Urban Ideation

I love cities.

Although I enjoy clean mountain air and a hiking through lakeside trails, I've never felt entirely home in the outdoors. My sense of orientation in the woods is middling, at best. In fact, I was once almost late to my 8th grade graduation because I got lost in the woods near my house. I emerged from the woods near I-95, a few miles from my house sweating and slightly bloody from the saw grass I had waded through during my ill-fated odyssey. I didn't actually get lost, exactly. I just badly misjudged distance and direction.

That never happens to me in cities. In the canyons of concrete and glass, my sense of direction is keen. Even when visiting unfamiliar cities, I adapt quickly to local landmarks and the subtle cues of urban navigation that can point you in the right direction even if you don't know what street you are on.

I've been lucky enough to visit most of the larger, more famous metropolitan areas and I love them all for their own reasons. A litany of what to love about each city might be worth firing off another time, but during this season none loom as large in my memory as New York City.

I only lived there for a few years, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. In wouldn't say it's my favorite city because San Francisco exists, but neither can I deny the logic of our cultural fixation with NYC, with the space it occupies in the collective unconscious. From my first childhood impressions of the city in movies and comic books, the romance of it attracted me before I fully understood what it meant to live in a big city. After all, I was born and raised in one of the more rural enclaves of central Florida. Not too far from Orlando, but if we are thinking of capital-C "Cities" then I don't think Orlando will appear on anyone's list.

I would imagine myself hanging out on fire escapes and on water rooftop water towers. New York dominates the public imagination; it's an ur-city, a platonic ideal of the urban.

Of course, I haven't been since The Plague Year began. Cities, as much as I love them, are not where you want to be in a pandemic if you can help it (and god bless those who cannot and find a way to live anyway). I haven't been to any city, actually. I fled SF at the start of the virus and have been waiting out the pestilence in the piercing sunshine of central Florida. (Oh, wicked gravity, why do you keep pulling me back to where I began?)

I love cities. I miss cities. I especially miss NYC in the fall, but what I find most upsetting is how hard I am finding it to even imagine what it would be like to exist there again.