If I smoked I would need a smoke. If I did coke I would need a hit. Acid? Tab. Pot? Bong. Whatever arbitrary vice I might choose I would need the requisite gear and the stuffer for it. The content.
I almosot hyperventilated yesterday, from nothing to do with those crazy breathing allergies of a few months ago. I have been wandering through some days of existential angst, spiritual apoplexy, mid-life paranoia and glimpses of mortality and the futility that precedes it. The daily futilities, the quotidian flourishes of banal normalcies that can find no comfort in its executor’s inferior vessel.
I saw a couple of old friends on Sunday. Well, one old friend and his relatively new (still new to me) wife. We had such a nice time. Lots of laughing but not the usual amount of reminiscing. Talk was more about the present and the future with references to the past used for illustrative purposes. We met in midtown — the tourists drive me crazy but midtown Manhattan is still my favorite part of New York. I want to live there and I think some day I will. Among other blunt realizations about my life of late I today asked myself if I even like Astoria. Living here for 11 years might seem to suggest an affinity with the place but I think my continuing presence here perfectly expresses one of my many character flaws: Inertia. Torpidity. I wait and ignore the sediment of my life as it snows like mud around me.
At times on Sunday it felt like I was unravelling. That feeling had started on Wednesday, cued seemingly incongruously by supremely mundane events (hah, “supremely mundane” is High-Larry-Ooooos). I was talking fast, loud and long; and it made me feel both vulnerable and heroic.
After our steak dinner I wandered around midtown. It was after 10pm and I was a little drunk. I can not remember the last time I peed on the street but I had to let it go on a dark and kinda scary 56th Street. I used to be wreckless about these after-dark wanderings, rambling one memorable night up a mix of streets and roads from Astoria to Union Turnpike — my goal was Flushing Meadows and to climb the Unisphere but I failed failed failed. I tried to get cabs back to Astoria from there but I was refused repeatedly by grinning cab drivers who, at 4am in some asshole part of Queens, could evidently afford to select their customers.
I did not wander that hard on Sunday but I remembered those many nights when I did. I remembered the time I made the most sustained effort to find a place in midtown. I got taken in by a standard bait-and-switch, wasting lots of peoples’ precious time. I still see that area as a place of some mystery and timeless human design.
Midtown is noisy and expensive. I don’t tolerate noise so well but maybe I could I tolerate money less well, expelling as much of it from my midst as quickly as I can by renting a $3000/month closet (with shelves) (and a closet).
I have walked off the existential shelf. This apoplectic soul has lost its bearings. So dramatic. Such drama. I wake up, clutch my forehead with both hands, and ask “Who is this?”
