Owlbone in Cambridge

This past weekend, my friend and partner, the redoubtable Owlbone, came to spend some time with me. I was watching the apartment of some friends in North Cambridge, who had gone to California for a few days -- very light duty it was, simply keeping company for their black cat, who came and went through a cat door at her own pleasure. Owlbone now lives in the Hudson Valley, much closer than when she was in central Jersey, but we're still lucky to get together more than once a month. So I had a few days to enjoy her company in a spacious apartment in a very hip neighborhood in one of the prominent nodes of My Mythic City.

Dusk Over Chicago El Station
--Albert H. Krehbiel
http://www.krehbielart.com/CHICAGO.HTM

My Mythic City is not an actual, geographical city, at least not outside my dreams. Though I sometimes call it Dream-Chicago, it's also made up of elements of Detroit, New York, Boston, San Francisco/Berkeley, and many smaller towns of the American Megalopolis. I'll dream of something going on in Dream-Chicago, and on waking, realize that it was more like Symphony Road in Boston. My dream self wouldn't much care.

When I was much younger, I longed for a life in the city. With all those people, surely many of them must have found the secrets I was looking for. Behind drawn windows and closed doors, orgies of revelation were occurring, ecstatic rituals of transcendance were conducted by magickal poets in low-rent neighborhoods, pulsing with ancient lore transplanted from primitives who had not yet lost their wisdom. I've uncovered many a surprise in art and religion, but nothing yet matches the ideals of my longing.

Instead, I developed an aversion to the City. Suicides and overdoses, friends gone crazy and then missing, the harsh realities of subterranean economy -- no wonder people idealize rural settings!

But once you get into rural places, then you're confronted even more with that dissatisfaction you've brought with you. Boredom leads to substance abuse, poverty to inadequately coping with the unmerciful reality of cold. Some day you realize that what you've been looking for is inside yourself, and maybe you can begin to appreciate the City once more.

So, it was fun showing Owlbone around Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston.


Porter Sq., pictured above, has the deepest escalators that I know of:


It was a good day. Idiotic politics protested:


I showed Owlbone the old and the new:


And we drank in the spiritual aspects of the area:


Although not strictly the property of Buddhism (or any other religion), the use of OM for a commercial enterprise deserves, at least, a reference to The Worst Horse.

Some people think that folks of different religions can't get along. Owlbone and I disprove that. She's Chan and I'm Zen.