The experience was a bit odd. It felt a tiny bit as if I had landed from planet New York, where there is danger around every corner and where sidewalks act as sponges for anything dropped, change, cameras, action and ideas.
The neighborhoods I walked through this weekend were like jewelry, placed on purpose onto a soft carpet in the middle of the room. Houses with their doors wide open, cars with their trunks ajar, cats siting by the street watching me walking by as if I were myself a cat and they were watching me on ca-tv.
I felt a bit inadequate. Maybe the doors were open because I was supposed to be in a car. I was not supposed to use my feet to get from one place to the next. Taking a walk in suburbia, especially with not even a bag on my shoulder, I really must have looked like some very strange being. Things were peaceful, nobody attacked.
A little park by the bay was arranged neatly around a cute kind of lake. There was a small island right in the middle. On the island were ducks and geese. The birds seemed to be very concerned with their social status on the island. One poor chap actually had to sleep on the dangerous shore off the island. He had been voted off completely. He was quite ashamed, probably scared as well.
I watched the amusing poultry interaction for a few minutes. I had not brought anything to write or draw and so I eventually got up an decided to take the road up a near hill. ON the table next to me was, in plain sight, a loaded classic nikon photo-camera. The lens was a good one as well. This was a beautiful classic tool.
Next to the camera in the grass, in a carton, there were some jackets, some sort of net. I was for some odd reason worried that somebody might just come by and steal the nice camera. Somebody obviously had left it there, on that stump.
I took one of the jackets and covered the camera with it.
"Excuuusee mee!!!"... there were little humans, somewhere on the hill, in a car, one of them must have been the owner of the camera. I tried to shout back some explanation. I am somehow bad at this kind of explanations though...
I just walked away from the newly combined arrangement. I walked up the hill, and past the people in the car, who avoided looking at me, as if my looks could kill, and i walked up the hill and further up the street, named after some trees, past more, bigger houses wide open, and cars with open trunks. And I imagined the odd things that were probably happening behind, well, not really even behind, these open doors...
And the openness was of course an illusion. It was a bit of a challenge... or maybe not at all. Maybe I had really spent too much time on planet New York City. Maybe in the near future i would find myself right next to a very open door, waiting for somebody to just wander in...
In some ways this site here is a location with wide open doors, isn't it?... doors and windows ajar... and yet it is not as easy as one would think to get to the private chambers... and not many even find them. And even I get lost sometimes. And this is probably an interesting thing to do, just in general. Though I am certainly not sure. I am never sure. And that is probably a really great thing.
