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tl;dr, part ii: metropoli (restless nights)
(Posting from back at home; bus wifi was 2 broke 2 post. Some strange malady has overcome my dogsitter; not only did she fail to drain my liquor stash, she also cleaned my kitchen. I have no idea what is wrong with her.)
-i am tl;dring my tl;dr on the bus back from NYC. It's eight and a half years since we last stayed here, rather than driving straight through to get somewhere else, and I'd forgotten how intensely loveable it is, and like all cities, all the more so if you aren't 19 and broke. Right now I love it so much that it's given me this whimsy of a life I never lived there, the same way I used to wander in W1 and stretch out my arms and touch Soho's stones on either side of me and wonder if I'd ever get to live there; and now there's the bare windswept trees in the shadowed green corners of Manhattan, and impossibly jumbled terraces, and grand dirty balconies north of Central Park; given the social pyramid I assume I'd be one of the people living in carefully stowed bedding under a scaffold, emerging in the streets at 1am to pick bottles out of commercial trash.
I know everyone has some kind of optimum comfort peopledensity or whatever, but I legit don't understand the ones who don't hang beside me on the extreme edge of that spectrum, head tilted upward at the skyline. It just seems natural and obvious to feel intense comfort and pleasure in dense, high-demand, obscene-rent locations where everyone else clearly wants to be there with you (because they love other people); and then you start navigating from the sun's glass reflection and seeing it all as an old, slow-growing brain of rock and steel, neon-flaring synapses and human neurones stretching from one cellular block to others far away, umbilical tunnels and dark veins, with generational adaptations forming progressively nonsensical shapes, its limbs stretching as it emerges from the sea.
truth, I love architecture and landscaping because I can't describe it, it's just there, doing things, platonically perfect spatial things, aesthetically and associationally inflaming. It occurred to me today as we were scurrying to catch our bus back to Boston that the only cause of the whimsy is that I've no bad memories of New York City, and it was the first place in my life I could have ever said that of. It is my escapist pastoral idyll, no lie.
Boston is going to feel very small when I get home, even knowing what a staggering improvement it was on what I had before, even knowing it has the advantage of being a place where I can maybe possibly survive. I am way happy there but maybe I'll one day get drawn into a metropole, maybe I'm just gradually clawing my way up to somewhere I ought to be - I don't know. I know how these cities make me feel, but I don't know what I'm able or willing to do for that feeling. But I'm an optimist, and I am also starting to get it - in the sway of the god of the red earth and the oasis, famine and feast, I know my easy life will get much harder before it gets easier again, and I know that the shittiest parts of it are long over and as time passes I am only ever going to get stronger and more able and more a functional part of this world. And I don't rule anything out, but lol, I have not even found my feet yet from the last major life upheaval though I would in no way assume that it will be the last I'm going to have. Fits and starts, joys and sorrows. I feel young today and (being as I am an ongoing trainwreck) I've barely started being whatever the hell I am ever going to be, and I don't know where this paragraph is going except for north back to Boston and my flailing search for my next job.
-also we went to MoMA on Saturday and it was about 95% complete shit. This is depressing; I've spent the last eighteen months not hating contemporary art in Boston, Pittsburgh and DC. There are amazing things on the fifth floor of MoMA, eg. Girl Before A Mirror, but tellingly they are all about a hundred years old and by people who were actually talented and had meaningful statements to make.
-i am tl;dring my tl;dr on the bus back from NYC. It's eight and a half years since we last stayed here, rather than driving straight through to get somewhere else, and I'd forgotten how intensely loveable it is, and like all cities, all the more so if you aren't 19 and broke. Right now I love it so much that it's given me this whimsy of a life I never lived there, the same way I used to wander in W1 and stretch out my arms and touch Soho's stones on either side of me and wonder if I'd ever get to live there; and now there's the bare windswept trees in the shadowed green corners of Manhattan, and impossibly jumbled terraces, and grand dirty balconies north of Central Park; given the social pyramid I assume I'd be one of the people living in carefully stowed bedding under a scaffold, emerging in the streets at 1am to pick bottles out of commercial trash.
I know everyone has some kind of optimum comfort peopledensity or whatever, but I legit don't understand the ones who don't hang beside me on the extreme edge of that spectrum, head tilted upward at the skyline. It just seems natural and obvious to feel intense comfort and pleasure in dense, high-demand, obscene-rent locations where everyone else clearly wants to be there with you (because they love other people); and then you start navigating from the sun's glass reflection and seeing it all as an old, slow-growing brain of rock and steel, neon-flaring synapses and human neurones stretching from one cellular block to others far away, umbilical tunnels and dark veins, with generational adaptations forming progressively nonsensical shapes, its limbs stretching as it emerges from the sea.
truth, I love architecture and landscaping because I can't describe it, it's just there, doing things, platonically perfect spatial things, aesthetically and associationally inflaming. It occurred to me today as we were scurrying to catch our bus back to Boston that the only cause of the whimsy is that I've no bad memories of New York City, and it was the first place in my life I could have ever said that of. It is my escapist pastoral idyll, no lie.
Boston is going to feel very small when I get home, even knowing what a staggering improvement it was on what I had before, even knowing it has the advantage of being a place where I can maybe possibly survive. I am way happy there but maybe I'll one day get drawn into a metropole, maybe I'm just gradually clawing my way up to somewhere I ought to be - I don't know. I know how these cities make me feel, but I don't know what I'm able or willing to do for that feeling. But I'm an optimist, and I am also starting to get it - in the sway of the god of the red earth and the oasis, famine and feast, I know my easy life will get much harder before it gets easier again, and I know that the shittiest parts of it are long over and as time passes I am only ever going to get stronger and more able and more a functional part of this world. And I don't rule anything out, but lol, I have not even found my feet yet from the last major life upheaval though I would in no way assume that it will be the last I'm going to have. Fits and starts, joys and sorrows. I feel young today and (being as I am an ongoing trainwreck) I've barely started being whatever the hell I am ever going to be, and I don't know where this paragraph is going except for north back to Boston and my flailing search for my next job.
-also we went to MoMA on Saturday and it was about 95% complete shit. This is depressing; I've spent the last eighteen months not hating contemporary art in Boston, Pittsburgh and DC. There are amazing things on the fifth floor of MoMA, eg. Girl Before A Mirror, but tellingly they are all about a hundred years old and by people who were actually talented and had meaningful statements to make.
