little things

This morning I went out to convert my foreign currency, and just to walk around this unfamiliar city. I discovered little things hiding in the shadows, like mastercard debt and bank hastles. I suppose these are the things that are easiest to forget, because they are the things we most want to forget. They are also the aspects of normalcy that I never missed. And it makes me wonder about the cost of normalcy.
Over the last two years the things I missed the most, I called normalcy. These were things like driving a car, shopping for grocerys, and having a set of keys. Going out with friends I had earned not inherited by default.

And as I consider what it may cost me to stay here, I wonder if it is possible to stay without compromising, to fit real life as defined by this city.

The amount of corprate greed and financial waste here is incredible. So to is the rising homelessness and poverty.

I live on the 17th floor of a building downtown.
A large portion of downtown is joined together by glass tunnels called plus 15's. They got their name because they are fifteen feet above ground, and every now and then some RV gets stuck underneath one of the many plus 15's in the city because they never bothered to read the warnings.

This morning I barely had to step outside at all to get my errands done. On a cold day, one is thankful for that. You can just go from one building to the next through these above ground tunnels.
On a nicer day one begins to wonder what they are missing by staying inside. The sun. The air. The Oxygen.
This is the gerbil maze that we imprison the socailly elite, and they don't seem to mind. They glorify themselves in their ability to exist without ever needing to face real life, down on the street corner.

In Edinburough, Scotland, I was amazed to discover that underneath the city was buried levels of the previous cities. Most of the gateways into this subteranian world were closed off, but there were places for tourists to go and spend money for a glimpse into the netherlands.
I discovered that the reason for this was because once upon a time the city had a wall around it. As the city grew, they wouldn't build ouside of the wall, so instead they built up.
In the old section of the city all of the buildings are very high and many of them are as far under the ground as they are above.

In centuries past, these subteranian versions of the city became the dwelling places of the impovershed. Gradually, the people and crime that the city chose to ignore, literally became invisable to the elite who lived above them and would no longer have to look upon them.

That is what I thought about today as I made my way throughout this city, 15 feet above ground.

(early in the millineaum, an independant film was shot in the city called waydowntown. It was about a group of young people who made a bet to see who could go the longest without stepping outside. just existing in our gerbuil cage.)

http://www.sauderzone.com/ubtlinks.htm (other tunnels)http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=260302004 (scottish newspaper)
http://dhost.info/differentclass/index.php?p=10 (Edinburgh music scene)
http://www.theflagship.net/coldspot/docs/hauntedhistory-edinburgh.html
(Edinburgh tunels and hauntings)
http://thecapitalscot.com/pastfeatures/vaultedin.html
Edinburgh tunnels)