The more there is, the more there is, the less there is.

I saw an old man crossing the street Sunday afternoon, a cane in each hand helping to propel him across Broadway. His small frame was bent over almost double at the waist and his back was nearly parallel to the ground. He had on a tan trench coat that covered his small eighty-some-year-old shoulders, and as he shuffled along he clung to a plastic bag from Zabar’s in his left hand. He was moving impossibly slow. Left foot. Stop. Right foot. Stop. People turned their heads as they approached him but kept moving after taking a few concerned looks and going on their way. I looked up and could see that the traffic light on this four lane two-way thoroughfare was about to change from red to green, and that he was about to get caught in the middle of fast paced moving traffic.

As I came upon him I bent down and asked if I could help carry his bag and get him across the street. At such an intimate distance I saw that he was in belted dress pants, he had on a crisp white dress shirt and a striped tie knotted in a full Windsor topped with a plaid cap that covered the stark white hair on his head. I wondered who he was and where he was coming from or going to and I thought, looking at him, that surely he was thinking: wasn’t it just yesterday that I was a young man able to get across the street without having to give it a single thought?

In a muffled tone he told me that he didn’t need any help getting to the bus stop. He didn’t even bother to look up at me as though I’d asked him an entirely absurd question that he was barely willing to justify with a response. I looked up and could see that the distance to the bus stop couldn’t have been more than about ten strides, but at the rate he was going he wouldn’t be getting there for at least another ten minutes. So I waited. I stepped back and stayed near to his side as the traffic light turned from red to green and cars and cabs began to move (annoyed horns honking loudly), around us.

As I stood by him his eyes remained firmly planted on the ground with extreme focus as he moved (left. stop. right. stop.) I wondered if all those years ago he could have in any way predicted this slow moving moment in the middle of Broadway with a complete and total stranger by his side. Because he was young once. He lived through wars and bad economies and bad presidents and raised a family and drank beers and went to baseball games and buried loved ones and watched his life go by only to find himself now here, in the middle of a busy street on a warm and overcast Sunday afternoon in Manhattan alone.

I guess we can’t, can we, allow ourselves to see that far into the future when all that’s there is what is left for us to look back on. How can we when our legs still move easily and we work out our muscles regularly and we eat too much and drink too much and are reckless with our hearts —who can be bothered now with the consequences that time will inevitably bring? Push it off while we can, those sad and distant moments of our future when we wonder where everything suddenly disappeared to, when we wonder where the time went and the days when we were able to get across the street on our own.

After we made it safely, I left him at the bus stop where the driver of the cross-town took over the job of getting this man to where he needed to go (perhaps that was all his day had been, small moments with nameless faces all of whom helped him bit by bit on his journey through this city that must look so different to him than it does to me).

Sometimes I think about what my life will be like ten, twenty, fifty years from now and how much the choices and decisions I’m making now, (in each passing hour, minute, moment…) will affect what it will look like if I'm fortunate enough to get there. A man who had been watching me assist the elderly gentleman across the street stopped me on the corner and shaking his head said, “So sad, that man. Just so sad.” Well, I thought, what do you know? What do any of us know about the lives being lived by the people around us? Sad that he's old? Sad that he’s by himself? Perhaps. But any New Yorker will tell you that being on your own doesn't necessarily mean sad, and from the looks of him this was a man who knew a thing or two about how to live.

So there’s no point in wondering where we’ll end up because there’s no real way to know all that our lives will be like as we move forward, regardless of the pace (because even when we think we have it all figured out, we don’t). So today as time flashes by more quickly than I can make sense of (April already?), all I can hope is that if one day in my distant future I happen to find myself alone in the middle of a busy Manhattan street with the traffic light of my life about to change from red to green —that I won’t look back on the road I took that got me there and find it paved with regrets.

And it wouldn’t hurt if I also happened to find myself impeccably well-dressed, too.

happy hours.

There are few things more awkwardly self-revealing than being in the middle of a slow moving pub by yourself waiting for someone or something to show up.

It’s small, the kind of place where there’s a pretty good chance that everyone really does know your name, and tabs run high and so do emotions and when you show up as an outsider to a place like that you can feel it, a distinct change in the atmosphere as though you’ve just entered a foreign country where you hardly know the language at all.

There’s a lot to talk about what with The Chill, and everyone agrees or disagrees about politics, sports, relationships and movies but it doesn’t matter to them because they all know each other and what they’re there for and playoff or primary every day is a big day for New Yorkers.

And you can tell easily enough those who have been here for hours, whose day didn’t include (from 8 to 6) being trapped behind office doors and bright and blinding computer screens with responsibilities so far outside of themselves that they’ve lost sight almost entirely of who they really are. No, they are trapped in different ways, perhaps. Their lives...well, you never know, do you?

It’s only in a place like this that you can sit by yourself and drink your $3 pint special (from 6 to 8) and think long and hard about what you’re doing and what you want and where you’re really meant to be in the whole vast configuration of things. It may even be in those twenty minutes you have to yourself (the only twenty minutes of your whole day it would seem) before someone or something shows up that you can even seriously allow yourself to begin to contemplate the answers. And if you’re like the guy next to me who had two too many two or so hours ago you’re sitting there with your mouth open and eyes closed probably dreaming of a time in the not-so-distant-past when things made a lot more sense.

Because when you suddenly find yourself in a foreign country right smack in the middle of your hometown you may find yourself questioning what exactly you’re waiting for and why, and the answers to those kinds of questions never do seem to be there looking back up at you from the bottom of your glass when you’re ready to go home.

love reservations.

Couples in all five boroughs will be sitting across from each other tonight, a candle between them illuminating their prix fixe menus and their relationships.

As the prosecco is poured and orders are placed for what is going to be just another dinner in a long line of dinners together, they can’t help but think about how it’s always so easy to love someone when they’re right in front of you.

And later, amidst the overwhelming smell expensive perfume and garlic you’ll be able to tell when another person has fallen out of love.

They’ll excuse themselves from the table leaving their steamed artichoke exposed near the heart, the discarded leaves with teeth indentations still sitting just off to the side, neatly stacked.

I accept Time absolutely.

What a silly thing time is and what it is to look back on your life and see how much has disappeared. If you’re like me you compare everything to what happened to you on this very day four years ago and think even now, so many days and hours and minutes removed from that one moment in your whole vast life that somehow it still feels like it happened just yesterday.

I guess that’s what happens when you lose someone you love and you lose them quickly, unexpectedly without warning at a time when you figure you’ve got so much more time with them ahead of you. You go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to a ringing phone that’s going to usher in news you don’t want to hear but can’t avoid no matter how much you try. And you don’t have time to say goodbye, such a small word really, but as soon as the chance to say it gets taken away from you it suddenly means so much. Everything before everything changed feels like another life, like it happened to someone else who was living in some alternate universe because now you think, looking back on it, that there was no way something like that could have happened to you, no way it could have happened and you actually survived it.

But time keeps moving forward and so do you and you realize after not having been able to feel it for a while that your heart’s still beating. People lose people all the time and you’re not alone so you figure that you should learn from it, learn from how fast these things can happen, how fast life happens and how easy it is to take things for granted. And we do it all the time, something as simple as thinking we know what tomorrow is going to bring (hell, we even believe our weathermen). We expect everything to go as planned - we expect the subway to come, for our local coffee shop to be open, for our jobs to be waiting for us, and above all we expect the people in our lives will be waiting for us, too.

If you’re like me you know better and you think people who don’t are a lot worse off than you because they don’t understand (but at some point eventually, they will) that this is it. Because this isn’t misplacing. No, we can misplace all we want because with misplacing there’s a very distinct chance that whatever we’ve lost we will inevitably get back. And that’s all we need isn’t it, that logical answer of: well it couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air. Your keys, a book, your iPod, subway pass, that letter or picture. I just had it, you think to yourself. I just had it.

Your logical will struggle with your non-logical as you try to come to terms with the fact that there is in fact no re-tracing your steps, no hope of ever getting back what you’ve lost. Finality like that is overwhelming and it changes you, it has to, because when you lose certain things for good like a person or a love or a chance of a lifetime you’ve got no choice but to see the world differently along with your place in it.

So you learn. Yes you learn to take more risks and more chances and to be brave and to not be so afraid, but the most valuable thing you learn are the tricks that Time can play. Bewitching, deceiving, there’s-never-quite-enough-of-it Time. You know now for certain something so obvious and yet were only really able to fully understand four years ago, that you can just have a lot of things before they slip right through your fingers. The question now I suppose is how often do you let them, or have you also learned the very important lesson of knowing when to tighten your grip on what matters while you still can.

shelter from the storm.

We don’t like to talk much about it, but—
we all have a lot more in common
than the weather.

The Chill is here and we are...miserable.
Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs are iced over,
(the way our insides have felt for a while now).

Because life keeps happening whether the weather
(whether we like it or not),
and we can’t see now that eventually it will all just melt away.

So for now we seek comfort where we can
no matter what it means—
even if it doesn’t mean anything at all.

Makes me long desperately for spring.

How To Strike It Rich.

On Tuesday night a friend gave me a lottery ticket. I wasn’t in any way aware of the Mega Millions Lottery as I’m someone who doesn’t believe much in luck. I’ve already accepted the fact that if it does indeed exist, it makes a distinct point to stay as far away from me as possible. My friend, well he (and apparently everyone else) was incredibly excited about the drawing. Later I was watching news stories showing helicopter views of people standing in lines at convenience stores that stretched around the corner for blocks. I heard about pools that had been set up among families and in offices and universities. What a special thing it was to see so many people take a stand against the pessimistic tone of our everyday lives and take a chance to believe in the idea that something so exceptional could actually happen to them.

I mean, just look at Ted Williams. Living by the side of a freeway in Columbus, Ohio holding nothing but a sign in an attempt to tell the world (and anyone who would listen) that he mattered. Suddenly he’s on every major news network in the country. Bam! Just like that. Everything. Changes.

Up until eleven o’clock on Tuesday night we were bound together as a nation by the exhilarating thought that despite the odds, someone, somewhere, was going to have to win this thing. I carried that ticket around in my pocket, and for approximately three hours was reminded of what hope felt like.

Of course it ended the way high hopes tend to, with a bit of inevitable disappointment. When you hear the winning numbers come through and see you don’t have a single one, you tell yourself: well, I knew it wasn’t going to happen anyway. You shrug off your chance of a lifetime and go back to accepting life the way it is. You finish out your week trying to forget all about those dreams you were having about what you were going to do with $380 million (Paris apartment! Pay off student loan! Maserati! Oh, and give to Oxfam, of course). You get a bit down when you start to feel that nothing ever changes at the exact moment a new year starts and change is what you’re desperately seeking most of all. You vow never to get involved in the lottery ever again and to find a new job, a new lover, a new apartment maybe, anything to feel better. Reports of more snow? Jesus Christ things are bleak.

But then you see Ted Williams all cleaned up on the “Today Show” talking about how long he waited for his second chance, and you remember that there are two people out there in the great states of Washington and Idaho who did, in fact, actually win.

One day it could be me, you think as you quicken your step. One day.

And so hope endures and you realize eventually that perhaps when it comes to hitting the jackpot of your life it could be anything, really. Truth is we are given winning tickets all the time, Mega Chances that could change everything.

I suppose the trick is simply to be smart enough to know when to open your eyes, reach out and cash them in.

time travel.

The year ends, as it always does, leaving me wishing I could travel back in time and do a hell of a lot of things differently.

As the clock strikes midnight I’ll inevitably look around and wonder how I got there, at the end of an entire year of my life seemingly empty handed. When did that happen (and more importantly - why haven’t we yet mastered a time machine?). I guess that’s just how fast it all happens - seconds, a moment, a word, a choice, a glance, a feeling - that’s how life happens, quickly, and most of the time without my even realizing it.

Life and the years of our lives happen as fast and fleetingly as it takes to count to ten, and I’d like to go back in those countdown seconds and warn my previous countdown self to the dangers looming in the distance of the upcoming year. I would have resolved then and there to proceed with extreme caution: warning, injuries and mistakes are closer than they appear. It would make a difference, wouldn’t it, to be able to go back right before you’re forced to go forward? Go back with clarity and distance and knowledge and collect what evidence you can on the inner-workings of your downfalls so you can stop yourself (for God’s sake) from making the same mistakes (again and again and again).

Because the answer isn’t to stop caring or to start caring about something like quitting smoking or losing weight or signing up for speed dating. No, we can resolve all we want to (and who are we kidding, really? Well, ourselves, always), but who we deep-down-are isn’t going to change no matter what promises we make for ourselves. All we can do is try to go back and in those ten seconds attempt to see ourselves in the harsh light of the year gone by. Shine the spotlight on those pivotal seconds and defining moments, those nasty words and foolish choices, those lost glances and forgotten aching feelings and continue to let life happen (quickly) but this time realize it.

And if you’re like me you’ll want to cling desperately to what little you got right (ok, so maybe my hands aren’t entirely empty...), and in those ten seconds you’ll vow to make every attempt to know better what you’re doing so you can do it all differently with your eyes more open (and your heart a bit more closed), so that maybe next year, if you can at all help it, you won’t have so many regrets.

Because until we can actually travel backward (and it’s only a matter of time, really) and allow the chance for history to diverge from our original past, we are stuck on a linear path moving forward into complete and total uncertainty which is both thrilling and terrifying at the exact same time.

Cause for celebration? Well, I guess.

It's always the ones -

Tall,
Dark,
(Not particularly handsome)

Who you know -
Could never understand you and,
Would never make you happy

That track you down through a friend of a friend
(Who was that girl in the black dress at the party on Saturday night?)
And want to date you.

Odds-wise

To me there’s nothing quite like being in a church watching a wedding take place to make me think about odds. This weekend as I sat there looking at these two people getting asked the standard round of questions: do you take, will you honor, do you pledge to love (I do, I do, I do), my brain couldn’t really quite wrap itself around the fact that it’s possible for two people to find each other at the exact right place at the exact right time and agree about things in terms of their lives forever-wise.

I mean, we’re talking about for-as-long-as-you-both-shall-live in a world where most of us don’t like to feel committed to anything much beyond the weekend, (and when it comes to love, well, are any of us ever really planning ahead?). I listened as the declarations ranged across the spectrum of health and illness, prosperity and unemployment, to the inevitable drastic flux on the good times v. bad times scale of things ending with the ultimate question: in light of all this, will you remain? And there they were both saying yes. Yes emphatically before God and everyone else with lots of money gone on invitations and venue fees with too many Tiffany’s candlesticks and pieces of flatware piling up on their kitchen table back home.

I sat there and thought about life and love odds-wise, and by the time they got to the you-may-now-kiss-the-bride part I figured that you probably have a better chance hitting the lottery than finding yourself up there saying yes to all that and really meaning it (and having the other person really mean it, too), and be able to look back years later knowing you were able to make it to death do you part. Because I think that’s the way it is odds-wise if you know what you’re looking for and don’t want to settle for anything less. How great can the probability really be when we’re all scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid most of the time anyway? At weddings I really feel like you ought to be up there acting like one of those people on the evening news in Gary, Indiana or someplace, in just total absolute shock at the sheer fortuitous luck of having struck it big. What were the chances?!

While I’m not typically big gambling-wise because the purchase of a lottery ticket is, from the standpoint of classical economics, foolish (did The Wealth of Nations have a chapter on marriage?), I do realize that in order to ever win one does, at some point, actually have to play the game. Yes you can bemoan odds and statistics all you want, but if you’re too scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid to at least get in line and pay the dollar for your ticket, well, you simply just can’t expect the windfall will find you eventually (in fact, I’d venture to say it will be lost to you forever).

So as the happy couple passed by me on their way back down the aisle I figured it’s best to go about the daily business of your life and from time to time take a chance on some of those numbers you have a particularly good feeling about and hope for the best.

A crapshoot? You bet. But that’s just the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.

It's hard work being out there. And everyone is.

Everyone is out there with their pasts stuffed in to invisible luggage by their sides as they sit on bar stools waiting for someone to make things right (as though some stranger could possibly fix all the broken hinges that are somehow, miraculously after all these years of abuse, still holding our hearts together).

And any day that someone could be anyone and most days we’re too busy to notice or particularly care. We keep on thinking we have more of the one thing in this city there’s never quite enough of, time (and an infinite number of chances), and we let it slip by us (December, already?) more easily than we should.

Isn’t that so funny about time and December and how that last month of the year always comes up slowly and then bam! there it is right on top of us, suffocating us, leaving us all asking the same questions: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where has my life gone? It’s as though we’ve misplaced all the days of the year in the attics of our lives and here we are now frantically trying to find them beneath all the dust to take some of them back, to make things right (and there’s just so much clutter). And we make many failed attempts and that’s okay because it’s the holidays and we’re told repeatedly in greeting cards and by Burl Ives and George Bailey that this is the season of perpetual hope.

But we will not find the lost days of our year hidden under Christmas trees or in wrapped packages, boxes, or bags. They are gone, and so too soon will this season and then where will we be? Having to start all over again, I suppose. Out there tediously searching for the same things in different people at different bars - only then our bags will be heavier. We’ll be carrying with us what little we were able to salvage from before and everything we were able to survive. We’ll continue to chase time because that’s what you do when there’s something you want that there’s never quite enough of, give chase, pursue persistently, (possibly forever). And everyone will say the same thing they always say to me as though somehow it makes it all better, all worth it no matter the end – well hey, at least you’re out there.

Latest plans.

I saw him jump on to the subway, making it just in time before the doors closed behind him. He must have been running late (literally) because he had on sneakers and black track pants and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that he’d made it. He looked, as I observed him standing there, like he was in a hurry.

Dressed in flats and whatever I manage to pick out to wear each morning, deep down I always feel like I’m wearing an invisible track suit, almost subconsciously compelled to make a mad dash to what’s supposed to come next in my life - even when I’m never really quite sure what next is.

He was young with wavy blonde hair and he held an iPod in one hand and a large manilla envelope in the other that was labeled, in scratchy handwriting, "Latest Plans." As I looked at him I wondered what it would be like to be able to carry around all my best intentions in an envelope so that I wouldn’t forget them. We’re making plans all the time, so much so that we don’t even realize it. We have date books and appointment books and scheduled events and hopes for the future even when we should know better by now (shouldn’t we?) that most of the time making plans (thinking we have any real control over what’s going to happen) is absolutely absurd.

He caught me eyeing his envelope bound for some unknown destination, and he held it closer to his chest. I figured it made sense that once you’re able to contain and define the latest plans of your life you’d be smart to put on your running shoes and try to get to where you’re planning on going fast, because we all know (don’t we) that plans are nothing if not subject to change.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

So it has begun. It creeps up on me every year and then, bam! it hits me as I’m walking down Broadway and I see all of those wooden racks lined up along the sidewalks. They loom tall reminding me with a sudden push of panic to my stomach that time is getting away from me (wasn’t summer just here?).

I know then, that once I return to the city after eating too much turkey (for reasons I don’t really understand), those racks will be filled with green trees selling for $100 a pop. Soon families after failed attempts at negotiating down the price, will be dragging them home to put up in their cramped apartments until the needles fall off. I’ll watch as they pass me, the branches of their Fraser Fir bouncing as they cross the street, one person at the helm, one bringing up the rear.

This morning, however, everyone was hauling duffle bags and suitcases along the sidewalks as they headed for the subway, I along with them. We stood in silence as the train sped to our offices, eyes glazed over as we remembered quickly the disputes from last year over who was going to bake the pumpkin pie and who was going to bring the cranberry sauce. We tried to mentally prepare ourselves as the memory came flooding back of the incessant questions from relatives about how we can live in a place like New York. Isn’t it too expensive? How do you live? Do you have any money? How are you going to have any savings? Can you ever go on any vacations? Doesn’t it get exhausting? Why do you have to work so much? And when, (for crying out loud), are you going to bring home a significant other? Have you thought at all about online dating or have you just acceptedthefactthatyoumightbealoneforever?

And on, and on, and on.

We’ll endure packed planes and pat-downs, gridlock traffic and kitchen meltdowns, yet every year we throw our bags over our shoulders and once more unto the breach we go. This year I’m seriously questioning it along with the whole of the holiday season. Perhaps it’s my prickly nugget of a soul, but I no longer see the point. It’s always there waiting to ruin the end of my November and entire December by making me proffer gifts and good cheer, pies (yes, the pumpkin pie was me), and an inordinate amount of patience. (Is it even possible to think about what comes after all of it - the weighty unavoidable horror of facing yet another year come and go?).

It’s. all. just. too. much.

So as I left the train I gave a silent nod of understanding to my fellow New Yorkers all on the brink of tomorrow’s mayhem. Yes, my eyes told them, the questions will come but you don’t have to answer. The moment you return to the city the rest of your year will disappear among lots of red and green lights and you’ll think there’s nothing you can do about it. You will be asked to attend office holiday parties and Christmas weddings and at least one terrible Broadway show you can’t afford with a friend visiting from out of town. But take care. You’ve been here before. Know it’s never too late to take a stand against these holiday traditions of yesteryear that rule our lives. Invitations can be declined. Friends and family can still love us even if we don’t buy them an iPad. We don’t have to keep going through the motions when the motions no longer make any sense.

We are New Yorkers (for crying out loud), and if anyone can take back this season, it’s us.

Serenity Now.

Oh I'd say it's easy to forget that the world doesn't, in fact, revolve around you once you've been living in this city for a while. I wasn't surprised really when this study came out last week that New Yorkers are some of the most stressed out folks in America. It’s the economy (stupid), but it’s also the commutes and the people and the rents (too damn high). The list goes on. I mean sure, we've chosen this lifestyle, but then again, what does that say about us?

It was an early morning and I was tired after getting under three hours of sleep the night before and I managed, somehow, to get out of the office long enough to run next door to Starbucks for coffee on a day when I knew there wasn't enough coffee in all of the city to get me through it. I knew right away when I walked in that something was off. It was quiet and the line was much too long, and (horror of horrors), it wasn't moving. At all. I saw a few people shake their heads and throw their arms up in exasperation and then walk out. Places to go people to see, man. I tried to remain patient and inched forward for what felt like an eternity. In my attempt to keep my eyes open as I stood there, I looked around and saw an ambulance pull up outside. That’s interesting, I thought. And then I saw the medics pull out a big white shiny gurney and start to frantically move in my direction. Very interesting.

It was then that I put two and two together (I'm extra slow without caffeine before 9AM), and they pushed by me and this long line of sleepy impatient New Yorkers and made their way to the back of the store. Before long I saw that they were actually in the process of picking up a barista off the floor and strapping him into their little contraption. His face was red, his blond hair matted down with sweat, and I knew I was supposed to look away but couldn't. And then it happened. It bubbled up from my stomach to my aching head, and there was nothing I could do to stop it: Of course, I thought. Unbelievable. Of all the mornings for some guy to pass out in Starbucks it had to be today at this exact moment, didn’t it?

I immediately hated myself.

But that's the thing, was it even really me? The reaction I had was automatic, an almost subconscious response, the kind of response I've been trained to have especially living here in this city of endless inconveniences. All I wanted was a Grande bold. Just seconds earlier that was the biggest problem of my day so far (well, I mean, I guess), and now here I was watching this young little barista who made one too many café latte's that morning getting taken to the hospital. He just couldn't take it anymore. Passed right out. Extra hot, no whip, decaf? I'm done with this, he thought. Call 911.

After they wheeled him out I did eventually get my coffee, but it felt wrong standing there adding the cream and then walking out with it on my own two healthy feet (surely karma was going to drop a piano on me as soon as I got outside, right?). When did I get like this? When did we all get like this? We're stressed, yes, but there has to be a middle ground somewhere between being annoyed at someone’s extreme misfortune and calling the paramedics because of it. I vowed then and there to make a change and attempt to see the world and the people in it differently, because maybe I'd been looking at it the wrong way for a while now. Who knows who this guy was back there whipping up foam and espresso, and where he'd come from and what he's been dealing with. Who was I to be so quick with my impatience for just a cup of coffee? Have a little understanding, have a little faith.

75% of us are stressed, according to this survey by The American Psychological Association, compared to 65% nationally. Apparently we eat too much and are unhappy with our jobs and we’ve yet to really reach a “Network” moment (I’m mad as hell…etc. etc.). What’s going on in the rest of the country that’s so great? Who knows, but my first thought was that I bet there aren’t many people walking around getting upset with their coffee provider while he’s en route to the emergency room. Maybe in New York we get so used to praying at the alter of being-on-the-go-all-of-the-time (we never sleep, right?) that we’ve been sleepwalking right through our lives, ignoring everyone around us and chalking them up to just one more thing we have to deal with, one more thing to make us stressed. And we don’t need one more thing to make us stressed. We know that.

So tomorrow everything changes, the way I order my coffee, the way I address that person standing at the top of the stairs of the subway looking at their Blackberry, the way I react to my credit card bill….maybe then my blood pressure will drop and I’ll feel better, happier, more mellow. Who knows, maybe then the people around me will start to change, too. And we can change! That concept won the vote in 2008 and heck, New York (and life) is based around the one certain fact that things will forever be constantly changing.

We need to accept that, yes, however also there is the unavoidable knowledge that in a city with lots of open windows looming above us with every step we take, one really never can tell when those pianos are going to start to fall. I figure it can't hurt to be prepared.

People don’t change, so it’s a good thing seasons do.

I don’t know why it always amazes me that one day we’re all out on the sidewalks complaining of the heat, sweating on the subways struggling for some amount of leftover non-smelly non-sticky space as every person feels closer than usual, more suffocating, more crowded...

...and suddenly there we are, all huddled on street corners waiting for the bus with hands digging deep into pockets of coats we forgot we had.

"I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service..."

It’s easy to lose touch with people. Life in New York (and everywhere) gets busy quickly and suddenly that plan for an email, or a drinks meet-up or weeknight dinner has come and gone, leaving you wondering if perhaps too much time has elapsed that you need to rethink the relationship altogether.

A longtime friends birthday arrived last week and I sent a text (why I never call anyone on their birthday anymore I can’t say) with well wishes and signing off by telling them how much I love them. Five minutes later I got a text back:

Wrong #.
(Love hurts.) Mz. Auterberry.

Wow. So much time had elapsed that this close friend had changed their phone number and I wasn’t aware of it. Actually, much more to the point, this friend changed numbers and never even bothered to tell me!

I always say that maintaining a relationship of any kind is a lot of work, but this was just too much. Mz. Auterberry (whoever she is), basically summed of my overall feelings on the subject, literally sending me a text with what very well may be the story of my life: terribly sorry, wrong number, try again, better luck next time.

Fall is here, hear the yell. Back to school, ring the bell.

Fall is here (tomorrow, officially) and I can tell because there is a chill in the air and I suddenly feel compelled to purchase #2 pencils.

There’s a school across the street from my apartment for little people who look to be in kindergarten, and now each morning as I (late, tired) run out the door to a day I know will keep me in front of a computer at a desk dealing with things of moderate to high importance, I think briefly as I see those faces about what it was like to be young, and naïve and blissfully unaware of just how crazy this life can be.

They are outside, usually running around or playing with friends as the parents section off into groups and talk about their latest purchase at Bergdorf’s. Some I pass on the way to the subway being dragged by their parents as they cry and scream that they don’t want to go (I know the feeling), as though sitting through a day of kindergarten is the worst thing in the world that could possibly happen to them.

I don’t remember much of kindergarten but I happen to recall just sitting around being read to. I think I wrote my name a lot, which was easy enough after the first few tries. I attempted drawing pictures in crayon of stick figures, (my talent hasn’t changed much over the years) and was praised as a great artist. In the morning my mother picked out my clothes, provided me with a lunch (it was always there, like magic!) and transported me to and from the institution leaving me with basically nothing to worry about aside from making friends (all it took was a cookie swap!)

After a long subway ride I got to the office in my last clean dress (dry cleaning is expensive!) I opened an inbox with over 100 emails, had an alert that my credit card payment was due (the horror), I had a meeting in an hour, and having been late and skipped breakfast, my stomach was beginning to make all sorts of noises.

So, at the start of what promises to be a long day, I feel confident that in time those children I passed this morning will look back and realize, like I do, like we all do, just how great they had it when they didn’t have to do anything at all.

America is my country, Manhattan is my hometown.

Yes, it’s possible to be away from home for so long that upon returning you come to appreciate it a bit more. It’s also possible to become so caught up in this burnt-out, over-worked, worn-out culture, that the world you see around you on a daily basis can come so become so tedious you no longer see it anymore. There comes a point when it is just a place with concrete sidewalks filled with lots of people and lots of cars and you yourself are just there in it, drifting, until the next day happens to find you.

I’ve been away for a while at a time when I think it could almost be defined as divine intervention (if such a thing should exist). The city and its heat were weighing extremely heavy on my shoulders, and in twelve days away I found myself on a plane every morning, and every evening going to sleep in an entirely new and foreign place (Oh, what a thing that can do for a person if the timing is right, indulging that urge to run away!).

And then I was back, and after traveling around the country for almost two weeks there wasn’t any better sight than the Manhattan skyline looming in the distance. I also found it very reassuring that at the end of this long and tiring time away from the buzzing streets of this place, that once I got off the train at Penn Station I was immediately thrown right back into my old life. Within moments I was out on 33rd and 8th vying for a taxi cab, arm up, suitcase in tow, with people all pushing and yelling and trying to get one before me. A great thing about this place (a trait I wish more people had), is that it doesn’t waste any time getting reacquainted with you - what you see is what you get.

In a cab, windows down on a warn night in Manhattan speeding up West End Avenue, home (one of the best feelings in the world), I thought that yes, it’s possible to be away for so long that when you come back you have a new appreciation for the world and your place in it, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

One just hopes the feeling lasts, of course. At least until the next chance there is to escape.

What is it that you want?

At 10PM on the uptown 1 train I was headed home when at 23rd street, a man, drunk, got on my subway car and promptly sat directly in front of me. Ok, so maybe not directly, but he was across from me and I knew right away it was going to be trouble. He starting talking, about what I couldn’t at first say as it was a lot of words grouped together that didn’t make much sense. However it was the emphasis behind each word he spoke that made me wonder if maybe he was trying to say something important.

So I did what I usually do when I think I’m on the brink of hearing something really juicy that I’m perhaps not meant to, I kept my eyes on the book in my lap, and kept my ears open.

"What is it you want?" he asked. He was slurring really, so it sounded more like, "Whatisityouwant?" really fast and all smudged together, but I got the message. I’m not sure who he was talking to exactly, because at this point, around 42nd street, everyone who had been sitting on his side of the car was now on mine, a group of about eight of us all sitting there crowded on one side, and him, sitting there across from us alone.

"Whatisityouwanthuh?" he asked, perhaps to all of us. I look at him and then to the man next to me, my eyes leaving my book for just a moment because it seemed to me that our guy across the way was making eye contact with him. "Whatisityouwantouttalifemanhuh? You wannajob? You wannalady? You wannanicelady?" he said, and then I saw he was making eye contact with me. I looked back to my book.

He then proceeded to pontificate on things like, "Materialism," and "Capitalism," while now laying down along the seats across from us, talking up at the ceiling as though to some audience out there who really needed his help. He was actually making a few points for someone so drunk he couldn’t really keep his eyes open.

"Mayflower!" he said suddenly and sat up. At this point he was on the edge of his seat and I felt like this was it, this was what I’d been waiting for. This was what had been keeping this guy up at night. This guy who, obviously has a job, is old enough to have worked some years and seen some things and to have lived a life where it hasn’t always been easy. This is what has caused him to leave work early and head to the bar and sit there and throw his hard-earned money away on beers so that he could try to forget or make sense of this one thing that he just couldn’t seem to get past.

"Mayflower," he said again, his finger pointing at us like a teacher in front of a classroom. We all sat there as the train rattled on, some of us pretending not to see, some of us (including me) now looking straight at him, this one man in the middle of an otherwise empty subway car.

Mayflower," he said seriously. "I know ain’t from the Mayflower. Maybe you are, maybe you all come over here on that ship cause you got a purpose," he said. "But me. I ain’t from the Mayflower. No, Iain’tfromtheMayflower," he stopped and lowered his head, shaking it slowly before looking up at us again, "So," he said with what I thought was the perfect amount of dramatic affect for someone so obliterated. "Where does that leave me? Where does that mean I’m from?"

I looked back at him in the silence he’d created and wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter where he was from, surely it mattered more now in this instant that he had some idea of where he was going to (and that he hadn’t missed it a few stops back).

The guy next to me shook his head and laughed.

"Oh, yes," he said softly and nodding his head. "I knowI knowIknow, man. You gottajob you gottagetupfor in the mornin. I know," he said and laughed and leaned back in the seat and smiled like he knew something we didn’t. "I get you. I get you’re tired, I know. But c’mon man," he said and then after some thought decided to apparently really cut right to the chase and shouted: "FUCK THE JOB! WHAT IS IT THAT YOU WANT?"

We sat stunned. Satisfied and letting this sink in for a while, he smiled, closed his eyes and lay back down on the seats.

Fuck the job. Hm. Now that’s something. What is it that I want?

When my stop came he was passed out and snoring loudly. I left him there, figuring that maybe he never got around to asking himself what he really wanted until perhaps maybe today, when he had a particularly bad day at the office, and looked around and realized that he in fact somehow didn’t have anything he wanted at all. Perhaps then he proceeded to drink until he couldn’t remember what those things he wanted were in an effort so it wouldn’t hurt as bad not having them.

Whatisitthatyouwant? All I know is I hope he finds it, and that one way or another, he makes it home.

Of all the mornings.

We all come to New York because we want to get somewhere. No matter where we’ve come from or where we’ve been before, none of it matters. Because. It’s here on the surface of this town that we know (hope, pray, wish, dream, pray some more), we’ll get to where we’re meant to be. But. What’s so funny, (and sometimes you have no choice but to laugh) is, that at the exact moment you find yourself in a rush to get to what could be, The Next Big Thing of your... LIFE, (and maybe it’s LIFE, not just New York), the exact moment you’ve got that somewhere there right in your sights, is, (undoubtedly) the exact moment you find yourself stuck underground on the downtown 1 local train for 40 minutes, and miss it (poof!) entirely.

Empire State of Mind.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve wanted to say something. To the stranger sitting next to me on the subway whose earphones are so loud I can’t concentrate on the A section of the Times, because all I can hear is Jay-Z talkin’ bout how he grew up in a place famous for movie scenes where people take Gypsy Cabs (Actually, these streets won’t make you feel brand new. In fact, more often than not, they’ll make you lose your mind).

To the person standing on the left side of the escalator in rush-hour, I resist the urge to yell – STAND TO THE RIGHT! To the person who stops just at the top of the stairs to check their blackberry, I resist the urge to inform them - OTHER PEOPLE EXIST! And on and on and on.

However after over four years in this city, I’ve come to find that you really have to pick your battles. Because the moment you choose to address each irritating thing that happens to you in the course of say, just your morning commute, pretty soon you’ll have to start resisting the urge to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

This morning was a prime example. An emergency on the 96th street downtown local tracks made me take the train from 86th up to 96th only to transfer then to a downtown 2 or 3 train (it’s early, it’s snowing and I’m already irritable). By the time I made it down to Houston, the local 1 train was packed. Upon exiting the crowded, hot train, one rider made one of the most common (and most irritating) mistakes – she shouted “excuse me!” to everyone in front of her while also trying to push her way through the crowd. Note: this is the most irritating when it’s clear that everyone else is also trying to get off the train as calmly and semi-orderly as possible.

True to form, I resisted the urge to say something. However the gentleman next to me had apparently had enough. To the woman, (who like most people in these situations thought she was the only person who mattered), he said: “Calm down lady, we’re all trying to get off here too.” The woman, (not surprisingly) didn’t take this very well. She proceeded to tell him to “fuck off,” to which he replied, calmly and loudly while shaking his head, “Boy, are you fucking irritating.” The crowd laughed and I smiled inwardly.

The best part of this little tableau however, was that after such a declaration I would think the ideal thing to do would be to deliver the stinging comment and then flee from the scene. But karma being what it is, after telling this woman in front of a train full of people that she’s “fucking irritating,” the button on the cuff of his winter jacket got caught, (in what looked odds-wise to be tantamount to hitting the lottery), on the small little fabric handle of her umbrella.

Oh.

I then watched as these two enemies had to stop, (attached now), and work together to disentangle themselves. As I passed by and he was finally freed, I’m fairly certain I heard him tell her he was sorry.

Let’s hear it for New York.