The Urban Soup (Part III)

Today it was more like miso soup. I have always been intrigued by miso soup: the little bits that swirl and eddy at every movement of spoon or chopstick, resembling the clouds of Jupiter, instigating many discussions of chaotic behaviour, many discussions trailing off long into the night. (Ah, if only!)

The miso soup also has larger pieces floating around, not subject to the chaos and indeterminacy of the smaller pieces. Large pieces push the collective currents of the small into certain configurations. So it is with cities: hundreds of confident parades sweep our streets; billboards trumpet the secret ambitions of marketing executives; food trucks on side streets betray the emptiness of their drivers' lives; coffee shops flooded with elementary school children probably visiting the "vibrant" downtown for an art trip, or maybe a geography trip, or maybe a media studies trip. We have our granules of churches clogging up traffic flow on key arterials; we have workmen emptying out sketchy neigbour houses: neighbours whose vice-filled ways denuded our trees long before autumn hit. These pieces do nothing to sort out the chaos that flows all around them; they'll occassionally stick to the spoon (that's why I usually use chopsticks).

Forgive me if I'm not making sense. I've been moping around and I figure only the full disorganized schizophrenic glory of a pointless mixed metaphor can shock me back to the land of the living and the colourful. Speaking of colour, you all need to check this out. Go to the "visual illusion".

Consider: "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are!"