Locality

Lastnight- I drove back to my parents house in Wooster to see some friends and my dad on his birthday. The drive is about an hour and a half and nearly the entire drive I was thinking about what I would have to do to get lost. I thought about that feeling, of being lost. It's weird how some people react to it. I don't tend to worry about being lost unless I have to be somewhere at a certain time.

My thoughts about this seemed to keep coming back to the same question, "what is being lost?"

If you set out with no destination, can you even get lost? But, I left for a specific city, and a specific home, one that I know very well how to get to. If you are thinking to yourself, 'all I have to do is keep driving north and east and I will get there, it might take longer but I'll still get there,' or 'Once I stumble across a main road I will know where to go,' can you consider yourself lost? I thought about this till it drove me nuts and I began to loose faith in the english language and our ability to communicate ideas.


I began to question:
are you lost if you do not know what direction you are going? If you don't know the name of the area you are in or the street you are on? If you have no frame of reference to determine the next step?

I started thinking about how the dimension of time factors into it. Are you ever 'lost' and not just 'delayed in getting to a destination?' What is your locality when you are lost driving, does it extend to only to the exterior of your car because that is the extent of your familiarity and interaction? If you become lost for days on end on a hiking trip- are your friends' worries about you part of your locality or seperate distinct localities? Is your locality what someone else defines, or is it yours exclusively in sense that it can never be expressed or experienced by anyone else.

All of this got me thinking about how each individual person has a unique response to every word and eventually, I began to question proper nouns.
I contemplated the idea that there are in existence, in an abstract but very literal way, a number of each "individual" too big to comprehend . For every person that has ever met any given individual there is a definition of that person.
Ryan Chitwood is: this guy in all my design classes that I've worked with in groups and experienced critiques with, someone I've known since the 9th grade who I make music, go skateboarding and enjoy chinese food with, someone I've known since the 10th grade who I make music, go skateboarding and enjoy Jim Jarmusch films with, this guy I met at a concert, the seventh customer I had today.
All of these 'definitions/localities' are true. I think I began to understand a little more the idea that "The map is not the territory," and how it applies to so much more of our lives and our localites. There can never be a complete map, record or history of anything that does not include everything in existence.

I would love to hear peoples' answers to some of these questions, even if they're, "You are just talking gibberish"