The Urban Sherpa, a blog by Christopher DeWan

(one thousand and thirteen tales from urban bohemia...)

The Swedish American Dream rating=0 new!

July 30, 2008
File under: Camera Obscura

Ikea figures perform Riverdance

The Urban Sherpa visits IKEA.

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Caged In rating=0 new!

July 29, 2008
File under: Camera Obscura

Caged in

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White Lies, pt. 1 rating=2 new!

July 28, 2008
File under: Heart NY

Tompkins Square

"What's that?," she asked, at the rustling of the underbrush in Tompkins Square, just beneath our park bench.

"It's nothing," I replied, "probably a squirrel," while I watched the parade of a half dozen rats clamber over one another and disappear into the night.

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Hanging by a Thread rating=2 new!

July 27, 2008
File under: Anecdotal Evidence, Love Stinks

or, The Parable of the Pants

A few years ago, toward the end of a troubled love affair, I went clothes shopping, and bought a pair of pants I still have to this day. I bought them because she would like them, though I wasn't aware of this motivation at the time. I wasn't trying to impress her with the pants, exactly. Rather, the pants were a manifestation of a taste that she and I shared: I liked the pants, I knew she would probably like the pants, and therefore the pants would confirm the reasons she and I were close: they were emblematic of the like-minded judgment that brought us together in the first place.

I knew all of this at the time without actually knowing it—I couldn't have articulated why I bought the pants; I only knew that I was shopping with an anxious desperation, fueled by my fear that my love affair was over, and at a not-quite conscious level, I hoped the pants would save me.

I was hanging by a proverbial thread.

She never saw the pants—she broke up with me over voicemail—and the pants became emblematic of something else: lost opportunity, failure, dashed hope. From that day on, the pants never did fit quite right: I tried to get used to them, tried wearing them with different clothes, tried to alter myself to better fit into them, and only occasionally considered the appropriateness of trying to alter myself to fit the pants, instead of the other way around.

12th and Walnut

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Big Sky in Valley Forge rating=0 new!

July 26, 2008
File under: Camera Obscura

Big Sky in Valley Forge

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