not to worry all of this is leading somewhere...

as i was riding up the coast with the evil twin’s viking brother to his summer house, passing towns along the way he states that before moving to hellerup he looked at these places and found them too isolated. passing tårbæk, skodsborg, and vedbæk, i find them a bit big.

i wish i had spent more time in the villages along the nordre strandvej which were less dependent on copenhagen. am in outside boyceville which is outside menomonie which is deemed too small and boring when i am trying to get out of the car and wander “downtown”. a postcard from someone letter pressed who states she is coping with small town alabama.

i seem to remember when i hated that baltimore couldn’t manage to have a million people, upset that i was in niterói and not rio but extremely glad that i wasn’t in novo friburgo or teresópolis.

something happened. i remember liking the drive along what seemed a never ending dirt road - actually it was only 17km - in heavy fog from ribeirão pires to paranapiacaba. driving along the wisconsin-illinois border through towns like durand, afton, juda, footville and brodhead. seeing towns’ water towers lined up in the distance in the flatness of downstate illinois. liked walking between haworth to hebden bridge.

then it was turning the megalopolis into manageable bits. camberwell not london, write to tribeca and inwood not nyc. headed to heights of santa teresa to look down on rio and even preferred são domingos/gragoatá - before the landfill - as the praça leoni ramos was more for the locals than the passers by.

i could have been scarred by films like local hero, impressed by the fact that the silly mid on misplaced tanzanian spent time in the orkneys in the hopes of a 20-20 pickup match. it isn’t being small it is being self-contained, one has to be able to find the necessities within town - a food shop, a general store, a tavern, places without them no matter how small seem more suburb than town - peasants pissoir is that example of bedroom community but so do all those north shore towns where although are self contained still consider themselves chicagoan i found a litmus test, if the answer of where your from is the closest big city then the town is not suitable for me.

in cities i would search out those places that seemed to be autonomous with definable borders - hyde park or better still hegewisch, locust point. i search them out trying to find the limits of where i could live. days after the ride up the danish coast, biking through the deerpark i go through a large gate and see rådvad, i wonder...