Week Four - Flaneur

I think I have always been a Parisian. I lived there for a year when I was five, went to preschool there, but that is not it. It's the way that I live my life for the moment haphazardly that does. I dress up when I go out, considering the opportunity to see people and meet new ones on the street to be more than a valid cause to wear my semi-casual attire (corduroy jacket, dark jeans, a button up shirt). I would never miss the chance to impress some stranger on the street who I may end up having a conversation with because it is a lie that we are not an objective people, a superficial people. We are certainly more than that, but to deny what is almost a primal instinct fueling the creation of life itself, as well as society, would be a crime. I took French so I could maybe go to grad school there, as silly as getting a masters in literature in english in a foreign country probably is. Yet I have been a Parisian all my life in other ways: never would I reject the moment for the future, for the moment would never come again. Thus I take time to do everything, especially the activities with friends that I really shouldn't have time for. I'll sleep over on couches or floors, I'll go driving till the sun comes up just to drive and feel air moving by face, I'll be out till 3am socializing and then come home and work through dawn till lunch, carefree so long as everything gets done.

This summer especially have I become one with the concept of a Flaneur: Will and I have walked everywhere in this city this summer. We go out aimlessly, for the place does not matter, and head foward ceasingly. I always had to walk around a lot, never having held onto a car of my own for more than a couple of months because fate, and thus I have learned the leisurely walk past green brooks and ducks, past confused citizenery and more often past trees that shall always hold their tongue. I do the same in Boston with Will. We walk and walk without break some evenings, maybe slightly drunk to make the experience more amicable, but not always, and it becomes a game. It comes easier for Will than me, his mind I feel being less organized than mine, and thus I follow down random lefts and rights. I ask why we went that way and he honestly cannot answer. I tell him the bar is 4 blocks in the opposite direction and he shrugs and starts walking parallel to it if I'm lucky. Sometimes I get drunk and then I really don't care how far we walk: I have crossed the city with Will in under two hours while very drunk at night, and felt the concrete beneath my feet, the cars ever moving at my side, and known that existing itself is reason for existing, nothing else need apply for the job.