the endless drone of loving new york
There are a lot of things people do in life to enjoy themselves, but I think the best of all worlds is that situation in which you no longer can tell the difference between when you're working and when you're playing. I prefer things at the extremes somewhat — and to me, there is no better way to play than to do something really intensely, go hard, pull out all the stops, and then suddenly realize that you're not working towards the relief of the outcome but within the joy of the process. To those I know writing something on deadline, in the middle of opening a store, or rushing around arranging the flowers — whatever it is they're doing that they've chosen to do, delighted in organizing, and are seeing to fruition, I often stop and remind them: this is the good part.
Yes, the part with the compliments and sleeping and sense of accomplishment is good too, but to my mind the process is to be savoured, because without that, what is there really? I don't enjoy things nearly the same way unless they feel earned, even if what I'm enjoying is just free time — and that probably comes from being a freelancer whose ideas of "free time" are oft polluted by pending to-do-lists and a 24-hour work clock. But going full bore towards something — sticky New York, blistered feet, scant on sleep, tying ribbons at the last second squinting into the full July sunlight — is just so fucking awesome.
And though I love my city tenderly, it takes only a couple of days in New York to forget much of my real life completely. Something about the city's full immersion, humidity, the wealth of amazing old friends I have there (and the lucky kindling of new ones), the near-ridiculousness of its specialization ("Oh, you can get that down in the three-ring binder district!") and the heated, star-crossed, truly swoony relationship I have with its landscape, streets, its names — something about it all just fits perfectly to me despite in so many ways violating my every understanding of logic and reason. It's pretty unspecial to be a non-New Yorker groaning on about how great and magical the city is, but it's not a conceit or a posture — in fact, I wish I didn't feel this way at all, as lord knows it would involve less second-guessing, less cliché, and sound less like the tortured whine of someone long hung up pathetically and endlessly on an old lover.
I think a lot about memory, location and continuity, and more than even on my trips home do I find a synthesis of those things in New York. (Truth be told, going to Chicago is more like a complete and total disconnect.) See, when I was nineteen I packed a couple of tuna sandwiches and drove twelve hours straight to New York City for the first time, off to visit a friend I'd made through music and mutuality. Dan lived on Long Island, and I got pulled over twice on the way to his house, but what I really remember is just how impossible it seemed to me that I had even made it there at all — you can't just pack tuna sandwiches in a cute little college town and hop in your Corolla and leave the midwest for somewhere so big on your own power, can you? I remember the huge rock cuts on the Ohio Turnpike and the long emptiness of Pennsylvania giving way to the sudden clutter and filth of Jersey and the biggest most beautiful rusting towering crazy things I had ever seen. Crossing over the George Washington Bridge seemed not like the tremendous hassle it does now, but like the bridge it really was: the opening of an epic gateway, the start of a new chapter of life that remains an ongoing strain on the senses and the heartstrings.
I can't even get into the histories, the lovers, the hot Julys and Coney Islands and spring breaks and chance encounters that make up my own mythology of the city and constitute my own ghosts. I could easily write for weeks without ever getting close to making sense or order of all it's added up to. But what occurs to me is that I found a place to love (even if it prefers to love me back with rats and urine stench and altogether too much humanity) at an age where things were changing; that I came into a revelation of a city at the same time as I was coming into myself, and that going there is a way of touching something that hasn't changed like everything else, that doesn't represent a part of my life that seems too-easily chaptered off. The city is faultlessly able to compress the past and future for me while constantly reminding me of life's potential and chance in a way that, generally, knocks me off my feet. I realize that part of the reason this always happens is because I just haven't given it enough time to break me down and completely sap the life out of me — not to mention my bank account — but what can I say. I'm a romantic. And if I have a chance to look at the world, even in brief flashes, through great-friends-glittering-bridges-
lavender-donuts-Brooklyn-street-names-long-walks-East-Village-willow-trees-
three-in-the-morning-cab-ride-colored glasses, well — can you blame me? I'm going to do it every time.