Home life and street life

Zurich, Switzerland

I returned to the city of family and strangers. I needed to rest, to revitalize -- to find other motivations for living besides the slow decomposition towards death.

I accompanied my sister to kundalini yoga class and bike trips in the city, she sharing her home and daily comforts to a sister fallen at the edge of a mental and material crisis. In exchange for my time and her prepaid salary, for a week, I commuted an hour a day to fulfill her frivolous job of feeding and playing 2 cats for 2 hours a day and to make feasible financial decisions for a future once bleak and void of value.

Such conditions allowed me to began the long writing process on this blog, propelling determined self-expression as a method of autohealing, as a means to transcend such basic struggles of survival. 

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But always, a lingering feeling lurks as the surrounding environment impresses its imminence on whatever state of mindbody is conjured at the superficial surface: Here, in Zurich, on her apartment futon, I, handwriting, typing, expressing out the insides as the daily passing sounds of the modern city's ambulances, firetrucks, automobiles, mid-day and late-night street conversations, etc echo from the third floor window.

Outside me, there is a world which continues exterior to my existence: Here, a land of mythical memories monumentalized (the heroic man), symbolic sources of economic production (the milking cow), and collectively recognized interruptions between the quotidian passage of time (the national holiday). 

August 1st, National Swiss Founder's Day, commemorates the mythical construction of the Swiss Confederation of German, French, Italian, and Romanian speaking corners of the Alps, deriving a shared heritage of armed-neutrality and geography (similar to Sweden). Just like weekly Sundays, August 1st is a holiday off for the family. Only through participant observation might my expatriate family and I find relations to this modern constructed heritage outside our roots. At midnight, we observe from a window an ambivalent  acting out and desensitized display of patriotism in the form of street fireworks.

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The unfolding of the citylife drama culminates to a Saturday of sensory and sensual excess...

The Zurich Street Parade is today's most attended technoparade in Europe after a disaster in Berlin's 2010 Love Parade violently discredited the festival's purported purpose as a public "demonstration for love, peace, freedom, and tolerance." At this festival, up to 1 million attendants were believed to have participated.

A tagger revises the revolutionary rally cry

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, we walked, moved, and danced among other bodies on the street as bass-speakers mounted on trucks moved around the central lake, leading the crowd with a diverse living network of sensory stimulants and compelling the consumption of the fruits of paradise. [unfinished]