In which the Country Mouse has a boner for the city

I love being a fake New Yorker.  There are few other comforts right now that can put me in such a dizzying dazzling darling mood.  Summer in the city?  It's clear, it's clear, it's clear. I write in cafes.  I read in parks.  I do yoga on my fire escape.  I walk around naked in my apartment with the curtains open to be that guy.  

When it rains, I can see the reflections of the awesome skyscrapers in puddles, where the giant monolithic structures are extended from the sky and sent jutting into the depths of the earth.  I say awesome in the old, biblical, almost angelic sense.  Not that I believe skyscrapers to be images of the Divine, but they impress upon me such a sense of awe and mystery, humility.  I am afraid.  I am inspired.   

In tandem with how I've been living my life for the past two years, every day I just start walking.  Occasionally I have a destination, usually not, but I always arrive somewhere. 

A double decker tour bus drives by, an elderly korean man points to something near me, everybody looks.  I am exhilarated, for the people (who on this particular day are all looking absurd wearing their "SEE NYC" mandated yellow trash bags to keep dry) only see me as one of so many.  A New Yorker.  They don't know that I'm lost because I walk with determination and a firm step.  I'm fooling them.  As I do everyday, I am playing a part.  I haven't lived here a month, but I sell it like I was born and raised. I am reveling in a performance of which I am the only true audience member.  Like the groove your ass finds on the couch, so have my feet have found on the city sidewalks. 

I feel just as much home here as I did in Erie, in Meadville, and honestly, in India.  Is home where your heart is?  Could it be your feet?  Cause lately, I don't know where my heart isn't.  

A dusty foot philosopher.  (let's pretend this is more applicable this is)

They call me dusty coz my feet have been through a lot

The wisdom of my survival that's just due to a lot

So I'm not gonna sit here and whine like crushed grapes

My mind leaves you speechless like duct tape

Vampires are no longer cool

There are quite a lot of things that come to mind when walking through New York City.  Metropolitan chaos, arson, butter churning, thick air, and of course, squirrel muzzling.  But if there is one thing that today's march through this city that never sleeps has impressed upon me, it is vampirism.

To my left, the epic and often gothic skyline of New York City, hiding under a grand quilt of cloud, soft and billowing, yet heavy and dark.  To my right, translucent clouds of pink and pinker, corseting the sun, and smurf-blue skies peaking out from behind.  My head suffers a constant beat that rivals eminem's newest baseline, while light assaults my senses, driving dull plungers into my sockets and probing my... eye-to-brain-connecty-tendons.  I want a cape to wrap myself up in, to kill all the light and save my skin from smoldering underneath the harsh and Godly waves.

Luckily, not a block a way from my apartment is a nice little shop called Vampire Freaks, where any blood-sucker can find all the essentials.

Mucus is dripping down my nose, rain pours through city gutters, people scowl at their sloshy shoes.

Today is just a different view of the city.  Not one from an ambitious country mouse, but from a lecherous ghoul.

True Blood will premiere in a few nights.  I'll be in my coffin until then.

taking apart technology.

 I saw my first iPad through the lens of an old spyglass that dates back to 1896.  I don't actually know the year, I make things up sometimes... my dad lent it to me for a movie prop, not knowing he was going to lose it forever, but how could I ever give up an authentic pirate spyglass from 1896?

I knew exactly where he kept the old thing, but he doesn't know that.  The old trunk.  The one that in our old house he kept tucked away in the back corner of the crawl-in closet directly left from where he hid the Christmas presents every year.  I remember sneaking in on all fours, contorting my whole skeleton like a mouse to fit through the maze of closet junk to finally arrive at that elegant and out-of-bounds cedar chest.  The chest was full of.... guns... and guns were off limits.  Ask my Luke Skywalker toy whose blaster was ripped from his plastic grip by mother the day he was drafted into my armada of playthings.  In our new apartment, where his entire room is about the size of that closet, he keeps it underneath his bed.

Just as I did when I younger, I would sneak into his room, go through the cedar chest, disassemble the civil war era revolvers, the b.b. guns he used in the depression to kill his dinner (often of squirrels), or to just marvel at the gadgetry of it all.  And the sounds, the glorious metallic sounds of springs loading and gears falling into place...

When I asked for the telescope he said yes, but stalled as he remembered where he kept it.  I didn't chime in with the answer, and I let him figure it out.  Eventually, he pulled out an old dusty trunk from underneath his bed, blew off some dust, wiped away some cobwebs, and creaked it open.  Silently reveling in the joy of antiquities, he pulled out the dented and rusted bronze telescope from the bed of retired rifles, knives, and other wonky weaponry.  It was bent and warped and you couldn't even collapse or expand the shaft, and let's be honest, isn't that half the reason we all play with telescopes anyway?  The shook-scchhuck sound, the phallic implications...

The iPad: sleek, sexy, and simple(they say), cheap(they say), great to use as a cheese platter(they probably don't say).  I really wanted to run out of the house,  across the road, and into the yard where this family is hovering over their new toy, their new technological centerpiece, and steal it away!  I watch them marvel at how magic it is.  One embarrassing evening, I was patrolling the web with squinty eyes and got very excited about those damn mac ads promoting the thing; the fit brit guy actually compares it to wizardry.  It becomes magic, apparently, in my inability to understand how it works and my marvel at the fact that it does.  Suddenly using an iPad gets me THAT much closer to Hogwarts.

A friend recently illuminated Harry Potter to me in a way that I always knew, but like so much that I know was not able to eloquate.  "We all love Harry because we are that different and we are that alone."  And much like Harry, at home over the summer, I've been feeling pretty estranged.  In my sister's [finished] attic, no job or money, a time where when I'm not reading or drawing or kayaking, I am spying on the more-than-fortunate neighbors with big boats and kids with toy hummers they drive around the boulevard.  No one really to spend the time with, except my lovely and spoiled niece, my less abrasive Dudley.  Things blend together at the seams, and suddenly it is a week later.  I need to get out of this town, this mugglian suburbia.  And I need to bring my telescope and pretend it is my wand.  Don't need no fuckin' iPad.

On the train to New York (after buying some Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans off the food trolley) I tinkered with the broken down trinket.  There is a lot of time in summer, a lot of pet projects.  Such as fixing a telescope, starting a blog, cooking my own batches of jam, taxidermy...  Anyway, the thing collapses and retracts again, whoopee!  Shook-schuuk.  Also, wonderful living images somewhere between 75 and 100 yards jiggle in immaculate focus.  Do that, iPad.  although in some distant future, when iPads are attached to our heartstrings at birth like teletubbies in the United States of Apple, I am sure that the little camera will not only have an incredible zoom, but also shoot home movies in 3D.  I like having the spy glass with me.  It keeps me connected with some form of rustic and adventurous history that I have no real connection to, but try to emulate in every day life.  So pissed, by the way, that modern trains don't have a caboose with a back patio thing like in all the movies.  Western movies.  With train robbers and stuff.  Maybe they got rid of the caboose patios because that is where all the robbers were getting in.  Maybe I shouldn't continue to write my stream of consciousness.

I feel somewhat like a pilgrim.  I feel somewhat maudlin.

New York City and no where to go.  Two legs and not a single place for them to take me.  It'd be nice if the subletter would let me stay a night early in my summer apartment.  Or if my friends would answer their phones so i could stay in their summer apartments.  But that ceased to matter after my phone died.  Even further from communication, further from what I know.  More like a pilgrim.

I know, I'll go to Ellis Island.

Or at least look at it through the lens of an ancient old pirate telescope.  The ferry costs money.  There is a person on the ferry with an iPad.  Fucker.  Suddenly, I feel very much in the same place that I was a few weeks ago, with less money, fewer friends, and nothing knowable.  But as I learned from the fit bit guy, things unknowable are that much more magical.

Cause even though I can't get that green statue in full focus, I am feeling a lot more magic.