I just looked at a map of my hometown for possibly the first time. And realized that streets I’ve walked, biked, and driven for the last 25 years have names I’ve never known.
This time last year a man passing in a van asked me how to get to Lila Ave. from the back side of the hill where I was walking the dog. Perplexed, I gave him landmark-based directions to get to the one street I suspected started with an L.
According to this map, we were both already on Lila at the time. Or wait, what I *thought* the map said was Lila at first look. On second look, what I always considered the same street growing up is actually two different ones, with two different names, becoming Lila later on. I didn't even construct the streets that way in my head - I understood the continuity, direction, and relative distances of different paths through my town in a completely different way.
Apparently, I am purty ignorant.
Not to mention all the paths I took regularly, that would constitute main thoroughfares in my understanding of my hometown, but which do not constitute roads in an official map-making sense.
This probably means something profound about maps, place, and individual perception. Oh the tyranny of technology over personal histories of lived space! The arbitrary basis for scientific understandings of distance and time!
But my analytical powers are sapped at the moment. So pretend I wrote something profound about it, instead of what I am writing, which is
Hot damn son, that's some crazy shit!
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