While Walking About These Quiet Streets...

While walking about these quiet streets of north Deering much in the vein of W.G. Sebald in his famous trek around the east coast of England, aimlessly strolling,  flaneur-like, mindful of summer's end, with August-fading, brooding upon fleeting dusky images of houses and yards,  thoughts merging with scenery, the curve of the road, the overwrought oaks, front porches, mailboxes, cracked sidewalks, frayed lawns, familiar street signs, eluding the occasional traffic on Summit, taking the path down off of Sumac near Lyseth, traversing the school grounds, cutting across toward the CVS or going the "long way" around...on that same walk I have taken day in and day out, knowing in advance what will happen before it arrives; trudging past the same trees and shrubs and parked cars until reaching my destination at the shopping center where Shaw's grocery and Starbuck's hold sway; yet somehow connected with this secure sense of a predictable outcome is an inkling of weird alternative scenarios, of what might have happened if sudden rage or hysteria or impulsiveness or crazed emotion had taken over or if all inhibition fell by the wayside. Would I have simply wandered off somewhere else? Or commandeered a random bicycle to abscond with? Or shop-lifted bubblegum for no apparent reason? Or chased squirrels into the woods? Or staged a very real emotional melt-down? Or feigned a panic attack just for fun? Or pretended to be my favorite super-hero undergoing sudden metamorphosis?Surely none of this could-have ever really happened...in all likelihood...except as a glaringly remote "logical possibility"...And yet...this sense of foreboding over the odd and extreme "what-might-have-occurred,"  the infinite bizarro-world possibilities, hiding behind the average-everyday, is, I believe, at the root of our late-historical, romantic consciousness whereby mundane reality is infused and inflated with all manner of free-floating subjectivity in the form of fantasy, whimsy, day-dreams, reveries, supernatural happenings, comic-book heroics - that is to say - wild scenarios that hide about within the mundane, haunting us...those events that could perhaps, by-a-long-shot, in the extreme rare case almost happen, but never do - or should I say - rarely do since when they break into reality - the destruction and insanity and chaos factor is always immense...