I spent the new year out in San Francisco. I did it to somehow escape the routine of another new year’s turn back in NY. The irony of it all is that as soon as midnight struck, the image that blasted out of the many video screens in the bar I was in was that of the brightly-lit ball dropping on Times Square. It seems there really is no escaping NY. Home hangs heavy wherever one is and NY might as well have been a chain than a mere pendant. It shackles my consciousness with its gritty, grand charm.
January 3, 2006
January 6, 2006 at 6:39 am
New York is too lucid a home to stay away from. It’s much easier to escape, say a backward state, or one that hasn’t made any major news at all. I feel that way about Manila. It’s so easy to get away from it because every other place seems so much grander and more superior than that pollution- and traffic-infested place. But when the heart hits, damn. Friends and family just pull you back and I realize that no matter how bad the traffic can get, how smoky the sky gets, it’ll always be (sadly, regrettably and quite happily) a place I’ll call home.
I don’t think NY is a chain to you. It’s more like one huge railroad track. Whatever place you go to, be it a place for escape or a place for just bumming around, you know you’ll always end back where you started.
You’re a New Yorker through and through, my friend.