stockholm is fucking natural, man

i needed kira to open the door for me recently so i threw pebbles at her window. i threw pebbles that i found on the street at kira's window. stockholm is like that. it's mutable and alive, its ground is more than hard cement; you can get a handful of it. think, for example, of the mania to get a seat whenever a stadium closes, of the romance of an uprooted paving stone in paris, of how irresistible it is -- though maybe this is only true of drunk college kids -- to steal construction signs off the street. most cities are great, hard wholes because they'd just be dry bones if they weren't, like the rubbed away patches of ancient things that you're allowed to pet in museums. 

the streets are littered with snails when it rains; the dogs are off leash; you can just drop your apple on the ground because the ground, the living ground, will deal with your apple for you. kira went out in the rain one night and came back with a handful of dirt and rocks with which to replant a plant. her hands were dirty in a way that wasn't gross. it wasn't city dirt, which clings and sweats and stains. it was the dry, the cleansing kind. 

stockholm is natural, man. it's not a city in the typical earth suppressing sense, you get the feeling that you're on the tip of the iceberg of naturalness. its parks are not dandified "poets’ walks" with imported boulders, they're actual forests. there are stairways careening up rocky cliffs. its buildings aren't taller or shorter because the developer was more or less of an asshole, they were just built on higher or lower ground.