Scribbles:Sidewalk Shaman
Three AM is best, when the streets are as bare as they are going to be. After the drunks have gone home, before the earliest of early risers are getting ready for work. The streets are bare and silent under the streetlights. But you can feel it - the streets are still moving.
The trails of countless metal beasts still linger in each lane. Juggernauts of motion, fuelled by crucibles of fire and air in their bellies with one purpose. They exist to move. And after the exhaust has dissapaited into the air, and the minute droplets of oil have soaked into the road, the purpose, the destiny of motion remains. It builds, layer on layer.The roads are rivers of intent. They are man-made ley lines. Ribbons of black and gray impulse with yellow lines down the middle that pulse like the veins and arteries of the living city.
Most people just ride that current, off to their day-to-day dramas. John Q Public unknowingly jumps onto those currents, gets washed away in them and feeds them, until the arrive at their destination. 'Driving' is a bubble of metal and fiberglass on a deluge of energy that is neither here not there, but on the way. Commuting is limbo with talk radio and cup holders.
The sidewalk is the boundary between the road and the parcel. It is the threshold between the purgatory of motion and the churches, the businesses, the plazas and the fields in which living exists. The in-between of the in-between, it is the most liminal of all places in the modern age. For those who know the way, the sidewalk is the bridge between all worlds.
I walk the sidewalks. I step from one street to the next. New York, Babylon, Agartha, Iram, Atlantis, Dylath-Leen - I've been to them all. There is no road I cannot reach.
The city is full of those that fall between the cracks. The homeless guy who everyone thinks is crazy because they can't see the spirits he is talking to. The ghosts of the jumpers who realized, the moment before they hit the ground, that they wanted to live. The troll villages living underneath the largest bridges. The chick who saw God at a rave, only to discover she'd been claimed by one no one has ever heard of. The totems of Gridlock, of Hardcore, and of ROI that are trying to reach out to the people who feed their existence everyday. My job is to be there for them. These are my people.
I am a brother in the Pact of Asphalt and Wire. I am a disciple of the mysteries of Rebar, Cell Phone, Traffic and Power Grid. I am a sidewalk shaman. My world exists next to your own. My job is to make sure we all stay good neighbors.
