If Plato’s Cave is a Midwestern US-American city, then what realities flash distorted shadows across its interior walls? I’ve been asking myself that question for quite some time: off and on for decades, at least. Cities are, after all, strange things. They are where the bad guys live, according to Biblical logic, and in the logic of modern thinkers, they are places in which only strangers live. A city, I heard once, is where you live, and where every face belongs to a stranger. I can’t remember who said that: Samuel R. Delany, perhaps, or someone he was quoting. I wonder, then, if Plato’s Cave (as a Midwestern US-American city) is simply a place in which strangers look at shadows on walls? I have my own shadows. I find them soothing, interesting, and occasionally cryptic-yet-whimsical. I know that the shadows I see are little more than the motions of real things between myself and a source of light…over there. I know that shadows are not the things themselves. They lack physicality. They lack dimension. They rest on things or under things and cannot exist unless things cast them between an observer and a source of light. For this reason, I find shadows to be quite interesting things. Okay, and I happen to like darkness…I’m comfortable in darkness, in places that frighten other people, and so it stands to reason that I’d like shadows. On sunny days, I seek out shadows, waling close (often against the flow of traffic) to remain in the shade. I identify with creatures at home under rocks and rotting logs. In some oddly over-analytical way, I probably associate with such creatures, do to their awareness of shadows, and the hints at reality they convey, while allowing one to remain apart from that reality. Shadows, I think, are the perfect places from which to observe and catalogue, and—on occasion—to point and snicker. Cities, I have learned, are ideal places in which to do that. I thought of shadows today, as I drank iced tea (for 99-cents) at a local donut franchise. The franchise is connected with a well-known ice cream place. As I drank tea with Corey, I watched a woman and two children interacting with ice cream. They were Midwestern Standard and dressed in largely pastel colors. The mother possessed pastel colored hair and a tan that achieved a strangely pale hue. She and her children cast strange shadows, not physically, but in their manner. I watched, as one of the boys, licked his ice-cream cone from the wrong direction. The flavor he wanted was apparently on the bottom, but due to the reality he perceived, it was completely logical to lick both scoops of ice cream off of the cone, onto his wrist, and then onto the palm of his hand, while ice cream (in garish, unnatural colors) smeared his lips. The mother declared that the scoops of ice cream were too large, and apologized for getting the boy precisely what he wanted. That, I decided, was one incredibly odd shadow and I cringed at the reality it implied. (My mother never apologized for getting me precisely what I wanted; instead, she taught me how not to waste it.) Something has changed; it casts strange shadows on the city. In honor of shadows (of multiple sorts) I’ve decided to post this image. As expected, I loved the shadows, the lack of color, despite the very overt (tough subtle) presence of color. I liked the pigeon. The shadows here, are less metaphorical than the shadows glimpsed in an ice-cream/donut place…but they are shadows nonetheless, and far less unsettling that a shape of reality that demands apologies from a mother…for a mistake she didn’t even make. Now, I’m off to think about shadows some more, and as always, thank you for viewing, reading and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.