Welcome To New York
With neither pride nor undue shame I too have left parts of myself all over these United States, at times in what is considered the proper fashion and at other times in such fashion to raise eyebrows, and if you have even the merest shred of decency you will start exercising your brow at this moment. Neither would it be out of line if you choose to purse your lips and shake your head slowly back and forth, projecting outward as far as you can reach with it, your indignation.
Folks here in New York City have been real nice about welcoming me and the cat and my multiple aloe vera plants. Jimson Creed had coined me the Reluctant New Yorker on one of my recent trips here from Virginia and North Carolina, three years of going back and forth I think rightly earned me the moniker and although I still have a fair amount of wrap up in Virginia I am now heart and soul embracing the big city life, which ironically is in some ways more country than any country life I've ever lived. By that I mean that not once in the country did I ever turn a corner and run just inches shy of smack dab into a man with a freshly gutted sow slung over each shoulder.
I'm not crazy about the question but as it seems to be the universal ice breaker here I have decided for simplicity sake and to lessen the risk of saying the wrong thing just stick with the same one liner—so far so good—in answer to how am I liking it here.
I have procured a real cherry of an on street parking space as it only requires a thirty minute investment twice a week instead of the more common 90 minute times two investment plus the handful of coins for short timing it at a meter. Bernadette's sister, the Restauranteur, was looking out for me that first week and would call me whenever she moved her car to see if I wanted a better space than the one I was in, until finally the cherry spot came available, in a parking zone of which I was heretofore ignorant, and now I am hesitant to consider ever again moving the Jeep, despite it being under a tree where roosting birds poop on it.
The first Monday in the spot I forgot where I was and by what duties was I dictated and didn't get out to move it to the opposite curb so the street sweeper could pass. I received on my back passenger window one of those nasty orange stickers informing me that civically I was a bad person, although I did not see a ticket on the windshield. Bernadette says people steal parking tickets to use on their own cars for short term illegal parking and that I would be wise to go online and see if I owe the city 65 dollars. To remove the large orange decal requires heavy work with a single edged razor blade and a paint thinner backwash to get the glue off.
Today I was out early though, with a cup of coffee as big as my head and some reading material, and behind the Jeep on the street was a large pile of what I think was human excrement. What I may have been alluding to in the opening was a sympathy for the bowel movement that just won't wait but sympathy is not to be construed as a love of so I was eager for the cleaner to come this morning, although not that happy with the imagery running through my head of the sweeper brushes and what they would do to the fecal matter. Thursday is Thanksgiving and the cleaner won't come on that day. The next cleaning day will be a week from now, which seems a less than ideal amount of time to be parked in front of a pile of human waste. But as is sometimes the case you sit in your car and the street sweeper doesn't come and this was one of those days. Someday I will desire to go somewhere and the passion I feel for the parking space will meet its first real challenge. I can imagine equally the desire for movement and change and the seduction of inertia. But certainly I will be moving it when Bernadette and I make the road trip to New Orleans over the Christmas holidays. And then when we get back I will have to start over with the process of searching out the cherry spot. Probably it is better not to believe that there is only one.
After marching back up to the fifth floor this morning I told Bernadette what I had seen behind the Jeep and she said, welcome to New York, even though she has by now already welcomed me many times over.
...more recent posts
A Rush To Toilet
It began today as an inauspicious ending after a night shortened by a morning too soon. Endings can be hard especially when necessary and here in Bushy Fork, the former Fence Post, I felt at dawn the dread of the dream walking naked through high school halls realizing against all waking logic that I didn't have enough credits to graduate. I did graduate though mane, what the hell is the meaning of that dream? A question not begging an answer is still worth voicing.
I'm eating Blue Diamond almonds from a bag and drinking Newcastle from WalMart and in a perfect world where anything you wanted to amount to something, did, with no sense of who is the whore and what constitutes whoring, would be enough to fly me around the world nonstop. Although of course I would occasionally stop for more beer and almonds.
Mane, nobody's calling me which despite seeming like a return on the investment from encouraging people over so many years not to call me, is still harshing my sense of well being. There are no banks to handle this kind of business, I have to do it all on my own and it's lonely at the top of a, uh, island. I know it is only ignominious by my own reporting but oh the shame, the shame of he who waits by the phone.
Though Bruce and Pizza did show up, without calling, and the last, the very last several hundred pounds of past renter's garbage did finally find a home somewhere. I'm not sure what bridge they dropped it off of, or into what pristine water, or who's backyard or into what illegal dump. I trust them implicitly. And rounded their pay up 10 dollars over an already fairly generous offering.
And the property managers are not returning my calls. It will be less than ideal to leave here without engagement to a property manager. But then they are here and seem willing and acceptable or better than that and without too much, as my mother was fond of saying, hullaballoo, the deal is inked and I'm ready to pack up and get the hell out of here. Except for that toilet which sprung a leak today.
Oh how I rushed out against all my better inclination towards leisure, and purchased that new toilet, only to lug that heavy bitch in and realize my earlier assessment had been too much based on self doubt, and that the leak was not so much a go out and buy a new toilet kind of leak but a simple push a small plastic tube onto a nipple sort of leak. I'm keeping that new toilet dammit. I will not give up on self doubt so easily.
It began today as an inauspicious ending after a night shortened by a morning too soon. Endings can be hard especially when necessary and here in Bushy Fork, the former Fence Post, I felt at dawn the dread of the dream walking naked through high school halls realizing against all waking logic that I didn't have enough credits to graduate. I did graduate though mane, what the hell is the meaning of that dream? A question not begging an answer is still worth voicing.
I'm eating Blue Diamond almonds from a bag and drinking Newcastle from WalMart and in a perfect world where anything you wanted to amount to something, did, with no sense of who is the whore and what constitutes whoring, would be enough to fly me around the world nonstop. Although of course I would occasionally stop for more beer and almonds.
Mane, nobody's calling me which despite seeming like a return on the investment from encouraging people over so many years not to call me, is still harshing my sense of well being. There are no banks to handle this kind of business, I have to do it all on my own and it's lonely at the top of a, uh, island. I know it is only ignominious by my own reporting but oh the shame, the shame of he who waits by the phone.
Though Bruce and Pizza did show up, without calling, and the last, the very last several hundred pounds of past renter's garbage did finally find a home somewhere. I'm not sure what bridge they dropped it off of, or into what pristine water, or who's backyard or into what illegal dump. I trust them implicitly. And rounded their pay up 10 dollars over an already fairly generous offering.
And the property managers are not returning my calls. It will be less than ideal to leave here without engagement to a property manager. But then they are here and seem willing and acceptable or better than that and without too much, as my mother was fond of saying, hullaballoo, the deal is inked and I'm ready to pack up and get the hell out of here. Except for that toilet which sprung a leak today.
Oh how I rushed out against all my better inclination towards leisure, and purchased that new toilet, only to lug that heavy bitch in and realize my earlier assessment had been too much based on self doubt, and that the leak was not so much a go out and buy a new toilet kind of leak but a simple push a small plastic tube onto a nipple sort of leak. I'm keeping that new toilet dammit. I will not give up on self doubt so easily.