It's up to you

The Empire Diner in Chelsea...

Sitting in the bar last night, a decision was made. Leave town, leave as soon as possible, leave now, and go to New York, and never come back. The time had come to face it, that if I was to go anywhere, it would have to be alone. I am getting used to alone, I like alone, he's easy to get along with, if not a little too quiet at times.

So I will arrive in New York, shortly, well not until the 18th really, it was the earliest discount fare I could get. I have it all planned. I will drink, heavily, on the plane, and check into my hotel. Then I will stumble up the couple blocks to the Empire State Building, just to make sure it really does exist, not just in movies and pictures, but that it's an actual thing that inhabits real space. Then I plan on having a late night dinner at Blue Ribbon because it's open till four am. I have a single seat, at Yankee stadium, in the bronx, box 342, Row E, for a Friday night game against the Angels. So I will venture into the Bronx early, and have dinner at Dominick's, which apparently has communal seating. But most of my time will be spent walking the streets, listening to the local radio on my headphones, and reading the post. Drinking, smoking, watching.

I lay out this light itinerary, because when I come back, it will be nothing like what I have discussed above. Who knows what I will experience there, and the effect it will have on me to have walked amongst the birthplace of pop culture. To be in the city that was used as a back drop in all the comics I read as a kid, where all the super heroes live, where a guy named Louie DePalma ran a taxi garage, and a guy named Roger Thornhill was mistaken for someone else and abducted. I could go on forever, but you get the idea. To walk in an environment so overlapped with history, fiction, and fantasy will be sensory overload, and with overload comes release, and rebuilding.

I have dedicated much of this website to the residual effects of low culture on the day to day life of one very ordinary person, the dichotomy of something produced for the masses, and how it trickles down to the experience of the singular. So the week that I will be in New York will be dedicated to living in the realm of the low. The sidewalk John Lennon died on, the apartment Stienbeck lived in for a year, and the central park path that Dustin Hoffman's character would jog every morning in The Marathon Man. It will all be there, and so will I, finally.