I saw myself loveless and loving in the big city, the big grey city with its sidestreets, alleyways, steps, and murders... I saw the pale gravel roads of its winding streets, the taxicabs, swearwords, and art galleries... I mooched about, lost, a tiny little atom in the vastness... Best of all is a Saturday at the height of summer, when all humanity seems to be crowded on the streets, walking the length of the street past department stores cheap book shops past the corporate record store and up beyond past the flags, regalia, glimpsing the absurd equestrian statues, cursing the drabs of dour Edinburghs where even punks are listless in dives alone... You can hear all the major languages of the world, in babbled snatches of street-speech, and all accents of English protesting when Scottish begins to sound like English begins to be American Canadian Australian, and it all sounds the same, merges into the same protest, the same primal baby wail, with lower dipthongs and tremors of African Chinese Mediterranean Japanese, the subtler growling vowels, the more earthy mantras of joy... All amounting to the same thing.. Near pinnacle street-scenes of blackened brickwork and steel, or ancient slops spilled down the castle-wall, and disgruntled cabdriver, and the backfalling brightlight Turkish shopcorners in the useless Haymarket, near the comfy 1920's flat with a tiny bathroom and outside are scrubbed-clean steps, bannisters, everyone is asleep inside or lurks at the back of the door, seeming depressed... So many phantoms in a city of phantoms.
Because at night, after closing-time, after the crowds have departed, the truth is revealed... When only the cold lights of McDonald's blaze blankly onto the street, everything shut-up, the proprietors huffily locking shopdoors, turning off lights... Lamp-posts shining near park-railings, cemeteries, advertising hoardings... In the small hours of the morning, in vacant lots at remote ends of the city, drunkards haphazardly gather for arguments, taxi-drivers turn their wheels sleepily, hard streetlight bounces onto hard concrete, and the blaze of electricity still buzzes like sap into sleepless homes... Sicksplashed sidestreets will be found in the grey morning, bungled refuse torn by fitful winds...