new york, essentially
someone asked, the other day, what I thought of new york. I replied that it was more palpable than any other city I've encountered. and it is. it insists upon all your senses. it demands and demands. people are more terse, coiled tight like fists. they're territorial about pavement space. they armour themselves in the skin of their own lives, and post around them those stoic sentries of the twenty-first century: the iPod, the headphones, the mobile phone, the blackberry. the pace is electrifying. people speak faster, push out into traffic, tap impatiently as you fumble for change. politeness is unvalued currency here. but all is not lost: some teenagers will still leap up for pregnant women in the subway.
the subway! a world of implausible characters, crushed together in the metallic hush and rumble of the underground, spinning skeins of implausible conversations that tie them to this time and this place. unravelling those skeins would, over the course of infinite time, elucidate an essence. (though, not a pattern. new york is way too cool for patterns).
tomorrow I will have a bagel. essential new york, supposedly.