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"I went into the woods," Thoreau tells us in Walden, "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential aspects of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived." I feel closer to nature in my new corner of the world than anywhere I have lived since I moved from New Hampshire. Tampa has neither the culture nor the intensity of large cities in the Northeast, but just now I am starting to understand its unique charm.

Urban sprawl leads to the paradox that I had to move further into the city to get closer to nature. Living a block from the river, I am surrounded by critters. Large grasshoppers, mosquitos, squirrels, butterflies, lizards, and all varities of insects live around me. This large, old house (which has had enough time to settle) allows convenient cracks and crevices for the smaller-type things to enter. I am used to non-paying roomates, but the large spider who was hanging out last week is not what I had in mind; it had the circumference of a cola-can, and despite having more legs, was less venomous than some with whom I have lived in the past year. I'm getting used to the mosquito bites, also. I was scratching, tearing flesh the first few weeks. Now I barely notice them; it's kinda the cost of doing business in my new home.

I live in a wild pocket within an urban environment. Busy Florida Avenue is but a few blocks away. The city zoo is a stone's throw as the crow flies. But the Hillsborough River--the defining geographical feature of the little city that couldn't--is closer. Having neither the magnesty of the Mississippi nor the power of the Niagra, it has its own mundane pace. And in a little cloistered bend in the river the critters and I call home.

I've decided that I hate the suburbs. "The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling." The marketing tactics buried deep within our ideology-laden collective unconsciousness, which actually make one think that moving outside the city--for the 'security' of gated communities, sprawling strip-malls, soccer moms and all the trappings of bourgeois existence--will claim my attention no more. I'm glad to be out of the super-concentrated apartment life, where my landlord is a fucking corporation, and whose leasing agents--'just following the rules,' as in shades of Nurenberg--complicated my existence with unresonable demands and expectations to keep their 'curb appeal' up to these bloated American standards. I now live in a neighborhood, not a complex (the term is itself telling). To hell with the sprawl! To hell with the SUV's! To hell with the neurotic products of the hedonistic pleasures of this existence!

I am the postmodern Thoreau: awed by the splendor of the natural, and contemptful for the artificiality of concrete and steel. We live in a world where prime-time sitcoms and drive-thrus mask the simple pleasures of every day existence. It is not that I heretofore have avoided the natural due to any intrisnic defect, but rather the culturation of my existence in Tampa has led me to disregard the splendor of the simple for the trappings of our culture. I used to walk alot--for fun. Since I moved here I have enjoyed the air-conditioned nightmare than is my existence, focusing on the 'in' and chastising the 'out.' My apartments previously have been a removal, a small place of comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable area. I have blamed my sedintariness on my lack of transportation, on the oppressive summertime heat, etc. But is only now that I am realizing that these were just so many excuses, and such a realization brings me greater joy than I have known in this sordid wasteland.