Recently in path, divergent Category

In my dream, it was some 10,000 years from now, and I was peering out of the window of a craft making its orbital descent into Titan--a colonized planet and moderately terraformed, but still greenish yellow and cold, its cities barely glimmering in the permanent dusk of midday sunshine.

I begin to have a greater sympathy for those "agitators" who feel that modern construction is detrimental to a city. I have always felt a certain attraction to the cleanliness and safety of box dwellings--large apartment towers with gleaming glass and steel. Of late, however, I've been rummaging through the detritus of our local alleyways, finding surprising corners of beauty and personality. Suddenly I mourn the seldom seen brick and timber ramshackle structures, with their greenery and weird graffiti poking from between the sandwich of industrial lots and extemporaneous parklands (also known as empty lots).

There's a certain strength in poverty, a sensual creativity born of neglect and need that cannot be satisfied in any way by the controlled power and grand management of "commercial property," with its multiple owners and shareholder values (to be uttered in the same tone as 'family values').

And now I find myself looking for a place to lay my head. I am growing increasingly less tolerant of lovely foyers and grand elevator lobbies. The swanky concierge and rental agents really don't make it worthwhile for me to spend that 4,000 dollars each month for my one bedroom box with its view of other boxes. Mind you, the suburbs are completely out of the question, but one wonders sometimes how the city lost its heart. I'm going to suppose that it has to do with some tax advantages of building a structure as apartments, then flipping it en masse to condominiums as soon as some specified term expires--ratchet one up for the attraction of 'wealth' to the city's tax brackets...

There are amazing alleys here, Bluxome, Tehama, Natoma--all South of Market (SOMA), where industrial architecture, with its severity, meets the decay of urban America in a splendid fusion. Metallic siding and potted palms peek from brick rubble left over from 1906, and geraniums grow in front of a graffiti-tagged wall, its message a simple one of an individual seeking meaning as it conveys in every metropole everywhere. It isn't that I desire a return to bucolic, choleric ghettos, but to find "my" space, where the tagging speaks to me, doesn't involve a search through shiny brochures with stock photographed racially non-descript yuppies enjoying their drugs of choice together.

I have this recurrent, waking dream. I sit, well suited, at a small table at a cafe in the south of France. A cup of the blackest coffee is served to me--it is perfect, limpid and hot in plain white porcelain. My collar is not too tight, and my bright tie reflects the sunshine. The sparkle of the nearby Mediterranean flashes in my eyes.

I gaze upon a stone village, long-ago eclipsed by the larger towns around. Clean and well kept, with colourful stuccoed walls and shutters, the village is dominated by a cool plaza with playing fountain and gnarled old trees.

No angry Algerians here, just delightfully absurd locals--scions of long inbreeding and geographic isolation. They are surprisingly savvy on matters of essential humanity. The baker sweats at the oven, the Dairy's smell no longer impacts the cheesemaker. There's an odd old woman who sells lingerie from her living room...