All the Noise of a City — A Free Write on the Observation of City-Living from a Country-Boy’s Perspective
So, it has come to my attention that I’ve now lived in “the big city” for almost a year now. The big city being, of course, Seattle.
Having been raised out in the country, I never really thought I’d be able to adapt to this environment. And I mean, I haven’t ACTUALLY and FULLY adapted to the place — arguably, I honestly feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of being able to survive in this place. But all the same, I’ve adapted more than I reckoned I would.
The city is loud and busy and just about everything I wasn’t raised to deal with. That’s not to say the country can’t be loud and busy, but it’s a very different kind of noise.
I’m on the roof of my building as I write this. Last night’s frost hasn’t even melted, and already, there is a hum in the air. From the direction of downtown, I can hear the choir of wheels on pavement, with nearer vehicles singing their solos of “Hey, I wanted that lane!” and “I’m a Honda who can’t drive up a hill” and “I’m a big truck in a city that has nowhere to fit me, so I’m going to drive around the block 8 times until I can take two parking spots.” In the far off distance, I can hear the jets of airplanes circling around the city to land into BOEING or SEATAC — a growling hum.
Music from a nearby construction site plays the foreman’s Spotify playlist, as an orchestra of hammers bash their metal-heads and wooden two-by-fours scrape against freshly dried concrete. And if you’re still, behind all that, you can on occasion, hear the sound of birds hidden on neighboring roofs. And that’s neglecting the fact that I have my own music playing on my headphones while having one earbud in to effectively join a voice chat with some of my online friends. That last part is my fault, but that part is the same for almost every person I meet while working the register at my day job.
There is just, so much noise, and that’s just to scratch the surface of my auditory experience here.
In addition to the mere auditory experience, there’s a much more violent kind of noise that plagues this modern style of living — one that claws its way into your life whether you like it or not. It is by no means exclusive to the city, but its prevalence in this place is far more saturated than anywhere else I’ve lived before.
I am, of course, talking about visual noise.
Let’s take a trip downtown to show you what I mean.
So I live in West Seattle. For the folks who have lived in the Greater Seattle area and who still don’t know where that is (because I’ve met more than a handful of folk who don’t know where “West Seattle” is), it is, as you might have guessed, on the WEST side of the city, almost directly west of downtown.
There are two routes to easily to get downtown from here. Either, you start walking toward the sunrise in the morning for about an hour or two, OR you open Google maps to tell you which bus goes where. Most in the city opt for the latter, because understanding when, where, and how the roads work here in Seattle is an ability even the City Transit doesn’t understand, and they’re paid TO understand it. Google, on the other hand, knows all. Praise be to Google because that’s what you need to get downtown with both your kidneys where they’re supposed to be (99% of the time).
After pulling up Google Maps up on my phone, and typing in Pike Place Market, it says the best route to downtown is the C-Line, so I follow it’s directions — walking like packman following those tiny dots on the map until I reach my bus-stop. And then I wait . . . and I wait . . . and I look at my phone for memes, and I wait . . . and OH LOOK THERE’S A BUS — but nope, it’s not the C-Line, so I wait, and I wait . . . and eventually, the bus arrives, and I get on, after feeding the bus driver’s kiosk $2.50, find myself sitting with 18 other folks who are as clueless as I am as to where they’re going.
Now, the inside of this bus is covered in signs and labels and pamphlets — all obvious things, yet all things that, I guess, are necessary when you’re dealing with a crowd of 18 clueless people trying to go downtown — signs like, “Hey, violence hurts people, so don’t be violent!” or “Hey, breathing hurts the environment, so don’t breathe too much!” Admittedly, we lost one of the passengers when we read that sign, but that could’ve been because of a heroin overdose. Either way, he stopped breathing, but no one’s going to check because none of our phones or signs say nothing about this.
We pass several billboards as we commute to downtown — boards promising happiness, money, success. One board even promises happiness, and OH! Minecraft! That’s like, the second closest thing to happiness for some, right? Signs show off successful businesses in the city — the bigger the sign, the bigger the business’s success. We pass by a sign for BOEING, then we pass by Starbuck’s headquarters even!
We pass more signs, we read more signs on the bus, we read our phones as they ding, telling us more directions, telling us who’s near us, telling us about nearby places we’d like to see. It’s a sensory overload!
When the bus finally reaches the first stop, you realize that “maybe going downtown was a bad idea,” so you get off and try to find a way back home. You’re surrounded by the homeless, and cops take a moment to halt the bus long enough to drag the body of your breathless crewmember out. You type into your phone “home” but that’s one answer Google could never give you in this place.
“Where is home?” it asks YOU, as if YOU are suddenly Google — as if you can define it and bring up “About 25,270,000,000 results [in] (0.79 seconds).”
But you don’t know. You never did. You never knew where home was until home was gone.
A newspaper flies by and you catch it, trying to find a sign but it’s headline just reads “The Homeless Crisis is getting Worse here in Seattle!”
Winds tear the paper from your hands before you can find any answers past the title.
You still don’t know how to get home.
Where it was…
What it was…
“When does home emerge from just the place where I put all my stuff?”
— Neil Hilborn, “A Place Where Someone Loves You”
We are all connected, and on some levels, that’s a really good thing! In such a massive grid-like maze of cold stone roads, glass towers, and concrete post-modern cubistic apartments, all navigated rectangular buses and automobiles that tell you to look at the rectangles in your pocket to get where you REALLY need to go, that can be a good thing — because, without the squares and cubes and rectangles in your life, you’d be unable to survive in this place.
I still don’t think I can really call this place home.
It’s not that I’ve not gotten used to the noise . . .
. . . but . . .
. . . given all its chaos and disfunction, the environment somehow is the antithesis of entropy — it’s Negentropy.
The city is organized into boxes, and in those boxes, we construct box-like buildings to box ourselves into boxy-roles.
. . . but . . .
. . . I was never designed to fit into boxes.
As I’m writing this, I realize that what I’ve written thus far probably makes it sound like I hate the city.
Let me be clear — I don’t hate the city.
I just struggle to fully integrate with it.
There are just too much noise for me to not get distracted by it all. If this were a game, the feeling I feel lacking here is immersion. It’s overstimulating, to the point that I either lose time trying to process it all or fall behind because I can’t keep up with all its shenanigans.
I think vlogger Nathan Drew covers part of this point pretty well in a recent video he uploaded relating to disconnecting from everything.
“There’s a very real cost every single time you . . . try to keep up with what’s going on . . . . Each little time that [it] happens doesn’t have a huge impact in and of itself, but all added up, it’s a life that’s distracted and constantly being interrupted. I get frustrated with myself because I fall into that trap, . . . I’m getting caught up in all the fast-paced changes that are going on around me . . . . It’s exhausting. That’s what I mean by a very real cost. It adds up and it sort of degrades your quality of life.”
It’s not that I necessarily fit in with the “gun-toting, truck driving, cattle wrangling country bumpkin” lifestyle I was raised around either.
I don’t, nor did I ever really fit in.
If I’m going to be really honest, there were many times throughout my life where those sorts of folk were my primary antagonists — and many are still some of my largest doubters, kin among them.
I ain’t trying to call out names or burn any bridges here. Just saying, many in the country bear a lot of doubts for people like me who pursue creative adventures versus so-called “practical goals,” like becoming a plumber.
It is in that part, that I feel those in the city can be some of your strongest allies. Almost everyone has a dream, and they’re just trying to achieve those dreams, just like you.
I’ve not met many or made many friends — that’s on me, and a part of my personality. However, I’ve still met a large variety of people here that share common interests. I have coworkers who have worked in the film and television industry, who’ve written books and stories, and who, after asking about my own goals, encourage me.
And that’s not to discount those who have encouraged me thus far because I’ve found more who do. I just believe there is something to be said about finding a community of like-minded people who have similar aspirations.
The city can be noisy. There are flaws in it, but I am adapting more than I thought I would. I don’t think I’ll become a city-slicker anytime soon, but I think there are some places in the city that are good.
Where I’m at, West Seattle, is a pretty nice place.
And with that, I think I’ve said all I need to about my city-living experience.
Queue end of blog song — Falling Up’s “Flares” (Acoustic)
