This morning the weather was particularly nasty as I was waiting on O’Connell Street for my bus to go to work. As usual the Dublin bus service was refusing to follow the time table, which left me to ponder the peculiarities of my surroundings. I stood in pouring rain that seemed to seep through my umbrella yet it was amusing to see the drops of water shimmering in car lights, bouncing off the pavement. In the midst of rain, people scurrying around to various places, buses, trucks, taxis, cars and creatures making an obscene amount of noise, I curiously absorbed and became absorbed in the chaos around me. This shouldn’t be new to me as I go through this routine every day, but somehow I managed to ignore the madness of the city prior to this morning.

In some ways a city resembles a monster, something like a giant squid from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. It awakens every morning, spreads it tentacles, and swallows everything it can prior to going back to sleep. Yet it also makes a mess, leaves waste and fails to clean up after itself leaving creatures that feed on its leftovers through the night. The monster has parasites as well that may slowly weaken it if not kept in check. The cycle continues until the beast becomes too large to sustain itself and its own tentacles attack it in a cannibalistic hunt to satisfy their own hunger, or becomes too weak to cope with its parasites.

This may sound like an insane rambling but this is what I was thinking while waiting for the bus to go to work. I will always be attracted to cities because they are monsters and I love becoming part of the monster. You have to stand in the rain, listen to the sounds, smell the streets and touch the walls to immerse in the city. You have to do all this on a regular basis without an avenue of escape. You can’t visit a city for two weeks, a month, three times a year or whatever and say that you know what that city is all about. You will only know once you stand in the rain and know that you will be back tomorrow and the day after and so on ad infinitum. Any thing else is childish ignorance of a yuppie tourist in my opinion.