I’m on Drugs. The drugs of the information age. Sometimes I walk to school on the weekends. My fiance and I share a 2001 Subaru Outback Limited Sedan. She drives to work, a twenty mile roller coaster ride, while I trek 2.5 miles through South Side Syracuse with heavy equipment in my backback to sit still, quiet, be a ghost in a lab full of interior designers. The students leave their Pepsi bottles, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and wadded up snot rags all over the desks in a lab where they are not supposed to eat or drink around the computers. I don’t give a fuck, but I passive aggressively write a note on the chalk board that says “Don’t Jersey the Lab or I’ll Trash Your Interior”. Mindless iPod listening drones, hopefully I can break it to them they have an inner voice, perhaps a soul. But how am I any different? I’m sitting here, my auditory sense enveloped by Ambient music in what remains of my stolen iPod, the earbuds. Thank you whoever stole that piece of shit. I listen to my surroundings now, the immediate environment is much more inventive and interesting than anything that essentially negates it. But I still keep the earbuds on just to blend in. I can understand listening to music in a car, or on a plane, train, any other high speed mode of transportation. I hope the astronauts are listening to some really heavy classical music as they launch into orbit. The speed and time must be just right to get through three movements of any of the Romantics. But my environment today consists off the resonanting hum of a server box and several Intel Mac Pros. The synthetic heartbeat dulls me.

When I tell someone I walk to school they usually gasp and ask me why. There are certainly other alternatives: the bus, a cab, ride a bike. I’ve found it’s no use to explain it to people. It’s still mysterious to them why I choose to be stuck in the middle ages. I am walking to understand this place. Every piece of geography has unique points of interest that no map can clearly resolve. Why am I so interested? Because the camera and the screen can’t really take me places, only my legs can. TV is no substitute for reality. The news is not a clear representation of anything.

What is really strange about walking in Syracuse is that no one walks on the sidewalks in the Winter. Everyone is willing to risk getting hit by a car and walk in the street after the snow falls. I think this is great because I can claim the sidewalks for my own. I lace up my Goretex boots, put on some winter pants and trudge through snow that no one else dares to walk on. Sometimes I aimlessly wander so if someone were to follow my footprints, they’d hopefully stop and stare and think about the things I do. Sometimes I go down to the water, walk circles around trees, try to act like a real animal. I feel like I am really alive.