I’ve been trying to figure out what this blog should be about. For it seems to me, a blog should have a purpose, I should be headed somewhere. Even ‘Seinfeld’ wasn’t about nothing. It was about a collection of neurotic, single people dealing with New York City. Now, it has occurred to me to do a blog about a neurotic, soon-to-be-married, thirty-something guy dealing with New York City. But I would be writing a lot about the people I work with, I think, which I would actually love to do, except that they’d certainly catch wind of it and sue me. And on top of that, my office life is only mildly interesting to me, and its tough to tap dance about something bland.
The truth is, I haven’t narrowed this thing down, theme-wise, which has left me staring at a lot of blank paper (virtual paper, Microsoft Word ‘paper’). And that presents a theme in itself. The rehabilitation of a writer. This is a theme most people can relate to, because most of us, at some point in our lives, have had some creative skill that we let dry on the vine for some dry economic reason or other, and we’ve thought about picking it back up, abstractly, but when we actually do try it again, we blow through the mouthpiece and a squawk comes out the other end of the horn, and, horrified, we put it down and back away and wonder if we ever really did know how to play it in the first place or if we’d convinced ourselves in the previous life we’re trying to recapture that that squawking noise was actually music. Like our ears have matured or something. Before, in their tender period of growth they innocently possessed a more forgiving interpretation of ‘art’. Self-help books have sold millions of copies encouraging people to pick up creative pursuits of which they are secretly desirous and leading them by the hand toward self-actualization. So maybe this blog is a self-help book in reverse. It’s the awakening of a slumbering artist, except without any steps. I’m a caveman stumbling into the light. If I can do it, you can.
In the name of lacking a theme, today I’ll give you a thought I was thinking on the train during my commute to my current destination, which is Newark, New Jersey. Before I get to the thought, I’ll tell you what I’m doing over here. I’m sitting in the Seton Hall Law Library, which is located in downtown Newark, not because I’m a law student, but because this place is extremely spacious and quiet and, more importantly, is a good distance away from home, where I’ve found I’m more or less incapable of doing anything except cooking, surfing the internet for baseball articles, and watching nature shows or sports on TV (sports and nature shows comprise 90% of what I watch). I can’t even read (anything substantive) at home. For that I have to go to a café, or to the Newark Law Library.
I live in Hoboken, New Jersey. There are a number of reasons why I ended up here (there), which I won’t go into, at least not now, but I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea at first. I moved to New York because I had my first taste of city life in Barcelona at age 28 (truly urban city living that is, meaning living in the heart of a bustling city), and it was sort of like taking a drug. By the time that experience was necessarily over, when I’d run out of money and stamina for living illegally, I came back to the US and decided I hadn’t had enough so I saved up some cash and headed to New York. Let’s say Barcelona was a gateway drug and New York was the hard stuff. I was completely enthralled at first—so much activity!—my scattered brain was overloaded. Then I settled in and the hardness of the drug increasingly stood out as the romance faded. Now I was in a relationship. The city and I weren’t having sex everyday anymore, I was growing used to being shoved, I was walking like an Olympic race-walker.
(Note on speed walking in New York: It’s just like driving on a congested highway. There are only two speeds you can go. You can go slow, and crawl along at the pace of the glacial train in front of you, or you can go fast as hell, zipping around the slowpokes. There is no in-between. There is no comfortable pace. This happens because, as you try and get around the slow guy immediately in front of you, you immediately encounter another slow guy, and so you have to speed up a little to get around him, and then you have to speed up even more to avoid getting stuck behind the next guy, until you’re going top speed. So if you don’t want to go top speed, you just have to give it up entirely and go extremely slow. Now, extremely slow is enjoyable in, say, a small town where there’s space to think. Going slow in a cramped line like one of so many emperor penguins, receiving a ‘flat tire’—having the back of your shoe flattened—every ten steps, or going slow in a conga line of automobiles, hyper-aware of the guy who is driving two inches off of your back bumper, is not nearly as enjoyable as speeding. Here is a ridiculous, but true, confession: as I walk in New York, silently to myself, I sometimes pretend I’m a car, and I think about which gear I’m shifting into as I race around a shuffling grandma or couple of skyward-gazing tourists. I mentally stomp on the accelerator. It’s fun. I walk around New York almost perpetually in third gear, although I occasionally ‘open it up’ along an empty stretch of sidewalk…).
Where was I? The big city honeymoon was over, or something like that. It culminated in an episode where a guy punched me in the head with his elbow in the subway. Or was it the time another guy kicked me in the back? These things do happen. They happen when there are just too many people with their own individual agendas in the same small space. These are the pains of people learning to get by in densely packed places. Here’s a Nostradamus comment about the future: we’re going to have to learn this skill, because we’re eventually ALL going to be living in densely packed spaces. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, It’s true, it’s true.
Yet the post-honeymoon City (insert your favorite large city here) is not a bad place, of course. The mass of people in Manhattan are divided between those who live on the island (largely financially well-off folks) and those who commute in, either to work during the day, or to party at night. I’m going to generalize that the kinds of people who would punch you in the head in the Subway are those who get paid too little and whose commute to and fro is long and unpleasant. But the majority of the people who either live in the city proper or are there to party, or to visit, are truly happy to be there. ‘Happy’, particularly in New York, often skews toward ‘Feel Cool,’ which skews toward feelings of being part of the ‘In Crowd’ versus the ‘Out Crowd’ which gets very tedious. But you cut through all of that, you navigate around it.
Back to New Jersey, and we’re getting closer to my thought—or more accurately my sensation—on the train to Newark. So I moved off of the Island for various reasons, most of them financial, and found myself on the other side of the Hudson River in Hoboken. The best way I can sum up how New Yorkers feel about New Jersey is a moment I had with my parents (one of my two sets of parents), while we were walking around in lower Manhattan after an anti-war protest. There was this great column of black smoke billowing up from the New Jersey side of the river, I mean a really ominous column of smoke. The kind of smoke that would signify something dramatically wrong. Dad was curious to know what was going on so he asked a police officer if he’d heard anything. The officer looked over his shoulder at the smoke across the river, shrugged, and said “Who knows (or was it ‘who cares’), it’s New Jersey.” I didn’t feel this way when I moved here, obviously, because I was willing to live here after all. But I did feel, just a smidge, that I was settling for something lost in a bet. I don’t feel that way now. Before I go on to mention Newark, I should say to those that don’t already know, Hoboken is not like a lot of the industrial lowlands of New Jersey that bleed away from New York (although it used to be in some ways). Hoboken is an antique, extremely well-preserved, classic immigrant neighborhood. Truthfully, it shares many of the same historic traits of Brooklyn and Queens, only in microcosm (Brooklyn and Queens are enormous—Brooklyn alone is larger than Boston—whereas Hoboken is only a mile square).
Anyway, the thought, or rather the sensation I had on the train ride from Hoboken to Newark today, was that I liked the trip. More accurately, I like the trip, generally, every time I take it. This is a surprising realization, that has implications, because the trip from Hoboken to Newark—or any trip from anywhere to Newark—is, on paper, an ugly trip. Especially today, when it was gray and wet and February-bleak. You look out the window and all you see are miles of raw industry. Semi-trailer yards. Barbed-wire fences. Junkyards. Warehouses. Structures of oxidizing, corrugated metal, piles of rusted steel, stretches of train track and windswept post-industrial scratch. Half-hearted graffiti. Dank tunnels. It looks like what I always thought Siberia might look like, growing up during the Cold War. And the weird thing is, probably because I usually take this trip during the weekends, there’s hardly a soul to be seen along this plain. And I like this trip, deeply. It’s not that I look forward to it, I don’t even think about it until I’m on the train and viewing this lonely, seemingly somehow forgotten place through the train window. But I surprised myself and recognized today, for maybe the first time, that there’s some kind of deep, lonely peace I feel when I’m out there. And I pondered for the entire ride why that might be. Here’s a little bit of what I came up with: because it’s completely real. There’s absolutely no surface level, none of that Manhattan sheen, no attempt to impress or pretend or convince. It is what it is. It doesn’t apologize. But that’s not it entirely. For it is depressing, there’s no denying that. And I’m not saying that if I could somehow oversee a massive cleanup and constructive rejuvenation of the area I would hesitate for a second. There’s this voice in my head, this down-on-his-luck character who lives out here saying “Yeah, you like it so much? Come on down and live here, see how you like it then.” No, I don’t think I could live here.
I’m just saying that in its hardness, there’s a silent survival instinct here. A kind of solitude. No wasted words.
