There’s a bitter body quickening within me, and its heartbeat is my own. Today is the day after Thanksgiving, and I feel very lonely. The holidays do this to me. I think it’s because I watch the city further stratify in a gawdy farce of revelry. So many people seem to think that the congestion equals love - or the attempt to show love - and excitement. I can’t stop thinking about how much colder it is, and how many people can’t find a warm place to spend the night. And the masses are worried about getting digital cameras on sale? It’s so very wrong. Bah, humbug!
Posts under ‘I Live NY’
A fresh reminder
As I left the apartment this morning for work, I looked outside and exclaimed to no one in particular, “It’s snowing!” I suppose it was technically sleeting, as the precipitation consisted of puffed (r)ice that melted the instant it hit the ground.
Deliverance
The buzzer squeals, and the one person I’d expect to visit is already visiting. “Someone pushed the wrong number,” I tell Cade. We continue doing whatever we were doing.
Swiping it forward
If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. And if I can’t scratch your back, I’ll scratch someone else’s. If no one’s scratching my back, it’s even more important to scratch someone else’s, because I get what I give.
Close stranger of mine
There’s that moment of recognition when you know someone you don’t. When you realize the woman on the subway looks uncannily like you plus twenty-five years, or you meet someone’s eyes and they just get it. Most people never acknowledge these moments, at least not to those with whom they are experienced.
Even Danny Glover loves that chicken from Popeye’s
Cade and I saw Danny Glover at Popeye’s in Harlem last night. Homeboy was keeping it real and ordered a box of popcorn shrimp. The cashiers didn’t recognize him, and I wouldn’t have, either, but Cade has a knack for recognizing tiny quirks of various celebrities and then rattling off their film credits.
Not to be confused with that NBC logo
Saturday afternoon: A ghostly white peacock struts down the sidewalk in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A crowd stands guard, their backs to the traffic down Amsterdam Avenue. The bird struts four paces, stops, and stares. “Notice I’m a peacock perilously close to traffic, everybody? In Morningside Heights, far from any zoo or possible origin? Okay, just checking,” it seems to say.
Vanity
A woman sits on the steps of the neighborhood church with her head bowed. I assume she is praying, but her head suddenly lifts. She is straining to see every follicle of her right eyebrow, tweezers in hand. A statue of Jesus looks on.
Riding into the flames
The sun sizzles upon the pinstripe-clad white meat of my thighs. I’m in Westchester County, home of NYC’s closest suburbs, and I can’t believe I’m in a cab with no air conditioning, much less a shared cab with no air conditioning. This is the land of in-house washer/dryer combos and attic storage - luxuries magnified by their proximity to Manhattan, where someone regularly pees in my building’s basement laundry facilities and I have to call on the professionals. Frankly, I’m disappointed.
Life inside and outside the walls
Nora Ephron on living, loving, and leaving NYC:
“Whenever you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite it true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor, the city seems to turn against you. It’s much more expensive (because you have to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind this when you live here; when you live here, it’s part of the caffeinated romance of this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, you experience change as betrayal… You’ve turned your back for only a moment, and suddenly everything’s different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you’re just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on the Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you read that Manhattan rents are going up, they’re climbing higher, they’ve reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.”
