A personal question

[constance]

Have you ever been confounded by a city or town? Maybe you thought, however inexplicably, that it was a bad place; or maybe it was a good place but it seemed unknowable from the outset and never got any less so, or maybe its layout seemed deliberately intended to trip you up at every turn; or maybe it was a place you wanted desperately to escape and it took a long time, longer than it really should've. Stuff like that.

If you've experienced this: what is that place for you? And how did it affect your perceptions? Let's talk about that.

Comments

[thalia]

Cincinnati. I actually rather like it, but I get lost every single time I'm there. I can remember once being able to see the place I was going but not being able to figure out how to get there.

I'm not sure that's what you have in mind, though, because my complete inability to navigate Cincinnati hasn't stopped me from going there or made me unhappy with it. It just taught me that getting anyplace would take 15 minutes longer than it should.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but

[soukup]

Albany, New York. I lived quite close to it, and every time I went into the town center something surreal seemed to happen to me. For one thing, downtown is full of once-grand but now run-down old buildings, and most of them are either empty, or look it even though they're not, or are being used for some other purpose than their originally intended one. It felt like all of the businesses were permanently closed; you can walk downtown on a Friday or Saturday evening and find exactly one open bar. There was a Starbucks which was mysteriously 24/7, and a pizza place which was the flimsiest of drug fronts. There was an antiques shop which seemed to double as its owners' home, and despite the signage they seemed really surprised to have a customer. There was a very oddly-shaped theatre whose design plan is rumoured to have been totally changed mid-construction after its twin collapsed. There was an underground shopping mall which always seemed to be open, but in which all of the shops were likewise closed. There was a diner which -- though clearly open -- had no staff around. There were some very recent immigrants from Albania who had set up a falafel shop and seemed as spooked by the place as I was, but apart from them, everyone I met there seemed to be sleepwalking and totally out of it, like they'd been given a sedative and a really tough math problem at the same time.

[constance]

Hahaha, I've done that in Atlanta before -- been within eyeshot of a place without any clear idea of how I was going to get there.

And I'm with you on the little weirdnesses of navigation not necessarily being dealbreakers, for me. But they surely are frustrating!

Re: I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but

[constance]

Actually, I love this response -- it's perfect! I'm just thinking about a haunted sort of fic, where a city's plagued in a non-specific way and it turns out that the thing doing the "haunting" is the city itself, and was wondering how we get frustrated or weirded out by our frustrating or weird cities.

If I ever write this fic, I might have to press you for more details. :-?

[soukup]

*all aquiver* Oh, God, please write something that goes in this direction! I've been slowly making my way through those recs you so graciously fed me a while back for fiction dealing with haunted/sentient spaces (and thank you again for them, by the way, because I'm really enjoying them!), and I think I may have discovered the one exception to my usual indifference to the fantasy genre. Yum!

In other words, you can feel absolutely free to ping me with questions or whatever. As you can likely tell from the length of my above response, that city's weirdness kind of made an impression on me.

[soukup]

(Oh, crap -- that was supposed to be a reply to your one, sry.)

[constance]

:D No worries! I will take you up on your invitation if I ever get to writing, which given my track record is kind of doubtful, but hey, thing sometimes do get written, right?

And I'm so pleased that you're enjoying those recs! I always get a little nervous, reccing for people, so I'm glad it's been a good experience so far.