Getting Lost on Purpose

August 26, 2005

I've been trying to get to know the area the only way I really know how -- by looking for ne wways to go places and "getting lost" as a result. One of these excursions -- turning one street too soon on the way back to the chiropractor -- failed miserably as I wound my way around housing developments. I eventually made my way out to Centreville Road (or maybe it was Walney by that point) and found my way home.

The latest excursion went a little better; I knew ahead of time that I'd probably wind up at the gas station near my apartment. In addition to learning that -- at least in this case -- having the same name really does mean it's the same street, I found a school-like building and the football field next to it. The houses back there also dredged up a memory I didn't even know still existed.

Unlike my apartment complex, where you have only a few entry points into a self-contained street system, the houses there sat on access streets that had intersections with the main road every couple blocks. (You can see what I'm talking about here, since I'm doing such a wonderful job of describing it. And yes, the development there is so new it doesn't show up on the aerial photography. Try to extrapolate out from the few houeses that were there.) For some reason it reminded me of visiting a friend's father down in the Columbus area, probably close to 20 years ago now.

It always amazes me what my horrible memory manages to pull up. And sometimes it irritates the hell out of me too, when I get the feeling that I'm trying to remember something but can't quite call it up.

August 25, 2005August 29, 2005