Friday, March 09, 2007

Neon Sign McFly

If Fight Club was a mass of concepts we abandoned in our late teenhood, like "smash the state," like "Where Is My Mind?" Like "Embrace the lack of romance," like "Ikea is not beautiful," it left us with one glowing word construction we carry into our early-twentysomethings: "tourist."

It's a word that sums up everything wrong with so many of us. It sums up the boys and girls on "Next" we can't even stand to watch, visitors to Manhattan Island, the heartbroken who only feel after a breakup, the grievers who only mourn after a death, those who only feel the wind when the wind blows, who only hear thunder when there's lightning. Our lives are continual condemnations of the tourist, because they offend us with their transience, their lack of belief, their populism. They see themselves as casual explorers, plumbing the depths of the psyche through occasional experience and coincidental exposure. In reality, they're continual visitors to used car lots. They buy whatever experience is thrust on them and act as though it belongs to them because they forked out their time, their money, their emotions. The greatest we are not customers, we live in the same used cars all the time. Our shows transcend reality because we really are not in reality when we hear our eardrums strain, because we feel real shame at our erections, we could not be apart from our shame and our world dyslexia and our diamond headlights. Our sadness, our heartbreak, our grief, our wine glasses and thin friends are our indulgences in what we have, in knowing we live here and were born here. The wind blows at all times because we are thoughtful. Anything less than causing the sun to rise for those around us is a failure. We are lanterns and the cities we were born in are the light. Toronto is New York is Decatur iff you were truly born there instead of in yourself. We know the alleys, the rooftops, and we walk through the areas that cabs refuse to go. Our depression when we're not touching breasts is complete, and our happiness when we are is absolute. I currently have three ambitions: one to be a homewrecker, two to touch a fake breast, three to be a house husband.

I will miss dearly one thing about winter, and that is the synesthesia of extremely cold nights. Nights where it's minus thirty-two with the wind chill and nobody else ventures outside of their homes. The bitter taste of cold, the cacophonic wind, the angry sound, the ice stirred up by nature, the stinging skin. All become one glorious sense that somewhat resembles beauty, although I'll admit I like the sight of it the most. It's fucking pretty, you have to admit.

Friday, March 02, 2007

On New York

A few good-timey stories:

1. I was fined $50 for lying down in a subway, an incident report filed at 5:05 AM. I have a court date for March 17th in Manhattan...when the police came on the subway I would have been worried but I was literally too busy thinking there was no way I'd done anything.

2. I left my wallet in an upper-west side bar nicknamed The Abbey one Saturday night. An hour later I realized my wallet was gone, and while resigned to figuring it was gone I figured it would be good to check out where I had gone. Sure enough, there it was on the bar exactly where I'd left it.

3. Toronto is nothing, in terms of cities. New Yorkers seem happy with how their place is a tourist trap; I can't imagine living there are not being endlessly irritated by the constant stream of uninitiated.

4. Staten Island is the greatest. One time I was going to a party there from Manhattan so I had to take a ferry then a bus then walk and it was so not NYC and then I wrote a story about it.

5. I'll be a stock broker and I'll get me a wife, are you living in the same society I am? Tonight they left me to take a cab because they chose to walk despite the storm...have they lost their obsession with radical Islam? Strings are a girl's best friends; they can be spatially extended yet explained within the context of quantum mechanics, I miss you string theory. I was born in an unremarkable birth with a white hospital room and white sheets and they brightest thing I wore was grey and it still stands only today it says Sleepwear on it but I'm as dead as I was then, I'm reading too much Sylvia Plath, I'm listening to too much early Manic Street Preachers, I'm looking up to them; I'm viewing their deaths as admirable and I'm twenty-two years olds, I'm too old to not be responsible for myself and that makes my resolve more exact it's a brick wall it's a lead plate it's rejection it's friends telling me about rejection. When I was a teenager I never cried, now I cry thinking about my mom, I cry visiting ground zero, I cry over mice fed to snakes, I cry about all past mass extinctions except this current one.
hey I'm just a wannabe drunk hey Mike I'm not a leader hey Kit I'm not a lover hey Bonnie I'm not a good friend. Ask someone who knows better, I've forgotten what concrete ability feels like.