miami! this thing is done! DONE!

Starting with the plane’s descent into Miami ruins the whole rotten surprise. The tidiness with which it’s laid out is a fearful premonition. All the buildings fit neatly into the spaces outlined by the roads, and it looks like making those roads so straight was the reason everything else is the way it is; it looks like the roads might be the whole point. Miami is astoundingly full of cement; it makes you notice how human development represses actual ground, of the unnatural falseness of all that gray, of all those right angles.

Miami is also a strangely flat place. Even from the rakish angle of the plane window, nothing sticks out from the ground; its buildings don’t scrape the sky as much as squat beneath it. This isn’t to say there aren’t tall buildings in Miami, only that they don’t reach up. This might be because there’s nothing to fear from the sky in Miami. Because nothing ever falls out of it there’s no reason for the complications of pointiness, of angles not ninety degrees on which snow or rain could accumulate. Rather than soar, these buildings are built to bask. They don’t have that narrowing, accelerating upward movement of something like the Empire State Building, that striving oneupsmanship of trying to be a bit closer to the clouds and the moon. In Miami the third floor often looks like the thirtieth; height is stacking floors until the building is tall enough to appear worldly and urban. Miami is submissively content under its sky, it knows it’s high and wide up there but it doesn’t care to climb up. And you couldn’t climb up anyway: the clouds here, the handholds of sky climbing, are pathetically frayed and malnourished little things. There’s just that coddling, infinite blue. And so it squats.

We came to Miami under the misapprehension that you could walk or take public transportation to get where you wanted to go, under the misapprehension, in a word, that Miami is a city. Miami is not a city, and only its saddest inhabitants don't drive. This sadness is partly because you aren't very well off if you don't have a car, but also because you will have to spend time on the metro, the bus and the sidewalks, all of which encourage you to think about infinity and solitude and whether there is any good in the world. Waiting for public transportation is soul crushing and you can’t not wait.
Miami’s transit system is literally crippling. I like taking buses in cities because, unlike the deserts of sidewalk in Miami, the stops are close enough together to race the bus. Your head start is the time until the next one and you can run looking over your shoulder and catch them as they pull in behind you. Bus racing is silly in that you arrive at the same time, only sweaty, but it’s invigorating to not have to offer up your limbs in sacrifice to the god of public transportation, to not move so that you will, to bind your feet in order to be better carried. In Miami, however, the bus-savior is a laggard and the princesses die virgins in their castles.

The people in the buses and metros behave with a peculiar combination of dreariness and brashness that seems to come from spending time in places that disrespect them by their structural decrepitude, that have society’s neglect of them embedded in the stained linoleum and the yellow fuzz poking out of the sticky seats. Many of these people react to this insulting dinginess by blasting tinny cell phone music into the open air, eyes closed, transported, performing. Their eschewal of headphones seems like part of both a hostile and hopeful fantasy of being on the mic, of aggressively colonizing the wretched public transit system with a purposeful raucousness, of swaggering on the margins of society. In his essay “Entertainment and Utopia,” Richard Dyer wrote about how musicals give audiences the feeling of utopia; the dancing and singing embody the spontaneity and effusiveness and fellowship of a better world. I think the cell phone singers are trying to key into that world, that on some level they hope everybody’ll join in, like in those YouTube videos of food court patrons breaking into song. But transit acoustics aren’t kind; the swagger is slightly schizophrenic.

As the mayor of Paris in the 1860s, Georges-Eugène Haussmann razed a great deal of the city under the pretense of modernizing what had become a dark, crowded, alley-filled and sneaky place, but what some historians have recast as an effort to reshape a city ideal for scrappy uprisings. While Paris, by the standard of other cities, is still rotten through with crannies, Haussmann gave it a few boulevards – with names like Avenue de la Grande Armée (“Great Army”) – on which little people would be littler and soldiers could march more breezily. Miami is the hideous consummation of a Haussmannian project. It is a good place for wind to blow or tanks to roll or, rather, for driving.

Miami is not designed for people but for people in the geometric containers that are cars. To drive is to try to embrace Miami’s dubious, promise, to attempt to be sane on its alien grid. Everyone drives. This is obviously manifest in the traffic, but also, more strikingly, in the mind-blowing number of parking lots. Miami stuffs its bra with them; the need to park cars is a lot of what makes it dense and tall enough to appear to be a city; the first ten floors of many buildings are parking lots and many other buildings simply are parking lots.

This results in a bizarre disjunction between the sidewalk and the buildings in Miami. It’s both mysterious and alienating to stand in front of one of its faceless structures in the way it would be to walk through a toll both and try to coax the metal bar into rising. And though there are sometimes doors through which pedestrians could hypothetically enter, they’re absurd (and locked) gestures, vestiges of building conventions on a new and unsettling planet. I wanted to knock on the walls, to wave my arms; the experience evokes a caveman confronted with a television. Buildings exist here in that they loom and cast shadows, they exist as the walls of a windy canyon. How people actually get into these buildings is something of a mystery, but it definitely has to do with cars.

Math is pure and factual and true because it has nothing to do with the sloppiness of the physical world. Trigonometry, for example, does not care about language or time or death, it will exist, austerely lawful, anywhere and forever. Living in Miami is kind of like trying to make a home in the tents of SOH CAH TOA, as reasonable, as human, as rational as building a house with boards the square root of three feet long. Miami’s urban planning is spectacularly indifferent to the experience of being a human on two feet. Its streets are parallel lines that really won’t ever meet, as if those tacky photos of two people walking side by side on train tracks were, instead of a hokey vision of growing old together, a lament of eternal, irreconcilable solitude. You get confronted by the horizon at the end of every street; there is no refuge in Miami. There are just those palm trees, shaved, naked, humpable. They’re the perfect streetwalkers to line the highways, as organic as global warming.

The inhumanity of Miami’s city planning leads people to avoid walking and leaves the sidewalks strangely bare. I write bare rather than clean because the sidewalks still have pieces of gum and the like, it’s just that they’re like the artifacts left after the apocalypse, like wistful, dusty tumbleweeds for archaeologists to study how we used to live. The trash, in a word, is dead here; it doesn't have the fresh freshness, the offensiveness of something new. If you let your dead cat's vomit sit for a decade it might eventually make you miss your cat and its retching. Miami's litter gives you the same feeling about pedestrians. The only people on the street mumble angrily to themselves and peck at cigarette butts. The ground in Miami is fundamentally unsuitable for things that are alive, you need a car to insulate you the way you need tires in a thunderstorm.

And Miami’s vegetation is organic proof. The grass, for example, is a creeping, itchy weed. In the way that people have imagined islands as the backs of benevolent whales, Miami’s grass makes you feel you’re atop a scratchy reptile. It’s survivor vegetation, clinging fiercely to the ground, conspicuously and gruffly alive amidst so much gray cement. That grass and the cockroaches will keep the world alive after the nuclear winter.

The vaguely horrifying thing, however, is that the weather is so pleasant that the monstrous monoliths and generally apocalyptic scenery don’t matter. It’s like being a frog in the disarmingly warm stew of dehumanization. In Miami, you cannot help being a slob. One day my friend and I had to meet our host, Jorge, an extremely generous and handsome man, at his work near Douglas Road in order to exchange keys with him. He works across from a parking lot building on a street so thoroughly devoid of interest that I realized that streets are a black line in between two gray ones. There was no place for us to sit while we waited, but strangely, my friend and I sank naturally to the ground, sitting at first, but soon sprawled unceremoniously on the sidewalk. This was odd because he and I are reasonably dignified people who would feel self-conscious about lying on ground where dogs pee and gum is spat out. But in Miami you don’t have to reassure yourself that you aren’t a hobo. You debase yourself in the same way that someone about to freeze to death feels warm, your fall is as comfortable and as irresistible as the cozy seduction of death. You’re a chameleon under the Miami sun, and the camouflage that beckons is a flip-flopped savannah of cement.

It’s as if a cosmic potato masher stamped Miami on the earth, as if a buttery oasis was struck by a Martian mesh. Once struck, the butter congealed around the masher and the grease started to get in people’s hair. But people made their homes on that masher and no one noticed they weren’t in the oasis anymore. The sky is still blue in Miami, and the heat is still terrific, and sucking on that tropical pacifier the people learned to be slovenly, to walk on the firm slime of an ugly American suburb.