The laptop in my backpack bounces against my back as I walk down the strip-mall sidewalk. It feels good, kind of like there’s a metronome pounding against my shoulders keeping my steps on beat. There are people in the store windows. They are looking down at their reading materials or plates of food. A multitude of fluffy white poplar seeds drift down as if falling from the sky. Back-lit by the saturated late afternoon sunshine, they look like they’re made of strands of gold.
In-between a value barbershop and a fine linens store is a cafe-bookstore that I enter. Light, almost inaudible African drums float out of invisible speakers over the spread of cafe tables all over. White ceiling fans blow down cool air. I order a small coffee with milk and sit in a corner, so that I’m able to people-watch the rest of the cafe-area. Like puppets, people turn pages with one arm and bring paper-cups of coffee up to their mouths with their other arm. I take this all in before I pop open my laptop and get to work on a couple new graphic designs I am doing pro-bono for a friend. It is for an upstart community-based arts program that caters to urban high school students in my neighborhood. I had met Stan, the organizer of the program, at a bloc party. He seemed like he was living comfortably, which I surmised from his silver watch wrapped around his wrist and his sunglasses with some designer’s signature on them hanging on his shirt-collar. Stan and I talked about great restaurants on our street, which I found a little discomforting.
“You don’t know what good magarita is until you’ve tried Vincent’s at Ashland and Lake,” he raved.
“That place has valet parking, right?” I asked.
“Well yeah,” he said, “You shouldn’t expect to find street parking by there.”
Even though I wanted to talk about cheaper, more hole-in-the-wall restaurants, I kept up the conversation by asking him about vintage wines and which place had the best. Stan had at least twenty-five years over me in age. Even though he was a little more high-culture than me, I appreciated his friendliness and faith in community building. His arts organization is called “Adol-less-sense”. It’s been running for a year but lacked much vitality because of a lack in promotion.
Now that I’m sitting here fitting this design into my busy day, I have my regrets about offering to do a series of poster and handbill designs. I could be working on other things. I have three big clients waiting for first drafts of website logos, the busiest I’ve been since I graduated college. Still, I feel bad about not wanting to do a philanthropic deed, so I churn on.
After a couple hours, I come up with two posters and a handbill, which I create rough draft files of and email to Stan. I decide to take the rest of the day off, so I walk back to my apartment and drop off my laptop, then leave for the beach. In college I had expectations of what my freelance life would be like after graduating. I never knew it would be so taxing on my free time. Throughout compulsory school, you’re trained to go to school eight hours a day with a scheduled lunch five days a week; they’re training you for a cubicle-office life. But although I’ve escaped the corporate-shackles, I find myself constantly looking for work or staying up all night to get projects turned in at the last minute. There’s no routine nor structure in the way I live and I bring my work home with me always. Even as I’m walking along the sandy beach, something I’ve loved since I was a child when my mother used to bring me down to the beach every weekend, I see the beach as something of a design. Is it nothing more than layers of an image to my eye? Water over sand under sky layered by darkened human figures? I imagine all the inspirational-poster companies that would re-purpose this image by slapping on some large, superimposed, kitschy text. The Beach: A Place for Family. Dreams Do Come True. Freedom: Live It. Inspiration: Pass it On. Got Fun?
In college I stuck with my need to excel in all respects of academics. Semester after semester I scored in the top percentile of my major. Getting A’s was mandatory. Twice I even begged my professor to give me an extra assignment or project to raise a borderline grade to an A. But even so, I didn’t participate in the college campus community. I only voted for student government once, out of boredom. I drank too much. Or maybe I just used alcohol too much as a stress reducer, something to make me forget that I was choosing to coop up inside my dorm and poring over the obscure theories of art critics.
I pass by people playing volleyball and little children molding shabby sandcastles. I look ahead and see the abandoned lighthouse that has been fenced off since it was put out of use many decades ago. In high school a group of friends had invited me out one night to break in and climb it. I called them crazy and said no, choosing to study for an art history midterm instead. It’s chipping red-and-white painted structure looms higher than it seems like it should, standing by itself around an empty area of sand all around it. I feel the rusty chain-link fence that surrounds it, rusty chips scattering a big like sparks.
The seagulls begin to come out as the sky fades into an orange twilight. I forgo the bus and rely on my two feet to carry me home. The people and places begin to shift into night-life-mode now, lights being turned on and a general feeling of excitement in the air. I pass by a small fluffy-white dog being walked by an owner with a plastic visor who smiles at me. I pass by a crowd of Japanese business men taking photographs of the city with their little digital cameras. When I get home I feel comfortable and in my element. Even now, a few years after I’ve moved out of my parents’ house, I still relish the feeling of being alone at home.
I fry up some fish fillets and canned asparagus for dinner. After washing down my meal with a couple beers, I head toward my bedroom and lie down, feeling exhausted from the day. There’s an empty cobweb in my corner that I stare at every night. It’s stayed the same size since I’ve lived in this place, making it seem like an abandoned space. Some spiders’ forgotten crevice.
My whole body almost melts into the soft surface of my mattress, but when I close my eyes my thoughts kick into high gear. I think about work and what I’m going to work on tomorrow. I think about my future plans to move to New York. I think about the lovers I’ve become estranged from. I think about the friends that make me smile. And then there’s a figure that is there, lurking. It’s tall, high, rigid, daunting. It flashes upon me, making me feel its searching light.
I sit up in bed and grab my coat and sneakers. I step out into the cool outside air, where the streets are shiny and wet from a sputtering of rain. The night is calmer now, just a few bicyclers riding down the street and lights going out in high windows.
The walk to the beach is slow and soggy. It’s the anticipation that makes me walk faster, though. I blaze through the empty intersections, the traffic lights telling me to stop in vain. I walk and sweat, the sweat cooling off my skin with each breeze that stirs up. When I get to the beach I feel relieved. I calmly walk to the sand and take off my shoes, letting my toes dig deep into the sand with each slow step. A few kids run past me in the dark, playing a game of tag. In the sliver of moon that is out, they look like black paper cutouts. The lake is slumbering, giving off soothing swishy waves of snores. I walk up to the looming figure of the old light house and let my fingers grasp the fencing around it before climbing it. My heart beats and beats, straining my chest bones into a shaky feeling. I walk slowly up to the tower, afraid to look up at it.
The door on the side of the tower creaks painfully when I open it. I follow with my eyes the spiral staircase going up and up and above on the inside. I clasp the railing as I climb. After a couple of nervous steps, I ascend comfortably, looking below me at the height I’m gaining through the holes of the metal steps. As I climb I think about the texture of the steps, its dirty, old metal surface that’s so gritty and masculine you can almost picture it as a background to some chop-shop print-ad. I know that it’s ridiculous, but my viewpoint would make for a great photo for some advertisement for someone somewhere. When I reach the top, the view takes me a second to get used to. I feel the woozy feeling of having a birds-eye, pan-optical view. The old searchlight has dead bugs and a blackened housing. I fumble around the back and find a switch that I flip, but nothing happens. I take a walk along the top-platform, my view panning from the dark ocean abyss to the desolate sand of the beach peppered by a few nocturnal humans to the winking pulse of the city to the sand and back to the everlasting ocean.
When I get back to my house, nestled in the covers, I notice a spider crawling around the cobweb in the corner. So comfortable, when things are in their place.
