Keep Your Chin Up, The Sequel

There have been many points within the past few weeks during which all that I can think about is quitting. The kind of day in which I am greeted in the morning by a child who tells me he wants to punch me in the face. And then another child who is angry because of something that happened during a basketball game during lunch (something I am only to piece together much later) and so he begins swearing at me, telling another student that he will slap her, and slamming his desk against the ground. And another student who is unable to stop talking for more than 1 minute, rendering me incapable of completing a full sentence during most points of the day (I’m not exaggerating). And another student who  becomes frustrated when I don’t allow him to do whatever he wants, so he grabs a computer monitor in order to try to break it. And another student who goes into violent hysterics when I gently and quietly suggest that she choose a book where she can read most of the words. And two students who begin punching each other because of something that happened between two other students. And so on and so forth. This is just a snippet of one day I’m talking about here.

I got pretty low there for a while, compounded by sickness. But eventually, I turned the corner. That’s just the way it goes. You get the bear up on your back, digging in his claws, and you’re getting dragged down, but then you turn the corner, and you find some sap and succor to carry you back into positivity. You find those moments of breakthrough, when students have a light in their eyes at the connection they are making to what you are saying.

I’ve also been learning coping strategies, to manage my own anger and upset. I sometimes have to step back and take a moment to allow students to have a completely off topic discussion, or to insult each other, until I can regain my composure and enter back into the fray. Because when I lose control of myself, that’s when my students begin to explode. They are like dry tinder in a forest, just waiting to be sparked. A little bit of anger from anyone, whether myself or another student, will spread like wildfire, and then the day will be spent in putting out flames. So I have to be able to take whatever they throw at me. I have to be the zen master, transforming their reactive stratagems of despair into teachable moments of development.

My students have learning disabilities (in addition to growing up in areas of high poverty), and I’m only just beginning to get a glimpse of what that really means. It means that nobody knows exactly how to teach them in just the way that they need. You can give them fragments of a standard education, but you have to find a way to pitch everything you do in a completely different way. And figuring out how to do that isn’t always clear. For example, a student may only be able to decode words at a kindergarten to early 1st grade level, but their comprehension is high. Meaning that they grow weary of low-level books about dogs and cats very easily. Or a student may be able to read words fluently at a 4th grade level, but their comprehension (or at least, their demonstration of their comprehension) of what they read is minimal. Traditional assessments don’t really convey exactly where they stand, in other words. It just tells you that they are behind, way behind.

So solutions may be, for example, that the student who can’t decode many words needs a graphic novel that requires complex understanding but has few words. And the student who reads fluently with little understanding may need books with clear and well-organized narratives, like well-written children’s books or short stories. But these aren’t solutions that you come to through training. You have to know the student that is in front of you and be able to see through their behaviors and symptoms and into the source of the obstruction to their learning. And you know, with all that free time and money that teachers have, you can develop all your own curriculum, get tons of great books, and tailor it just right for every student! (That last sentence was sarcasm, in case you didn’t catch it.)

I just keep on reminding myself — on those days in which I feel like breaking into tears in the middle of the classroom because my students are insulting each other in a way I would never even consider talking to any human being — that this is the challenge that I was looking for. I sought for it, and I got it.

And I remember last winter at this very time, I was going through the same struggle, in a different sense. I was sitting on the E train at 3 in the morning with the drunk and the homeless, then walking through the icy pre-dawn streets of Queens to shoulder the mythological struggle that is the American Dream. I was getting 4-5 hours of sleep and eating one and a half meals a day. So now, yes, this challenge right now, right here, is exactly what I came here for.

I’m here to work my ass off in order to make my world a better place. And what better place to do that in than New York City, the gateway portal to manifest destiny?

Update from the sweaty pit of Summer

As you may have noticed, alas, I have been unable to keep up with my post-a-day dictum. Only one more week of summer school field training and coursework, and then I’ve got some time off to concentrate on acquiring a job (kinda important), visiting SF for a wedding, and enjoying what’s been a fairly mild summer for NY. Since I’m currently sitting in a pool of sweat, I’m not in the mood for posting much right now, either, but here’s some graphic filler for the meanwhile. . . (once you’ve entered into the picture gallery below, click on the picture again once you are on the next page in order to see it full size)

Lil’ City House in DUMBO

Downtown Manhattan

Central Park Pond

Birds bathing in the hot summer sun

Lotuses in a Central Park pond

Tree formed shade in Central Park

Let Me Count The Ways

Oh, New York, New York, let me count the wonderful ways that you’ve affected (infected) me:

• lice
• asthma
• possibly cancer
• nut butter from hell
• 5 decrepit flights of stairs every time I want to venture out of my apartment
• schizophrenia
• showers in a slight trickle of water that sometimes disapparates altogether suddenly, usually right when I’ve just lathered up the dome
• dulled hearing
• an inability to relate to anyone outside of New York

Oh yes! This is why we love it here, people. We love it cuz it just hurts so good.

Anniversary of My Arrival

So it has now been a full year since this intrepid Californian arrived on this eastern shore of dense urban life. In this past year I have been seriously challenged and have undergone some changes, some growing up, some facing of the hard edged point of now termed ‘Reality’, or—as we used to term it out on a small lake bordering a wilderness area out in Tahoe—the ‘Real World’. A quick schemattering of this past year in a nutshell:

• a 7 day journey in a Budget truck across a storm/flood stricken Mid-West/South with all of my worldly possessions, including my terrified White-Fronted Amazon parrot Vinnie and my girlfriend
• a living in the living room of my girlfriend’s family’s apartment, sleeping on an air mattress that we blew up each and every night and deconstructed again in the morning, so that our ‘room’ could reconvert into a TV watching arena, in which I was subjected to extremely loud marathon watchings of Dancing With The Stars, American Idol, and The View, just to name a select few
• a confrontation on the late night D train with a very large man who was seeking to kick both my and my girlfriend’s ass
• I almost threw up on a train and bus, but just barely held it in to spew it all out at a bus stop 10 blocks away from our street
• a proposal and subsequent engagement to my girlfriend, now henceforth to be known as The Fiancée
• my fiancee’s sister moved out, thus enabling my fiancee and I to move into her room, where we now sleep on two twin beds pushed up together. We’re moving on up in the world
• an attempt to obtain our own apartment failed; I got Lasik surgery performed on my eyes
• I was unemployed for 6 months and sought desperately for a job, undergoing strange interview processes and feeling my self-esteem rise and plummet on a minute-by-minute basis just like the stock market
• I finally gained employment—in a location 1 1/2 – 2 hours away by public transit in Queens, with variable and long hours

Well, that’s pretty much my New York experience in a broad and sweeping overview. In celebration of my survival and continuing eeked existence here in this city, I am going home to Southern California next week, to obtain some much needed R&R, as well as to see my family and especially my nieces and nephews, one of whom I have not even met yet. My fiancee and I are going to get massages, as both our bodies are falling apart from our respective jobs, and simply enjoy ourselves, as we haven’t been able to spend more than a few hours together from week to week.

Putting It All In Perspective

Things that were before unthinkable/untenable become routine unremarked events in this city of everything and nothing, of the richest and poorest, of the darkness and the light. Blood spattered on the pavement of a man splayed out in the street after being hit by an SUV—a drunken boy kicking his girlfriend on the train—a woman sleeping on her knees on the concrete with her head resting against a hard wooden bench—the nightly array of homeless in the plastic subway seats, resting in exhausted, bent, flopping angles, their skin bloated and gray.

The petty struggle of my own existence is thus kept honed in a perspective relative to the suffering that is the everyday realm of those society has passed over. A clarity of vision comes from these watchful late night journeys. I listen to soulful music and catch small packets of rest as I cultivate my ambition, stoking a striated core of determination that grows increasingly irrevocable, a hunger and confidence maturated by patience and humility. Before, twas the wind or lack thereof that determined my path; now, tis my work and will that paves the way. My inner capitalist thus fomented, I recognize the value in self-restraint mixed with a strategic and occasional allocation of self-indulgence.

Time is now not merely The Now, which certainly has its critical power and mystique, as evidenced by Zen and Thelonius monks, but furthermore The Day That Will Come, the nurtering long-term barter that results, someday, in the fruition of what was once but a dream in a shell of enshrouded loneliness. There is This, and there is What Will Be, all one in the grand scale of existence, the unseen weighted omega pull of dark energy that exerts its unyielding influence on still birthing oblivion. What will be will be only because of each individual sown effort, this momentous ephemeral daily struggle. This daily bread will be only because of what must become. All one picture that cannot be viewed by any one mind but only ultimately in the intermixture of eternal generations.

Nu Bidness

Bunch of stuff been going down en mi vida right now, so here’s a general un-abstract post to fill you in. First things first, I got my eyeballs lasered, and I am now in recovery mode, which is a bit harder than I assumed it would be, as I am still working while healing.

Getting your eyes lasered is a bit scary sci-fi-ish, I won’t lie. They lay you down on a chair and douse your eyes in some solution to numb them. They were supposed to have given me valium but they forgot. I wished I’d had it. I was clutching the little stress balls they gave me and kicking my wee legs against the chair in silent protest. Anyway, then they tape up your eyelids and put something (a speculum, I believe it was called) around your eye to keep it open. Then your eye gets like sucked upwards or something, and you’re staring at this red light surrounded by concentric white circles, and it zaps like something out of a B movie, and you can smell your eyeballs burning. Yes, you can smell it, and it’s not pleasant. But that is not the worst of it. They then drop endless amounts of ice cold water into your freshly lasered eye. That was the worst part, for me. I was getting brain freeze from all the water being flooded into my eye socket.

But the whole debacle is over in a few minutes, so it’s not all that bad, really, other than being extremely uncomfortable and unnerving and disturbingly like a bad sci-fi movie. Then the real pain and discomfort begins. The rest of the day I spent popping vicodin and laying in the dark with my eyes closed, as they could not be opened, as they flooded endlessly with tears. The next day was more of the same, though I could keep my eyes open for slightly longer periods of time. I shuffled about with the big shades on that they gave me that made me look like Ray Charles. Then the next day I went back to work.

My eyes have been getting extremely dried out, which isn’t surprising, given that I work 10 hours a day with 3-4 hours on the subway, so I have to keep my eyes moisturized constantly. But the eyeballs are healing, slowly; meanwhile, I can’t see very well and I continue to look like Ray Charles. But it’s all worth it for the luxury of glassless-ness, folks. I can finally walk outside and put on my sunglasses, instead of squinting about and giving my aging skin crows legs.

Other news: my fiancee (I love throwing that word about; it seems to have a weight and heft to it that makes me sound conceited) and I have honed in on an apartment exactly one block away from the location where we are currently squatting. It gets tons of light, it’s relatively huge for a Manhattan apartment, and of course, it’s in a building without an elevator, meaning that we get plenty of exercise going up and down the six flights of stairs.

But we don’t have it yet. We just got all the extensive documentation prepared and put together for the property management nazis. A word on obtaining a space the size of a closet in New York City: it’s absolutely nothing like renting in California like I’m accustomed to. In California, you plop down a deposit and a months worth in rent and sign your name and there you go. They’ll kick you out if they don’t like you. But in New York, they require bank statements, tax forms, W-2’s, employment and salary verification, IDs, personal references, and a 5 page essay on your long-term goals and dreams. Well, minus the essay, they require a shitload of personal information, which is apparently because it’s nearly impossible for New York City landlords to boot you out once you’ve got a lease. Pain in the fucking arse, is all I’ve got to say. But as they like to say here, welcome to New York.

At my store in Queens I seem to be a space alien to people sometimes. They look at my name tag, note that I am from San Diego, and then proceed to exclaim with wonder at the fact that I exist and work in New York City. Seeming to forget that New York City is comprised of mostly foreign elements. Why the hell are you in New York? they all want to know. Implying that California is a land of paradise. Which granted, at times during my half hour walk from the train station to my workplace at 3 in the morning when it’s below freezing and the arctic wind is blasting through my puny three layers, it may appear to be.

Let’s discuss this cold further: it’s been really cold. Like, so cold that my toes in my shoes and socks begin to freeze. So cold, that the air penetrates my pantalones. So cold that it’s like walking out into a freezer. Welcome to New York, indeed. More like Welcome to Minnesota.

Anyway, I need to get off the computer, because it’s straining my still unfocused newly laser minted eyeballs. Another post will be forthcoming at some unknown date in the unforeseen future.

Flashes of Random Stuff That Constitutes My Current Existence

Some random New York City thoughts:

• It struck me the other day as I was journeying by morning bus through Queens of how a mere year ago I was in Lake Tahoe, California, where the skyline is drawn by cragged piney mountains, and as I looked over towards downtown Manhattan, where the skyscrapers loomed in the dawning sun into the bracing air, I realized that this mancrafted landscape holds its own mute beauty, distant and unintelligible, yet comforting and beloved all the same. I experienced a fleeting moment of affection for the city. It’s like it’s so unnatural that it’s natural.
• When I’m sitting on the subway train and I don’t have a book to read, as I stare unfocused out the darkened window I think of how cool it would be if the windows of the cars had some kind of screensaver type backlighting, so that as you were traveling through tunnels, you could look at a background of fish swimming around or something. Just something to stare at mindlessly so you don’t have to play that I’m-not-really-staring-at-you-but-I-kinda-am game.
• It’s true: Californians really don’t know diddlysquat about what cold is. It gets friggin’ cold out here. When that wind blows—forget about it: suddenly all that ski-bum wear that got you by on the West Coast feels like tissue paper. It requires fur, wool, dense thickets of nylon, scarves, and a phat cap. Yet you will still see pretty young thin things wearing puny little cute jackets over their skin tight jeans. Other than for their Ugg boots, it’s a mystery to me as to how they keep themselves warm. Perhaps they’re harnessed with alpaca thongs?
• The economy really is bad. We’ve got people applying for jobs at our store from Wall Street who were investment bankers for 13 years, etc. Well, thank god for the service industry, eh? Makes me all the more resigned to the fact that I’ll continue to be overworked and sleep deprived for the next year on, at least. Oh, joy.
• The subway ain’t the ideal venue to study mathematics in.
• The subway in the night during winter is full to the brim with homeless people who have nowhere else to go to sleep and get out of the cold. And it can get just a tad stinky. I think that the city would be much better off if its public representatives were forced to ride the subway in the middle of the night. Might give them a whole new perspective on things.

NYC vs. California

Now methinks it is time for more meditation upon the topick of la ciudad Nueva York, as I have now resided here for 8 months, and have become a daily inhabitant of its subterranean commuter lifestyle. Many New Yorkers seem to have a distaste/idealization of California in general, whereupon they either think that Californians are too laid-back and boring, or they think that California is paradise. As a native Californian, I can now bear witness to the differences between NYC and Californian lifestyles: really, the only difference comes down to a matter and concept of space. Allow me to elaborate.

In California, we are accustomed to vast amounts of physical space. We drive on wide freeways and vast suburban expanses. We sit in our SUVs and trucks by ourselves, and grow agitated when people drive too close to us or cut us off (although we are accustomed to sitting in thickets of single occupant cars in the midst of traffic jams). We think backyards are normal, and we are off-put by giant crowds.

In New York City, physical space is negligible, for both rich and poor alike, though obviously the rich have more routes and spaces of escape, and they tend not to be packed into their apartments like sardines. All riders of the subway brush up against each other during rush hour, are pressed against strangers in the compress of Times Square, are sideswiped by other shopping carts in the narrow lanes of gourmet grocery stores. All drivers here expect and are undeterred by the close proximity of other vehicles, bikers, and pedestrians.

In NYC, the people are somewhat more homogenous in a sense. Fashion on the street is echoed everywhere—women wear the same Uggs, men wear the same stiff caps, hoodies, or black jeans. There is a certain type of coat and messenger bag style that proliferates. Both women and men here tend towards a fashionable kind of asceticism: stick thin, utilitarian, and dark colored. There is a certain style of self-consciousness in many New Yorkers. They are accustomed to being overheard, stared at, and ignored.

Thus, there isn’t really all that much substance to the stereotype of “New Yorkers are aggressive”, and “Californians are laid-back”. It’s simply a matter of density. When you are shoved all together into a small physical space, then you kind of have to be “aggressive” in order to move forward. But contrary to the stereotype of “aggressiveness”, New Yorkers are also much more accepting in the face of adversity, as they know that people being in their way is a part of life. And contrary to the stereotype of Californians being “laid-back”, Californians tend to be very good at being completely unsympathetic to people and situations outside of their comfort zones, as they aren’t used to being forced to deal with diversity and difference.

What I love about New York is that people of all types are forced up together. And while they may not like each other, they are used to dealing with one another.

What I don’t like about New York is that it is dirty and industrial. All of the subway stations are falling apart, and as good as the public transit system is here, it still sucks—if you take middle-of-the-night trains like I do and you have to actually get somewhere on time. Too many people still insist on driving cars, and drivers here don’t have any patience for pedestrians. Let’s face it: NYC is the epitome of industrially created environments. It’s a completely leveled island on a nearly perfect grid system. This is both what makes it cool and what makes it suck, because all of what makes it hold together always seems on the verge of falling apart.

New Yorkers, being near the northeast with its abundance of rainfall, also don’t seem to understand the preciousness of water the way Californians tend (relatively speaking) to. All day long, I walk by New Yorkers with hoses spraying down vast swaths of concrete, as if that’s cleaning anything. What a waste of drinking water. I’d like to see how New Yorkers would cope with a drought.

I’m still ambivalent about what I think about NYC, just as NYCers themselves seem similarly ambivalent in their views of California. I like that even as big and dirty of a city as it is, people here love their neighborhoods and their communities, and this tends to imbue the city as a whole with a feeling of belonging and acceptance, even in the face of all the travails (i.e. unemployed young men) that urbanity brings.

In any case, I’ve developed an intermittent Queens-style accent, which seems to enable one to make sarcastic and ironic statements in a conversational manner. I have a tendency to adopt regional accents when I am trying to fit in somewhere, such as while I lived in South Lake Tahoe, I developed a slight drawl, or while in Peru, I would speak English with Spanish inflected vowels. Although I have been told by a New Yorker that I have a “California accent”, so the ruse is not complete.

As to where my affiliations ultimately lie, I will always love California, but I don’t know that I want to live there again any time soon. I think that I could live anywhere, and I will always take a little bit of that place with me, and I will always reject some part of it. I am an American, I am a nature boy and an urbanite, I am a hippie and a capitalist, I am a writer and a retail worker. Will I ever find some place that I can finally and with finality call home? We’ll see.

Trivial Mundanities, aka TMs

Trivial Mundanities. Such is the stuff of life. I am beginning to think that underlying much of Thomas Pynchon’s works is an attempt to demonstrate just how much of history is formulated by the forces of completely officially ignored and hidden aspects of existence—strange sexual encounters, anarchist theorems, pot smoke enshrouded pontificating into the night, etc.

Just to give you an example of the current T.M.s of my daily life: I left for work Friday at 12:06 midday in order to begin work at 2 in the afternoon. I then worked til 2:30 at night. I arrived at home, due to some mistakes in getting off at the wrong stations due to construction, etc, at 5:30 Saturday morning. I then again left for work that morning at 12:07, after waking up at 11:30. Blah blah blah. The point of this enumerating on timeliness is that work, in this (a)typical example of another crazy night in my life, can consume—inclusive of the transit time involved in getting to it—a grand total of 17 hours of a day in my life. That particular scenario left me with 6 hours of sleep, though in actuality it was more like 4-5, given the time I spent showering when I got home and the fitful type of sleep that was to be had.

That’s not much of a life outside of work, now, is it?

Just to give a few more T.M. laden tidbits subsequent to aforementioned Hell Night: I woke up, sort of, in the morning, stumbled creakingly into my clothes, fed my screaming parrot, ate a granola bar, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and made my way out to the street, hence towards 1) the shuttle bus to 2) the A train to 3) the E train to 4) the Q53 bus. It being a Saturday, the place wherein I work was slam packed with frantic consumers, and due to some problems we’d had with a fire at our frozen warehouse, our intranet ordering system failing, etc, the day was even crazier and more stressful than usual—and as always, compounded by the fact that I am still new and “learning the ropes” as a manager there. So I didn’t get a break to eat and sit down and drink water until 8 at night.

So I’m sitting here and it’s past 3 am in the quiet of the witching hours and I’m beyond exhausted. It’s my “Friday” however, meaning that I’m now into my weekend, which will consist mainly of sleep and attempts to pretend that I’m not going back to work again soon, very, very soon.

It’s funny that I have been for so long wishing to put the “car culture” of California behind me, and here I am, fulfilling my ambition, logging in my plentiful hours within the New York MTA system, breathing in its subterannean fumes. I spend most of that time reading my library books while listening to my MP3 player—which may have just died actually (I haven’t had to time to analyze the situation: does it just need to be hit, recharged, taken apart, plugged in, re-re-booted, etc? Or is it really, finally, after so many years, Dead?)—closing my eyes and attempting to relax/nap in the hard plastic seats of the subway while my head nods to and fro, or staring at a single point at the ground and trying to pretend that I don’t notice the weird dude who insists upon starting blatantly at me as if I’m some kind of anomaly that does not compute.

The trains late night can really lead to existential crises; you will find yourself sitting in a murky, decaying waterlogged station, the tiles splotched with grime, a vomit spill projecting on the ground in front of the puritanically designed hard wood row of seats, a midget with a black cap and a dragon embroidered denim jacket asking you if you speak Spanish and then saying something completely nonsensical to you in any language, a number of high pitched alarms ringing just slightly off time from each other for some reason that is unknown and obviously unimportant. You sit and wait, and wait, and wait. This could be hell. Trains in other tunnels rumble unseen on their way to somewhere else. Men in hardhats, doo-rags, and florescent vests walk about the station and wave flashlights. A rat mama and her baby scuttle across the tracks. Trash scatters everywhere, so ubiquitous it is unseen.

You get onto a train, finally, and random people of the night settle and are settled into states of disarray, disheveled post party/event states, bodies splayed at awkward ankles, heads nodding, a besotted woman guffawing at her partner’s slurred unfunny statements, an old man across from you pressing his head into the corner of the wall—you think at first that he is crying, and then you grasp the darker truth—his nose is pouring—literally pouring—out snot, and it is dripping down onto the seat, and he is embarrassed, attempting to hide it, trying to flick it over as it pools onto the seat with his finger into the crevice on the side. You pretend that you do not see what is transpiring.

Another man hacks up sputum and spits loudly onto the floor of the train. He stares belligerently at a man wearing an MTA uniform and hat. He spits a number of times more, to make it clear that he is spitting to make a point. He shakes, perhaps with delirium tremens, or in some state of spiritual dishevelment. He is dirty, he has bags of probably useless objects. He is talking to himself, complaining incessantly. Apparently, he has fallen asleep and missed his stop long ago, and blames the MTA system for making him miss his stop. He stares at the man across from him in MTA clothes and shakes, and spits audibly, and then continues to complain. To whom? Is it the Train Gods that he rails against? The forces of the ominous sounding Metropolitan Authority? People in the train pretend that this is not occurring, that they notice nothing, though they see everything.

Ah, the trivial mundanities of my existence.

Accidents and Appropriations

Last night after work my supervisor was giving me and another guy a lift to the train station and a girl in a fancy car with no brain decided to turn directly in front of us. We hit the side of her car and then went head on into the car behind her. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured, though the two cars that didn’t cause the accident are pretty much wrecked. I just bruised up my knees a bit on the seat in front of me and my back and neck hurt a bit. I went to the hospital to make sure I was OK, and didn’t get home til 5 this morning. The good news is, that means I have today off!

I consider it highly ironic that I have moved out to NYC partially in order to avoid having to even be in cars any longer, and here I get into a car for just the stretch of a few blocks and get into an accident.

Another Day in a Death Star Trench

In other news, I’ve finally realized what it is that I’m always reminded of when I go downtown and traverse its imposing/exhilirating canyon streets: the Death Star. There could totally be Tie fighters and X-Wings zooming through downtown Manhattan. Just an observation.

It’s fall now, and I am falling in love with the city more because of this. I could barely stand the sweat dripping humidity of the summer, but now that the air is crisp and the light diminishing, I am enjoying being here more. I love that feeling of waning, the way the orange light falls at an angle on a cool street in Queens, the way everyone is suddenly looking the way one envisions a New Yorker looking, with their nice coats and cold weather wardrobes and hoodies. I am someone not accustomed to much of an autumn, being from California, and it’s a distinct feeling in the air that I cherish. I’m just waiting for the trees to start exploding for the Wow factor really to kick in.

I obtained a Not For Tourists mini-booklet for the city, which should come in handy: it’s got little maplets of every neighborhood, with stores, bars, and restaurants listed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a certain section of town for some specific purpose, and then wish I had known what else was around to know what else to do. Not being a local, I’ve had no other option but to hop back on the train and go back to my little out of the way ‘hood. Now I’ve got my little handy info-book in my arsenal to combat my lack of intrinsic native knowledge.

My woman and I attended a new Van Gogh exhibit at the MoMA—which thanks to her inside connections we got VIPed right in—and I really enjoyed seeing some of his most famous paintings up close and in person. You can feel what makes him so visually captivating as an artist, the way he establishes an intuitive rhythm, like a musical etching, with his brushstrokes. Both her and I especially liked his Starry Night Over the Rhone, even a bit more than the more famous Starry Night—something about the deepness and tranquility of its thick blue hues—it almost looked good enough to eat, like icing on a cake. What I especially like about Van Gogh, I realized from this exhibit, was that he combines observation with intuition.

Rock Facing Water

In this contemporary juncture of my life in the continuum of heart-space-time I am being challenged, challenged by this giant density of city, challenged by the commute out to my work and by the long hours on my feet and by the loss of sleep, challenged by the people in the subway and the street, challenged by my living situation, challenged by my own limitations, challenged by my relationship, challenged by my expectations, challenged by everything that currently exists here and by everything that has led me summarily to this point of now.

I have not been writing frequently, as you may have duly noted, both because I lack free time outside of my days off and because I am having trouble enough grasping physically with my reality not to want to expend effort psychically and mentally untangling my emotions into worded strands. But I have a need. I have the pent up panopticon of my unvented frustrations and shattered hopes to deal with. I have the neglected plot of my blog awaiting tending to, calling out quietly for growth and development, for creativity and courage. I have myself to answer to, to nurture, take care of, love, and maintain.

Suffice to say that the challenges I face are far beyond the expected penance that any great dislocation can incur. I am realizing just how naive I still am, almost 30 but still sheltered in a collegiate sort of way. The struggle to actively prepare for the future is beyond all hopeful reckoning. I am understanding now that I must be prepared for disaster, for worst-case-scenario. I must be prepared to seriously and tenaciously endure. I must be ready to subvert my own natural inclinations and proclivities and breathe slower, breathe deeper, pace myself, hang back and await the unknown mystery that will come. To accept what I am given, patiently, with quiet ambition kept stoked hidden in a secret place from the world, to be unveiled only when the final cards are ready to be faced.

I think I seem to be implying that my reality is terrible, but it really is not. This is my point of this whole story. Things are not bad at all. The things that have been horrifying and distressing me are petty and largely irrelevant but to my battered ego. The challenges that I face wisp away when stood up to in full. My commute is focused reading time of the bounty that I skim from the wonderful NYC library. My work hones my body and teaches me humility and how to relate to a wonderful diversity of people and how to maintain a maturity and integrity of perspective and action. My living situation incorporates me into an extended family who supports and loves me. My relationship is committed, full of daily love and constant tendering. My expectations are evolving to include a much broader range of what my life is meant to be. And this giant, dirty city is teaching me what it means to truly live with and love humanity.

So these challenges, I am finally and wearily realizing, are welcome challenges. Though arriving in completely unexpected ways, rendering me momentarily defenseless, they are exactly and precisely what I desired and required, when seen for what they are. Something within me is rushing to the brink of a certain type of extinction. And beyond this shattering momentary loss and delimitation lies the widened horizon and incorporation of a greater sea.

So go we all. The economy, the body politic, the bedoeling roads of science, culture, and intuitive grasps at divinity. We journey our disparate paths to oneness. However embattled, however frayed, these droplets will find their way to their unexpectedly perfect destination.

People Do Not Touch Each Other

“He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passerbys mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.”

—Don Delillo, Cosmopolis

My ‘Hood, Inwood

I live in Manhattan—but not the part of Manhattan that you might typically envision, the jagged architectural skyline looming over Central Park midtown kind of thing. I live uptown, up-up-up past where your visitor guidebook map cuts off. Settle on down into an empty seat on the ‘A’ train heading uptown; don’t worry, one will open up soon enough. Get some reading in. Turn up your I-Pod to drown out the well-crafted pitches of beggars that hop on at 59th St to petition a captive train on the express run to 125th. Go ahead, doze on off and stretch your legs out. When the train reaches the end of the line, where the Harlem river diverges from the Hudson and forms the northern tip of the Island of Manhattan—that’s where you’ll get off. Welcome to my ‘hood.

Inwood is a primarily Dominican flavored neighborhood. The boys on the streets wear askew stiff baseball caps, long white T-shirts, and plaid shorts. There is a guy selling syrup dashed over shaved ice on the corner. In this part of town, instead of a Starbucks on every block, there’s hair salons and thrift stores.  There’s always a baseball game going on over at Inwood Hill Park and Dyckman Fields. Fancy sports cars and SUVs hurtle down the residential streets at all times of the day and night, bumping bachata and merengue at top volume. Motorcyclists thunder by, triggering car alarms right and left.

Go to the corner of Seaman and Cumming, and take a picture of the happenstance juvenile humor created by their adjoining signs.

Step into Inwood Hill Park, the only unmaintained “natural” forest remaining in Manhattan. The only maintenance performed there is when a tree falls down (every time there is a storm, a tree falls on Payson Ave and hits a car; no, seriously), the tree gets limbed up and then pushed to the side. Sometimes the City will come by and even pick up the remains of the tree. Mostly, within the park, they are just left there.

This is the kind of park you can get lost in. In the summer months, the vibrant animal and plant life is jungle-like in its density. Rabbits hop along in front of you. Rats scurry from one bush to another. A surprising multiplicity of birds call out from within the canopy. Mosquitoes invisibly fester onto any exposed spot of skin. During the weekday, you may even be one of the only human life forms inside the park, aside from the stray dog walker, the pair of teens smoking a joint or dry humping, or perchance a lone free-baser sitting along the walk with his shirt off. Dime bags litter the pathways going into the park, but otherwise the park is remarkably free of sketchy intrusion, as most idlers seem to be too lazy to infiltrate any deeper. You can go to the viewpoint and watch barges float past down the Hudson. I run in this park almost every single day, and I love it.

Adjoining Inwood Hill Park is yet another giant amazing park of a different stripe, Fort Tryon Park. Here there is a greater presence of human life, runners going up the steep paths, people sitting around the flower garden, dealers sitting along the wall in the out of the way places. You can go to a trendy cafe and see live music or visit the Cloisters museum. There’s even bike trails in this park!

I would say that having immediate access to these gems is what I really love about Inwood. I haven’t yet explored whatever semblance of nightlife there might be here, which seems to be either hanging out in an upscale Dominican restaurant, or diving in one of the Irish pubs that still remain along Broadway, a hold-out testament to the previous inhabitants of Inwood before the succession of the Dominicans. Otherwise, the only other thing that seems to happen around here at night is sitting around on park benches or lawn chairs and sweating. Capital of hip and trendy life it is not—but that’s not why we live in Inwood, now, is it?

Under the auspices of my surrogate NYC Puerto Rican family, I have grown to appreciate my new home, and to even feel that I would much prefer to live here than the expensive movie version parts of Manhattan. I sometimes grow peeved that everyone feels like they always have to hang out downtown. Sure, if I could ever afford the $6,000 a month to live across from Central Park, I would. But I’ll take Inwood Hill Park for now—that is, until I’m pushed off the island of Manhattan completely due to the ever rising prices of NYC real estate. . .

Snippets of NYC

More thoughts on New York, since I don’t seem to have many thoughts on much else at the moment:

I now understand what undershirts are all about, and why when I used to think of NYC, I always visualized hairy men sticking their torsos out windows in wife-beaters. Yes, sweating is a fundamental aspect of living in NYC in the summer. There is no getting around it. I tried to ignore the issue for a good long while, pretending each time that I got up in the morning that today I would not sweat profusely into whatever set of clothes I was putting on. Then I would stand on the subway platform in the subterranean swampiness with beads of sweat rolling down into my pants and pretend that it would all just disappear once I stepped into the AC of the subway car. But I’m slowly coming to realize that I am not going to suddenly cease sweating. I am going to sweat no matter what I am wearing. I am going to sweat whether I sit in the apartment all day or if I venture out into the streets or if I am dressed up in a tie and going downtown for an interview.

Hence the intrinsic value of an undershirt. Undershirts exist in order to soak up the sweat puddling out of your pits and down your back and prevent the external world from viewing massive sweat stains on your shirt. This seems fairly self-evident, I suppose, but as someone who had never worn undershirts except the occasional wife beater when I tried to be cool, I just never really understood what they were for.

Now I understand. I’ve purchased my discounted packs of slightly irregular white t-shirts and I now wear them frequently, allowing them to wick away the sweat from my self-consciousness.

People here are weird, but there’s so many people, and so many weird people, that no one really seems to notice anything strange, except when someone pulls out a gun or gets into a fight. I can’t quite define this weirdness yet, but it has definitely been noted by my awareness; it’s on my radar, and I’m silently taking notes on the street and on the subway.

Perhaps the weirdness is linked to the fact of the sheer density of NYC. There is no avoiding people here. They are standing in your way on the street, they are staring you down on the subway, they are running you down in taxis in the crosswalks, they are biking through pedestrians, they are hanging off scaffolding and running in packs through Central Park and flocking to free concerts and cramming into museums. They don’t necessarily speak your language and they don’t necessarily live here. It’s just people, people, people. So there’s almost a sense here that individuals don’t really have distinct identities. We mesh and merge into each other, sometimes lost to ourselves. We have to shout, push, fight our way back into self-awareness.

Speaking of fighting, I almost got into my first all-time fistacuffs on the subway several weeks ago. My woman and I had gone to the MOMA to view a weird film called Irma Vep, which is essentially a film about a director obsessed with this Hong Kong actress, and the actual director of this film also apparently wanted her himself, as he then married her after the film was made. Then they divorced, signing the divorce papers four years later during another film they made together. Anyway, so you know how after you see a really weird film you’re just in a totally weird state of mind? It was fairly late at night and we got onto the D train going to the Boogie Down since it runs express, then we transfer to the A which takes us (the long haul) home. The train car was full. After a stop, some seats opened up and my girlfriend went up to claim them. A big guy sitting there told her that he was holding it for his wife, in a rude kind of way, and my girlfriend snapped back something sassy back at him as she walked away. She later claimed that this sudden impulse to be a smart-ass was due to her strange state of mind due to the weird artsy film. He then raised his voice and said something in reply, and she again sassed back at him while walking away. He then turned around and started shouting “Fuck you, you fucking bitch!” and other such sentiments. At this point, I’m not going to just stand there and allow someone to call my girlfriend a bitch in front of a whole train car, which was avidly watching the unfolding scene, so I said, “Fuck you, motherfucker. Shut the fuck up” and other such sentiments. The big guy gets up and walks over to me and gets in my face, saying things like, “What are you going to do about it?” To which I replied, “And what are you going to do about it?” Everyone on the train perked up, eagerly awaiting somebody to throw down. It was about to happen. I was about to get in my first fight i.e. get my ass whooped by a big old dude on the subway train.

Which by the way, getting into a confrontation while locked into a car on the subway late at night is probably about the worst spot to be. There’s no one who is going to help you there. There’s no running. You’re cell phone don’t work. There’s no police. This guy could have taken both me and my girlfriend on, realistically speaking, as he was probably about 50 pounds heavier than me. I do have some rusty ninja skills, but as they haven’t been tested out lately, I wouldn’t want to rely on them. Fortunately at this point, his wife, wherever she had been, walked onto the train and came up to her husband and asked him what the hell was going on, and then led him back to his seat as he cursed us out repeatedly.

The lesson? Don’t sass anyone on the train, even if you’ve just watched a weird artsy film.

In other news, the mosquito season has abruptly ended. I’m not quite sure when it occurred, but I’ve noticed that in place of mosquitos, now the “water-bugs” i.e. cockroaches are now in high tide, scurrying about on the sidewalks, over countertops, and in your cereal. I’ve also been witness to a giant primordial dragonfly that was flapping about haplessly on its back on the sidewalk, with two cops standing and watching it. I walked up to it and let it latch onto my index finger, which it then proceeded to attempt to bite. I have to say, that was another first for me. I have never been bitten by a giant dragonfly ever before. It then flew off right as the cops excitedly told me to take a picture of it on my finger.

New York Impressions

New York, New York, no denying its a dense thicket of human and infrastructural networking nestled in veneer of steel, tile, concrete, and glass. One can easily feel submerged in its structural grandeur, its art deco apartment buildings, staircases into the swampy depths of the subway, plated cars pushing a foreshadowing wind through the hair of scattered denizens waiting to be lost again in the motion of crowded progression towards some omega point of hidden comfort awaiting in a box somewhere in a ubiquitous, guarded gray unmarked building.

As a child of California now swimming through the tidal press of NYC, it can at times be an alien, out-of-body experience, to find myself carried along forward into some frontal lobed consciousness of the masses, dimly lit intuitive corridors of the citied species, swaying pendulous through the streets with a chip on my shoulder. But here am I, finding my way, learning how I must perform when the chance opportunity is flittingly opened, to dive heedless headfirst into the fray without hesitation, after eons of pent-up waiting.

Rats will be seen rocketing quietly about from the corner of your eyes, they move quickly through the background landscape of your conversations with a see-sawing motion of their bodies, unmistakably unbalanced yet somehow poised, self-confidant, that dastardly eternal persistence inherent in their step. Also now, during the summer months, fireflies will fleetingly appear in flashing arcs against the dusk, a magical sight to someone wholly unaccustomed to them. I feel like a child every time I witness them dancing their temporal and unintelligible flights in the onset of another humid summer night.

And that’s another thing foreign and alarming to me: the humidity, the heat. The sweat puddling down my back as I sit in the apartment. The unexpected flashes of lightning and rolling thunder, a catharsis of rain, almost immodest in its passion and hurried release. The other day I was caught in an inopportune downpour that began innocently with a mild drizzling, proceeding thence into ponderous heavy drops, still spaced enough that one could pretend to hide beneath a tree, then suddenly twisted into a literal outpouring of liquid sheets from the heavens. Without any cover, it became quickly apparent that it was useless to try to deny it. I was soon soaked completely, and my contacts were beginning to slide down my eyeballs. And then it began to rain yet harder, against all understanding or belief, it came down like something known only through hearsay, like tales of monsoons, hitting the concrete so hard it almost came back up. I then wandered about through a Whole Foods, dribbling puddles of water everywhere.

Another thing is the mosquitoes. I am hoping that it is possible to develop some kind of immunity after some time, as so far when I venture into the park across the street, I get bit an average of 7 times, each one swelling up to a half-dollar size and itching like beejesus. I am frequently struck, when the temperature is 90 degrees or higher outside and the humidity is thick, by the sense that I am in the Amazon jungle.

I am now honing in on a job, wending my way through 2nd rounds of interviews to see which offer might hopefully be made, which path my life will take. It has been a process fraught with depression, stress, and the sheer inertia of despair, but the sense of change stirs somewhere in the air, like the firefly flashing its silent message of joy. Or is it warning? The channel runs ever onward, and the decisions I can make at this point are only responsive; I am at the mercy of the flow.

There are certainly moments too many to count when I realize that the city is welcoming and even forgiving beneath its exterior shell of aggression and constant movement. It is like how I learned to look at hiking down boulders and rocks when in Tahoe: the rocks look hard, and they certainly can be hard and perhaps fatal if mistakes are made and they are taken for granted. But if you look at them like something soft, something pliable that you can trust, they will support you, they will be as supportive as pillows to your knees. You can run like water along their points. Giving everything to every step, your weight presses the rocks down into balance, even when they shift, you move with them. So as with rocks it is with the city. Running with its appearance, trusting in its integrity, it supports you and moves you forward.

What I’ve Been Up To, As If You Wanted To Know

Here’s another (unrequested) update on my existence here on the Eastern Coastal city-side of things. I’ve done a few interviews for jobs, and I’m not going to talk anymore about it right now because I don’t want to jinx it. If and when I finally obtain employment, I will talk about it then. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I’ve been looking into doing some volunteer work in order to keep busy and possibly build some connections, and I’ve learned that volunteering is not as easy as one would think. In fact, it can almost take as much effort to volunteer as it is to obtain a job. You have to interview, attend orientations, fill out applications, aggressively pursue the volunteer position with phone calls, etc. It’s a little ridiculous, when you consider that all you are trying to do is offer your god-given FREE TIME for FREE in order to help an organization out. I understand that there’s some legalities to cover and that many organizations don’t have the time, money, or man-power to deal with it, but at the end of the day, it should be made as effortless as possible for the volunteer so that they can just get in there and HELP.

This is where NYCares comes in. Realizing that it is obscenely difficult for people who want to help out but don’t have the time nor inclination to deal with such a mess, some intelligent do-gooders formed NYCares to provide a direct, organized, and efficient means of connecting volunteers with needy non-profits. Instead of having to interview with each place and apply and make an extended commitment that you may not be able to provide, you just go on-line through NYCares, look at the calendar of upcoming volunteer needs, and click to sign-up for the day(s) that you have time for it. And that’s how volunteering should be. Welcome to the 21st century.

I’ve been trying to keep myself busy, which has involved tinkering around with my new Ubuntu system and trying to kind of learn the command line Linux stuff. It’s like the old DOS, but I don’t understand any of the commands yet, and probably never will. Which is OK. I’m alright with being someone who has to have everything simply supplied in an easy-to-use graphical interface.

I’ve also been trying to learn some basic HTML and CSS. It’s fairly straightforward from what I can tell, but I’m just not sure that I have the necessary devotion to get into it. I have visions of designing my own website someday. WordPress.com is wonderful for its ease-of-use, sense of community, and–of course–FREENESS, but you can only go with the blog templates that are provided, unless you want to learn a little HTML and get in there and make your own.

As you can probably tell, the arrangement and archiving of this blog are not ideal for what I’m doing. The only way to go through my past writing is by digging around in the extended list of categories or by date–but in order to get to the first post in a series, you have to really dig. I want a new method of linking and ordering all of my writings that makes it more logically accessible, such that–for example–if you wanted to look at my writings on Peru, you would be able to click on Peru and it would take you to the first post on that topic, not the last, and you would be able to quickly scan within that sub-tree by topic, date, tag, etc.

I’m not quite sure how I would structure it yet, all I know is that I want something different, organized specifically for my needs. I write about a lot of different types of topics, so it’s hard to simply use categories to organize them coherently. If any budding web designers out there have any ideas on what would work best for this blog, let me know. I really want to take my blog to another level, but I’m not sure how to do that yet.

On other fronts, I’ve learned that being in California all my life has spoiled me in terms of having access to fresh air. I’m used to wearing sandals. I’m used to being able to sit in a room with air from the outside moving through. Now in NYC I’ve been wearing close-toed shoes and realizing that my feet are gonna have to learn to adapt to not being able to breathe, cuz those motherfuckers STINK. Also, I’ve been sitting in the apartment and just sweating, because even with the window wide open and the fan on, I still don’t get enough air flow. So apparently my body is just going to have to learn how to survive with stuffiness. Or I’m gonna have to start spraying anti-perspirant all over my body. Or get botox injections.

I’ve also been reading a great trendy green book, WorldChanging, on the subway, which has become the place where I fit my reading time in. This book is the perfect guide to anyone who is remotely interested in positive and sustainable change. Lots of neat ideas that are exciting.

Here’s some observations on New York and New Yorkers:

• All the residential buildings are made out of brick. However, most of these bricks are not “brick” colored. They tend to be off-whites, yellows, and greys. When one does finally encounter a brick building with brick colored bricks, it’s like a breath of fresh air. Which is to say that the environment in NYC just tends to be remarkably drab. Which leads me to my next point:
• The peops on the street in New York tend to reflect their somber surroundings, and they wear mostly dark colored clothing. They also have a tendency towards certain accoutrements, like women towards high boots, and everyone towards large impressive looking coats. Due to these nice looking coats everyone wears, I tend to feel underdressed.
• One often will be an unintended witness to random barfings. Within the 1st week after I’d moved here, I saw two girls, on two separate occasions, in the middle of the day on a week-day, huddled over against the wall barfing, one on the street, the other waiting for the subway. I was scratching my head over the frequency and strangeness of this witnessed act until I ended up doing it myself one night after guzzling down two of the mandatory drinks you have to buy at a comedy club. They were Long Island iced teas, and my tolerance is way down. On the way back home, in the sway of the subway, and then on a bus, I started to really feel the mix of cheap alcohols. So I shoved my way out to the street and subsequently barfed all over the sidewalk, the kind of public act I haven’t performed in quite some time. But it made me realize something which leads me to my next point:
• There ain’t no public restrooms anywhere. As someone who has a bladder the size of a pea, it can be frustrating when I’ve had a cup of joe, hopped on the hour-long subway ride downtown, and then have to pee as soon as I get out. It’s then a matter of walking 10 blocks to some Target or Old Navy to use their bathroom, if you know where one is. So if there’s a quiet epidemic of a noro-virus spreading throughout the city, for example, then it is quite understandable that a certain segment of the populace can be found huddled against a wall somewhere out in broad daylight barfing their brains out. There needs to be some kind of public hole out on the street-level for the masses to unload into. It’s inhumane. I think everyone around here must be severely dehydrated, or they have evolved to not have bladders the size of peas.

In other news, I’ve quit drinking coffee, as it not only made me need to pee a lot, but it also stained my already stained teeth, and it also made my energy levels fluctuate too dramatically for my taste (heart attack level nervousness –> hardcore crashing). I had gotten addicted to the stuff while in Colombia, and I’ve been drinking it everyday since. I’m glad I’m done with it, as I can now go back to my most beloved form of imbibing caffeine: Yerba Maté. In case you don’t know what maté is, it’s a South American herbal tea that is primarily drunk through a filtering straw (bombilla) from a gourd. It looks, to the untrained eye, kind of like some illegal smoking apparatus, which is what also makes it cool. It is bitter tasting, so some people add milk or sugar or whatever their sweetener of choice to it, but I like it straight myself. But the best part about it is that it not only gives me a great burst of energy, but it is a sustained energy that lasts for hours, and that energy doesn’t make me crash later on either. So I highly recommend trying it out if you want to find an alternate source of morning caffeine.

Renewed Life in NYC

So, it’s been 3 weeks so far, and perhaps you’ve been wondering: how the Big Apple is treating the Manderson, how he is adapting, surviving, handling the new environs and cityscape and compressed energized lifestyle after 5 years living tucked away at over 6,000 ft near Lake Tahoe? The answer, dearest concerned citizens, is that I am thriving here thus far and cherishing the potentialities of my new abode.

When I talk to many New Yorkers about my present life-shift, they express astonishment that I would desire to come to a big, dirty metropolis after living in a pristine, mountainous, evergreen town. But au contraire, I reply, twizzling the oil through the tip of my imaginary mustache, living semi-hermit style in the boondocks has in fact made me all the more ready and willing to be subjected to the major city lifestyle. I love the diversity. I love that when I look across the subway tracks, every single person I see there is completely different from me, and one another. I love that there is so much life jutting up against itself, pressuring everything upwards. I love that there is so much music, so much nightlife, so many potential networks lurking in every block, with groups, non-profits, organizations, meetings, showings, plays, movies, bars, all waiting to be tapped into with the simple output of a little effort. Living in a place with little culture, little nightlife, little community has made me all the more appreciative of just how many things there are to do here.

I have been keeping somewhat busy, I sold coconut oil and coconut-oil based soaps at an environmental expo last weekend, and learned how to become a salesman in addition to a sales team manager (by the way, did you know about the many health benefits of unrefined coconut oil? Seriously, look into it). I’ve been looking into doing some volunteer work. I’ve gone to a permaculture group meeting. I’m going to venture into a comedy club this weekend, and today, I attended my first full-time job interview, which included, surprisingly, lunch. I have now heard a bit of very positive feedback on my resume, so after a period of concern, nail-biting, and despair, I am finally feeling validated. All of that work and effort WILL pay off. I WILL be able to move out of my girlfriend’s parent’s apartment eventually and not have to sleep on an air mattress in their living room anymore! Yes, it will happen. Eventually. With time. And money.

Coupled with these events is the sudden and explosive onset of spring. The giant park across the street suddenly has green things sprouting everywhere, flowers are blooming, and sometimes the sun even shows his face for a whole day or two.

So the answer is: Manderson is enjoying NYC very much. He has grown much in his Tahoe time as a sort-of-wilderness man, and now is adapting well to his new evolution as refurbished urbanite. And he can’t wait to take his drums, nargile, and other assorted STUFF that he can’t even remember all of anymore out of long-term storage and arrange lovingly, once again, into an apartment home. Until then, over out outside in.

-m

Hanami

It’s springtime in New York City. I’ve been enjoying the fruits of being in a major metropolis, even if I don’t got no money. This city has got plenty of free or cheap shit to do. Hell, for a lad such as I, whom has been hiding away in the mountains for the last 5 years, just walking around the city–anywhere around here–is a complete trip. I love it. Yesterday I went down to midtown and saw a guy playing a kitchen sink and some other assorted detritus on a street corner, and he was amazing. I wanted to take my djembes and doumbek out of storage and jam with him. A couple days ago I went to a Takahashi Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art–intriguing shit. His artwork is anime/manga on mushrooms, infused with a healthy dose of capitalism. An example of two of his statues: 1) a cartoon woman with gigantic breasts squeezing milk out of her huge nipples, which forms a jump rope which she is gaily swinging over her head; 2) a cartoon man with a hard-on triumphantly jizzing a spiraling jet of magic sperm into the air like it was his special move in Dragon Ball Z. Another interesting facet of the exhibit: a collaboration with ritzy hand-bag maker Louis Vuitton, a bunch of kind of ugly handbags sold at exorbitant prices in the middle of the museum. At first as you walk through the exhibit, you think the whole thing is a joke. By the end, however, you begin to take Murakami seriously—while still enjoying his take on Japanese pop art immensely. It’s disturbing, bizarre, hilarious, and just plain . . . what the fuck?!

Appropriate to the Japanese theme of that day, I then went over to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn after viewing the Murakami, and then did some flower viewing. Right now the cherry blossoms are exploding into the warming spring days like pink and white pearls of swollen libido. Here’s some pictures of said seductively blooming flowers. Enjoy!

Summation of the Road Trip

Lacking an internet connection most of the rest of the way, I’ll just highlight excerpts of Days 4-7 on our wondrous Truck ride through the American south up to NYC.

Day 4: OK City to Memphis, TN

Billboards advertising God. It makes one pause to contemplate why an everlasting all-powerful omniscient Creator would require billboards notifying interstate drivers of His existence. Apparently God also has hotlines, as well as graffiti, working in His name. I haven’t investigated this yet, but I have a suspicion that He may have set Himself up with a MySpace page as well by now.

We just missed a storm (by minutes) in Arkansas apparently, as we passed by recently flooded fields, a minivan stuck in the mud in the grassy median, and a semi rolled onto its side down an embankment.

I was tuckered out on this day, and Vincent, the little green one (aka ‘chicken’, ‘worm’, ‘penguin’, ‘pigeon’, ‘duckling’, ‘dinosaur’, ‘gargoyle’, ‘turd burglar’, amongst many others, all with the interchangeable preface of ‘baby’ and/or ‘little’) was also looking a bit beat, so we stopped in Memphis for the night, one of the first real cities we’d seen since. . . well, since San Diego, and I don’t even know if you can call San Diego much of a city, for that matter. Phoenix, similarly, is a sprawled tesselation of suburbs in the middle of nowhere in the desert, dotted with retirement communities that are like Disneyland for the old and complacent. OK City isn’t much of anything to look at—in fact, I tried not to look at it at all. Memphis is set on the banks of the Mississippi, and one can tell immediately you’re in what has been a booming port town for ages. We stayed in a hotel which we found through it’s coupon which advertised it’s pet-friendly policies and high speed internet. A sign was posted in the lobby stating “no pets”, so we smuggled in the parrot surreptitiously, and no internet in the nearby airwaves was to be found.

Day 5: Memphis, TN to Abingdon, VA

Vincent seemed to be adjusting to the truck ride. He stayed fairly quiet all day, closing his eyes as he rocked in the sway of the highway through the corridors of trees just awakening into bud. We’ve been waking up at 6 am (local time) on the dot each day on our trip, so we’ve adjusted ourselves to the time changes we’ve been undergoing along the way as we fight against ebbing time.

As we drive along rolling green fields and trees and winding rivers, I envision the Civil War, which is furthered by all the museums and battlefields commemorating it along the way.

We’ve been eating mostly Subway and other assorted types of junk on our trip, and I can feel my ass losing its firm mold and spreading outwards across the seat like jelly as the journey progresses. For our dinner in Abingdon, we ate sandwiches which consisted mostly of mayonnaise and cheese. Our cheap motel smelled like a mixture of cigarettes, semen, perfume, and scented spray sprayed to in a hopeless attempt to mask the other smells. We had to listen to the forced bovine moans of a not-so-classy couple next door through a separating door between our rooms which was nailed closed with a strip of siding, as it rained bucketloads and we worried about our stuff inside the truck and wondered if the truck was waterproof. On a side note, all of the cheap hotels we’ve stayed at between New Mexico to Virginia have been operated by what appears to be Bangladeshi or Pakistani folk. I comment on this because it’s strange when you arrive in what seems to be a rural town set out in the Appalachian hills, and the motel is run by an Indian family.

Day 6: Abingdon, VA to Waynesboro, VA

This day was a truncated day, because we were stopping to stay with my girlfriend’s friend in Waynesboro. So we slept in for the first time and then wended our way through the hills there, and spent the best night of our trip there drinking wine, beer, and whiskey, and eating a homecooked meal and telling stories. Vincent also seemed very happy to be there, and gorged himself ravenously on seed, clucking happily and preening himself with delight at his own beauty. He was very upset in the morning when we had to leave, even though we reassured him that this was to be our last and final day.

Day 7: Waynesboro, VA to NYC

A week on the road with an Amazon parrot in a 10 foot Budget truck is exhausting. We were extremely, extremely thrilled to have this be our last day. The roads through Pennsylvania and New Jersey are terrible. I thought the wheels of the truck were going to fly off. Vincent had started off the day very upset, screeching in unhappiness, but by the end of the day when he had settled down, he was even singing and talking, as if he knew the trip was almost over for him.

As we crossed over the George Washington Bridge on a Monday afternoon, and the city loomed across the river, I felt exhilarated and also just plain tired. New York City once had a glimmer of ‘bright lights big city’ to me when I was younger, but right now it’s just another city, another place to live and struggle in.

We unloaded most of our stuff, once again, into long-term storage, not knowing when my drums, books, and hookah will ever see the light of day. It’s been 5-months since we’ve been living out of our travel bags, and it will most likely be 5-months more. We unloaded the parrot and got him situated in his new temporary home, and he began straightaway cracking open seeds, a new travel-experienced bird.

In NYC, you can’t park a commercial truck on the city streets overnight. So we had to turn in our truck. The place we were returning the truck to was down on 35th and 10th, and we are on the very northern tip of Manhattan, so it wasn’t a journey we were looking forward to, especially in rush hour traffic. So we drove all the way down there, since on-line it said the place was open til 11. It was a crazy journey, akin to driving in Colombia, rocketing over deep sewer covers and cutting around taxis in a truck.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way on our road trip, I’d lost the contract papers for the truck. I figured that it wasn’t a big deal, since we’re on the computer. Problem is, we got down there, and the only guy there was a security guard, and without the papers, he wouldn’t take the truck, and the office was closed so no one could look up the information. Panic began to set in as we realized that we had nowhere to park this truck, we had just filled it up with gas to return the tank full, and we didn’t want to drive it all the way back to NJ to park it at my girlfriend’s aunt’s house. We called Budget and negotiated another drop-off location, this one way over up on the east-side. Evening was beginning to descend. All we wanted to do was shower, eat, and go to sleep. But the trip was still not over.

Afterwards, I discovered that I actually kind of enjoyed getting a little scenic tour of the Manhattan streets in a Budget truck, discovering first-hand the craziness of New York drivers, and gunning the truck through narrow passages where I wasn’t even sure if I would scrape or not, but didn’t care anymore one way or the other. I figured that if someone hit me, then that was their problem. The New York City streets are ridiculous. Just like in Colombia, lanes don’t really seem to signify much, at least not to taxi drivers. Also, there’s no ‘green arrow’ when you’re trying to turn here. Good luck. But all said and done, it was like Toad’s Wild Ride through Manhattan. Since I wasn’t driving my own car, I happily gunned the engine and bounced over the deep depressions in the street at full speed, no longer concerned about whether the wheels fell off or not, and no longer burdened by a sensitive and terrified parrot.

We filled up the gas, again, and finally dropped off the damn truck, once and for all, after having put over 3,000 miles on her in the course of a week, and pumped probably over 800 dollars worth of gasoline into her belly. Fittingly, the guy who checked our truck in was Colombian. It seemed fitting because in a way, Colombia was the first step on the journey that led us to NYC. And after all that crazy Colombian-like traffic, it was the final book-end that closed that chapter on the road-trip. We then took a ‘gypsy cab’ back.

So here I am, at my place of destination, a bit frazzled and fattened but otherwise OK, with my stuff intact and my bird sitting contentedly out of reach of the crazy old dog that resides here. The job hunt now begins in earnest, and my new life here unfolds.

One More Week til Leaving

So my life here on the West Coast has just about come to its official end. One more week and I and all my things—including my Amazon parrot, Vinnie—will be traversing the interstate highways out to NYC. Since my trip to Colombia, I have spent my time here in San Diego straightening some things out, such as figuring out how to deal with my grandfather’s gun collection, determining that I want to go to graduate school for public policy, remembering why I would never want to live with my parents ever again, and babysitting my adorable niece Sophia. It’s been a long month and a half, and I’m looking forward, desperately, towards change. It remains to be seen just how long it will take to acquire a job in the big apple, so my fancy new resume that I spent a couple of weeks working on will be put to the test.

I will be staying under the auspices of my girlfriend’s family in NYC, and even though it will be tight in terms of space, I’m 100 percent certain that it will be decidedly more positive then the experience of staying with my parents. It’s never easy to up and move out to a new location—at least this way we have some kind of a base and network with which to begin.

Along the way we’ll stop at the Grand Canyon, since my girlfriend has never seen it. Other than that, however, it will be a long 6 day trek in a rental truck, with the only other pit stops being urination stations and cheap motels. I hope Vinnie the parrot holds up OK—this will be his first trip pretty much anywhere, other than when he was smuggled in as a wee babe through Mexico, somehow escaped and flew over to my mom’s friend’s mom’s house (got that?), and latched onto the windowsill, whereupon she scooped him up with a spoon and gave him to her daughter who already had 5 other parrots, who then gave it to the young Me. I’ve never been in a living situation stable enough to keep him with me, so he’s been sequestered with my parents until now. Here’s a picture of him eating my cereal:

Hopefully I’ll be able to post a travelogue of the Budget truck adventures across the nation, but I don’t know if I’ll have the energy nor the wireless connection to do it. In any case, I’ll keep my anonymous readership posted as well as I can. Until then.

Happy Family Holidays from NYC

Here’s another thing that I find interesting about New Yorkan lexicon: when they join a line of people waiting for something, they say that they are getting “on line,” as opposed to what I am accustomed to, which is saying that I am getting “in line.” Also–and this may just be my girlfriend’s family and not symptomatic of the tri-state region itself–I have heard people referring to “turning off” candles, as if they were electrical appliances. And of course, you gotta love the accents, like how “orange” is pronounced as “aah-range” as opposed to the West Coaster’s “ohrange,” or how “god” is pronounced “gaad.” I even find myself slipping into a Bronxian accent at times, as I have a tendency to imitate the speech of others.

I just saw a weird ass Chinese movie, The Curse of the Golden Flower. It’s an orgy of nobility, incest, and death, like Shakespeare mixed with Oedipus Rex and opera. One thing I’ve noticed about this line of Chinese martial art/visual ballet movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/ Hero) is that the women characters, when evincing overly dramatic passion and pain, must mouth breathe at highly audible levels, as if they put a microphone right up to the actresses’ mouth to capture it (probably dubbed in by some industry gimp whose specific role is to mouth breathe the actresses in all of the top Hong Kong hits). The queen in this movie, Gong Li (who has got quite a bosom on her), mouth breathes such that the theater literally quakes with it basically throughout the entire film (there’s a lot of dramatic passion going on here). There’s also a plethora of quivering bosoms in this movie, and it’s kind of a sub-plot delight, to observe the various bouncing bosoms in different lighting and horse riding and ninja battling scenes. So if you’re into copious amounts of heavy mouth breathing and jostling Chinese bosoms, this movie is for you.

New York has been treating me well, I’ve been eating mass amounts of good food and spent a Puerto Rican New Yorker family Christmas, replete with gigantic presents and pernil and rice and beans and a bunch of people shouting at each other to converse. It helped remind me why I no longer care to “celebrate” Christmas, i.e. buy a bunch of junk for my own family members that they don’t need. C’mon people, if you are really into the holiday season, then realize that it’s all about spending time with your family, not spending money. Cut out the whole giving of presents (except to the kids, who of course need to be indoctrinated into our capitalistic consumer culture) and just hang out with your family, share a nice meal, talk, drink spiced wine. Remember when there was that whole Pentagon ad campaign a few winters ago, where they equated buying consumer products with fighting terrorism? It’s ironic, given that we are actually encouraging terrorism (desperate poor people fighting to be heard and empowered) by contributing to mindless products made in “third-world” countries for the profit of corporations.

Anyway, hope you had a good time with your family, as human beings rather than consumers.

Bagels n Jazz

Some more New Yorkian tidbits: when people talk about “crossing over” here, they ain’t talkin about a psychic who can tell you the name of your dead loved one, but rather about going across town, as opposed to up town, or down town. And when they talk about places in the city, it’s always in terms of cross streets. It’s “20th and 1st,” etc. Which makes sense, of course, given the grid system, it’s just not something I’m accustomed to hearing when discussing regional areas of one’s city. In South Lake Tahoe, we just say that it’s either “near the casinos,” or it’s “far from the casinos.”

Went out last night and scoped some avant-garde jazz in a club the size of an armpit. I can always appreciate experimental music, and raw kind of hard-hitting meandering free stuff, but ultimately, if there’s no solid rhythm to it I tend to get a little bored with it, because it just sounds like chaos to me. Which apparently some people are pretty into, given the swirling head-thrashing movements of some of the avant-gardian audience’s heads. It just seemed mostly noisy and pretentious to me, but hey, whatever frees your soul. I was sweating like a pig, and felt a little embarrassed everytime I burped, because we had just consumed mass amounts of Ethiopian food and the spices were bubbling up my mouth throughout the entire show in dense thickets of furnace gas. If you’ve never had Ethiopian cuisine before, it basically consists in shoveling piles of meat and curried sauces into your mouth with your bare hands with some thin spongey bread. Good stuff.

I also went to a couple of bars as well, both of which specialized exclusively in Belgian beers. Which leads me to another I like about this city, which is that there is apparently a niche for everything here. So if you wanted to eat pancakes with alfredo sauce and listen to happy harcore techno while drinking bean curd martinis, then there’s probably a hole-in-the-wall restaurant here somewhere for you.

For breakfast, I ate two fresh bagels with cream cheese and white fish salad. And as I was stuffing my face with this goodness, I was like, why the hell can we not have good bagels on the west coast? My friend told me it be the New York tap water that makes them good. Well, ship that shit out to California, then.

Mas Aventuras en Nueva York

Went out last night to a Spanish tapas bar in Chelsea, and I have to say that tapas may be the future of fine cuisine. Small portions of gourmet shit that you can share with other people and get stuffed on, and sample tons of different foods. It’s like what I love about going out for Chinese and Indian food with amigos–you alway order different shit and then share it. You could do Indian tapas, Mexican tapas, California cuisine tapas, and so forth, and it would be perfect cuz you could just sample tons of different shit instead of having to limit yourself to one dish. Good New York fancy schmancy eating experience, all trendy and shit, with a good wine selection and a militantly fashionable and attractive staff. For dessert, even though we were stuffed, I just had to try the flan de naranja, simply because I love any dessert item coupled with orange. Now, a word firstly on flan. Let’s be honest, flan is generally never that good. You always eat it and then are like, ok, that wasn’t amazing. But there’s always something about it that makes you order again later on down the road. Like, there’s this potentiality in flan to be amazing, it just never quite measures up. But last night, this orange flan was some good shit, I mean, that potentiality of amazingness in flan came to the fore and smacked you in the gizzard. I was stoked that I had made the choice to order it. And I was by that point into my second glass of vino tinto, which for me these days is enough to get me feeling warm, fuzzy, and conversationally inclined.

Then we went to a some random bar to get out of the rain. I had a Glenlivet on the rocks, and we ended up playing pool with a big black dude named Charles who was apparently on a combination of drugs mixed with his alcohol–as in, the dude would try to say something to you, but it would mostly end up coming out as sputtered, laughing nonsense, as if he had taken ecstacy and then snorted cocaine and then drank way too much, and his verbalization abilities were somehow getting shortcircuited. It seemed like he had good intent, so I would just nod my head and smile, and we were all equally horrible at pool, so it made for an interesting pass of time, if weird and somewhat disturbing. When we made our hurried exit, he was trying to get our phone number, but we cheerfully informed him that it would be pointless for us to give him our number because we were only visiting and lived far, far away. “Israel?” he slurred sputteringly. We nodded and ran back out into the rain. Might as well be Mars, given where good ol’ Charles was currently at in headspace. The dude was strangely fashionably attired, though, given his state of fucked-upness. He had a Jets sweatshirt paired with intent to jeans with designer silver spraypaint.

We then made our way to a restaurant that had a bar that served drinks in ginormous goblets, guaranteed to fuck you up to high heaven. I got a strawberry margarita, and every suck you took of this adult slurpee contained enough alcohol to kill a small child, not to mention that there was an extra shot nonchalantly placed into the goblet in a plastic shot tube, like a cinammon stick in a hot chocolate. At the bar, I briefly conversed with one of those dudes who sit at bars by themselves and order drinks and look about them, waiting for the chance conversation or single woman to come by (I have myself been that dude many a time, especially in foreign countries). He was sippin’ on a long island ice tea, and he informed me that it would fuck up a rhinocerous for your money. Having been a student in LA, and thus having learned what drinks to get in expensive bars to maximize fucked-upness with coverage of alcohol taste for less money, I then gave this dude the advice to either try an Adios Motherfucker, which is yet stronger than a Long Island Iced Tea, or for an even stronger drink that is still yet drinkable, a Zombie, which is probably one of the strongest mixed drinks you can get. Have one, and you’re drunk. Have two, and you’re fucked up. Have three, and good luck, unless you’re an elephant.

Then we went to an improv show, the Stepfathers at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. It was only the second improv show that I’ve been to thus far in my existence, and it was pretty funny, especially given that I was quite sauced as this point. It was different then the other improv I’ve seen, in that the comedian-audience interaction was pretty minimal, and I was a little disappointed by that, because what has always interested me about improv was that connection where the comedians are feeding off of audience feedback. But it was still pretty funny and creative nonetheless. I think the lack of audience interaction was mainly due to the audience itself, anyway–the people who spoke up for the word from which the comedians were going to act out scenes based on could only come up with “plane,” and “Fred.”

I have another thing to add to my list of what I like so far about New Yorkers: they all wear dark colors. You don’t see any pinks, yellows, any of that kind of pastel colored crap that Americans have an embarassing tendency to wear.

The Californian Esta In NYC

Yours truly is currently on assignment in the city of all cities, NYC, for the Christmas (read: CHRIST-used-as-excuse-to-aMASs-consumer-goods) season. This was after a 7 to 11 traveling day to get here via train, plane, y carro. 3 ½ hours in my old Subarita to San Francisco, wherein we abandoned her to the mercy of the streets, hoping that she won’t be broken into and peed inside of during our absence, and then we hopped onto the BART for an hour’s ride into the airport, commencing thence onto the final 5 hour leg of our journey via sky.

So I’m now here in an apartment in Manhattan, listening at this very moment to cars outside of the window bleeping their horns assertively—if there is one thing that NYC is about, it’s assertiveness—and trying not to itch my eyes because an old smelly dog in this apartment is apparently activating allergies in me I didn’t even know I had. I can’t say that I know much of New York, having only been here 2 times before, but I do admit to feeling a certain affection for it, mainly due to its immediate contrast to Los Angeles, where I lived for 4 years. After LA, the aggression of New Yorkers seems positively loving. They engage with each other. They verbalize their thoughts. This is refreshing to me.

I’ll try to take field notes on this fast-paced alien American world and see if I have anything new to say about it.