So you think you're a Situationalist

I was thrilled to learn, from our last lecture, that my odd habits of mind were similar to those exercised by the likes of Debord and Lefevbre. Validation! For as long as I can remember I have toyed with perspective in transit from point A to point B. For instance, I often imagine myself a tourist in my own neighbourhood ("so, this is how the people here live"). Andy Warhol writes of travel in his collection of thoughts on time. He tries to recall a trip he took to Europe but remembers only a car ride to the ball remarking, "Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life" (180). What if we could make the mundane memorable? Find value in the vapid? Without question we would find our lives more meaningful. I believe one of the most worthwhile effects of travel results from what we do in other countries that is most like what we do in the normal day-to-day at home (having coffee in a cafe, taking a bus, walking). The re-experience of the mundane gives us a new appreciation of our own routine. With this traveler's view, we can re-experience our own city without the need of a passport by merely using our imaginations. When I'm feeling particularly bored with the world I try to picture what Vancouver might look like if the city was abandoned for 20 or 30 years. How would the buildings hold up? Would ivy begin to thrive and set about dragging everything down? Would the deer come back? Below is a photo taken in 1999 of Pripyat , a city in the Ukraine that became a ghost town after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. It seems that, ever since human beings moved out, the city has experienced a "reinvasion of nature".

Sometimes the themes of my derives become a little too real. One morning, in early autumn, I was walking through downtown on my way to work. I had been reading Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem"and was inspired to envision Vancouver as a city prone to terrorist attacks. The date was September 11, 2001, and little did I know...
What I get out of these journeys of mind(on less dramatic days) is a new sense of connection to my world. I tend to notice rather than expect, get more out of human interactions, and and feel more "present."