This is a screenshot, a satellite view of San Antonio. I was looking around Google maps for a location and found this image. It captured my attention for some reason. It’s just a map of the city, there are dozens of neighborhoods like this around town, maybe hundreds, but this image of all those houses crammed together for some reason stuck in my mind. It’s so odd but it’s completely status quo. Odd, because you have no land, no reasonable space to plant a garden or go for a walk, barely enough land to raise your hands skyward and say, ‘This is my land.’
But this is how we live. We like it this way. We have become city dwellers after all. We traded in the wild savannahs of Africa for city life. Way more exciting and the possibilities for commerce - thru the roof! Still alot of monkeys around and big trees we call buildings.
We’re the last of the hominids, the Homo sapiens, we left our cousins in the dust. Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthal all preceded us, but we are the sole survivors. And we don’t live in caves, not funky little houses either, we moved to the city.
Imagine, for a second, how each house in the entire city is connected to a sewer system which collects the waste water from said domicile and channels it to the water treatment plant. A map of the sewer system of the city would make the capillaries of a leaf seem down right puny.
All the houses are connected with electricity, coming right from the power plant, thru all those transformers and power lines. Electricity, a thing not even known of 200 years ago, lights up our houses, keeps us warm or cool, cooks our food, entertains us with television and enlivens a communications system that potentially puts us in touch with virtually anybody in the world. Maybe the old ones had ESP or smoke signals or they just carved something into the tree, but nothing like this.
Right now I’m listening to a psydub, psychill channel on YouTube that I came across and at the same time I’m writing this post on Substack. Multi-moding. I might drop into Facebook and see what’s going on, check with Wikipedia for some information, I might send an email to Germany. All endowed and blessed by electricity, little electrons running all over the place and getting excited, bouncing around between here and there.
City life is sophisticated. We can go to the theatre, or go downtown to shop. Don’t mind the street people though, they don’t have anyplace to live. Poor bastards. Or maybe they like it like that, the whole city is theirs because they have no responsibility at all, no obligations to meet. I often wonder about that.
Living all smashed together in a city is a tribal experience. ‘Go Spurs, Go!’ is the rallying cry of the San Antonio tribe (the Spurs are our professional basketball team). It may not seem like a tribal experience on the way to work in the morning driving your car on the expressway. That’s when you tune into the radio and catch the news. Now you’re synched, you’re part of the scene. Sports scores and weather, too, provide a common background so the buzz at work has something to coalesce around.
City life is sophisticated but expensive. Everything costs money, even where you park your car. Good lord, you have to pay to park your car somewhere. Neanderthals would never have understood this concept. You’re paying so your car can do nothing. It’s expensive even to do nothing.
When we all have electric cars and we don’t have to breathe car exhaust it’ll be really nice in the city. We have everything else: parks and zoos and chambers of commerce. We have schools and llanterias also. If you don’t know what a llanteria is you probably don’t live in San Antonio. They fix your tires or almost anything that’s wrong with your car.
So, I challenge you to google map your city. If you don’t live in a city . . . wait a minute, how can you not live in a city? Oh well, if you don’t live in a city, find one and go explore it. This is how we live, in these very large, very complex, very compressed . . . cities. Thousands of people are represented by those houses and buildings. Their dwelling places assure them of a place in the city and the rent or mortgage on their dwelling places assure them that they will have to go to work in the morning. Otherwise how would they ever pay for living in the city?
It really is a tribal thing, in a way, it just happens to be a very large tribe. And we’re all in our square houses, watching our square TVs or our square computer screens (rectangular actually). This must be some kind of a tribe. Don’t you think so?
Thanks Rohn Bayes.