Just about everyday, I catch a bus to work. I spend the five minute ride watching cars go past, usually cars with enough seating for 5 adults. Most of the time, however, there is only ever the driver. Haven’t these people heard of car-pooling? Don’t they know there is a severe petrol shortage? Or are they oblivious drones, so used to the way things are they’ll never adapt to the way things will have to be.
Occasionally I go past cars with children in the back seat, strapped in tight and wearing the glum faces of people about to do something they don’t want to do, like go to school. The buses are usually crowded and running late, making the passengers constantly tut and look at their watches. The car drivers, on the other hand, appear to be in a different zone, wrapped in little cabins of calm and serenity in a sea of exhaust-belching, screeching, angry, honking metal. This hardly explains road rage, I know, but there you go.
I get off a couple of stops before my work, just so I can have a little bit of a walk before I spend the day with my bum glued to a chair. I walk past closed fast-food shops that somehow still smell like last night’s vindaloo or fried chicken. I walk past Laundromats where washed-out strangers sit and stare at their clothes circling in industrial dryers, almost hypnotised by their underwear spinning round and round. I walk past an early-opening hotel, where men of indeterminate ages are sitting in the morning sun, throwing accusing glances at each other and anyone walking past while sipping their first beer for the day.
These are lonely men who will be sitting in the corner as the day wears on, wanting to talk to the barmaid but never able to find the words. So they drink even more. Drinking is not a problem for them, just a way to pass the time. Their problems run much deeper, way down in the pit of their psyche, where they are still intimidated by their mothers and aunts and sisters and past girlfriends and ex-wives. They want to be loved but they fear for their very lives. So they drink in the hopes they will be able to get past their problems. Each night they go to sleep in a stupor but each morning they wake up still remembering what they so desperately want to forget
I walk past buildings undergoing extreme makeovers, buildings who should have had dignified demolitions years ago but have been subjected to bagging, rendering and paint jobs more suited to younger, hipper buildings. Stately elegance has somehow turned out to be garish over-compensation for the fact that these buildings were never meant to be stately and trying to make them so only destroys whatever elegance age had leant them.
This is my neighbourhood. This is where I live, where I sleep, where I work and where I play. This is where sometime today, someone will be born and someone will die. This is where someone will have their heart broken while somebody else falls in love. This is where somebody will lose their virginity while somewhere else, someone will find God. Or maybe someone will lose their virginity and find God at the same time. Who knows? This is a neighbourhood of rich and poor, of spiritual and hedonistic, of sweet and bitter, left and right, of extremes and commonality.
This is my neighbourhood, reflecting a tiny snapshot of the western world back in the windows of the buildings I pass, of frowning strangers with calloused hands and bruised hearts, of care-free children and careless adults. It is no better or no worse than your neighbourhood. The only difference is location. There may be terrorists in our midst, but there are also rapists, liars, murders, paedophiles, thieves, wife beaters and defrauders. Such is the world in its infinite variety. Such is life, no exceptions. You can be born with a silver spoon or a plastic spoon in your mouth, but we all end in the same dirt, with the same worms scouring our bones and the same epitaphs lingering in stone long after we’ve turned to dust.
I’ve long given up the belief that good things happen to those who wait mainly because I’ve spent far too long in traffic jams, supermarket queues and bank-teller lines. While I hardly want for anything, I don’t expect anything either and I am pretty hard to surprise. The cynical adult I hoped I would never become has crept up and taken over. I’m not sorry, but I am missing my inner-child. Has anyone seen him?