When Your City Changes
Sometimes things don't work out as planned.
I was wrong about Santiago de Compostela.
When I moved here last year, I brought more assumptions than carry-on and checked baggage combined. Here’s one: I’d get what I paid for. I mistakenly thought that the rent, taxes, and fees I’ve taken on were fair, but the city had something else in mind. As it would happen, the local government has intervened in my life. Directly.
It started in early spring.
One day I was walking, as we do in walkable places, and happened upon a worrisome development. Why, I had no choice but to trek a makeshift path designated by chaotically strewn plastic walls and cones, all within spitting distance of a construction worker shouting obscenities. His coworkers, playing grab-ass, were unfazed by the insinuations. Were their mom’s harlots? I don’t know, but I meandered around the maddened hombre and his wheelbarrow full of bricks and loose screws. Changing from one street to another and back, on an urgent quest to pick up a plastic figurine from Japón, I encountered another laborer who proclaimed that his peers deserved the death penalty for their learned helplessness.
I had to re-plan my path, that I had only just grown accustomed to, because the city re-planned it first. The city! The bureaucrats! HOW DARE THEY… do their jobs?
How dare they thoroughly widen the walkways near my apartment? Convert the two-way into a one-way? Add bike lanes? Complete the greenway? And all over the last few months, I might add. How can one keep up with such rapid change? Change isn’t inherently good; it has consequences. I had already decided that these urban amenities were good enough for me, and yet the city had decided to “optimize” them further. Back where I last lived, another lane was added to the neighborhood stroad for semis to honk in and out of a wonderful new economic opportunity: the construction of a volumetrically foreboding building that nobody in the surrounding community approved of whatsoever. But only because they didn’t understand economics, unlike yours truly.
So what if my cost of living precipitously rose there? By absorbing various costs associated with that development, such as inhaling toxic fumes, I was practically a job-creator myself. Had I stayed, who knows what kind of enviable genetic mutations I could have acquired? Particularly the one that tricks the foolish masses into believing that mint is a flavor rather than an extremely fucking annoying sensation. Deep down, I only ever desired to feel the blissful ignorance that has been robbed from me by my beautiful mind. I didn’t choose this. Meanwhile, in Spain, I’m paying the same rent I have been, but what mutations do I have to show for it?
I don’t deny that the paths are significantly more accessible. Counterpoint: what exactly does that accomplish for Number One? I was doing fine with the infrastructure as it was. They’re even converting the shabby area underneath the overpasses into a vibrant park. Who knows what unseen economic activities have been disrupted by such heavy-handed changes? We need to consider the knock-on effects of such do-goodery. People probably exchanged legal goods down there, in private, and now their privacy has been eroded… by making it nice enough for other people to want to be there.
This city, Santiago, is just so dense that any improvement is an improvement for everyone. Sound good? Well, it’s not. What I’m describing is basically the tragedy of the commons. Not everyone can just walk around and enjoy life, or else everyone would do it. Joy is a scarce resource. If you vacuum up all of the joy, then there’s none left for me.
And at this point, I’m stuck here. I can’t afford to move back to suburbia because I’ve become europoor. I have no car. I don’t even have an air conditioner in the midst of a heatwave. I’ll probably die. Suddenly, I’m expected to open my windows at night, and then seal them shut with the persianas during the day. Manipulating slats with a pulley system is the job of a manual laborer, not a white-collar professional such as myself. One time, I nearly cut my goddamn finger off while aligning the slats! Worse, I don’t even have a drying machine anymore, so I have to juggle my staggeringly demanding and intellectual responsibilities — with hang-drying. Such menial tasks have eroded my Male Surplus Value, and now the other alphas don’t want to be friends with me anymore. The betas don’t acknowledge me. Not to mention, walking everywhere has made me skinny. I look sick!
Please, don’t do what I did. Don’t ever assume the city’s fumes are for you, and you alone. Everyone else will eventually get to breathe them too.
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️
Do NOT click the play button below. It’s just bloopers or something. Unfortunately, I get an error every time I try to remove it from the post.