Maybe everyone thinks New York belongs to someone else but feels it belongs to them.

Everyone feeling the same things

Everyone trying to figure out the same things

Everyone endlessly processing the ways other people treat them

Or else they don’t care

(Do they exist? They must exist?)

We are all interchangeable and also irreplaceable

No one meets anyone’s standards (no really, he’s not worthy)

Everyone gives the benefit of the doubt

Everyone knows it all goes back to childhood

Everyone endlessly feeling, doing, saying the same things

On a summer day off in NY, you go to the beach, sit on a blanket, and talk it out

Some people only talk about themselves and recruit everyone else into the minute examination of their lives

I don’t want to talk to anyone about anything

Every problem

Every hangup

Every trite feeling or observation

Poor me

Each problem is something someone else has gotten over, not me. 

The shark doesn’t care as it sinks its teeth into your leg. It doesn’t even want to eat you.

*

People contain unknown possibilities that only blossom given the right situation. The possibility was latent, but then it comes out with the right people. Someone could have their heart broken by one person and then turn into a different person, loving another.

Tuning the body, attuning oneself to what it tells you even if it is indecipherable. This means blocking out all of the ambient noise. One’s life becomes one’s body, often propelled by illness, though not always physiological—the beauty myths warp us. Life is a series of don’ts, negative commands aimed at indulgence.

Does prolonging life mean having no fun? One only really concerns oneself with life’s limit when forcibly confronted with its imminence. Victor Hugo said that we are all serving a death sentence with indefinite reprieve. But some tune to the body in anticipation of death well before in the mode of wealth accumulation, lifeblood accumulation; they dedicate portions of their lives to health, the CEO’s exercise regimen, health influencers; the rest of us, relatively disabled, are faced either with “lives of quiet desperation” or the wanton concession to luxury that comes to bite us in the end.

*

Considering all the layers of different substances that film our streets, all surfaces, even the wellscrubbed home. I look down on the subway to see the remnants of a spill—the liquid unknown unless I could run lab tests on it. One imagines a carelessness in spillage, like the indifference of a dogowner leaving shit on the sidewalk. That story does not intrigue me, though its remains incense me. But the spills—perhaps even the spits—might contain stories.

Is a spill always an infelicitous occurrence? I suppose libations honor the dead. But the typical cases are accidents or mistakes—a knockedover glass, or even a fallen old person. Spitting could be an intentional spill. Ejaculation of course.

A train ride with two women heading home to NJ from a concert at Madison Square Garden, looking for help navigating to the PATH train. One of them was sick drunk. She vomited mostly liquid down one side of the train to the other, not a puddle but a rivulet, a lesson in why you don’t get on the floor on the train.

Certain floors retain the afterimage of spills even when scrubbed. Do you have to scrub harder? Or is it there forever? Will that train always contain the running drips of that woman’s vomit?

*

Every item, scrap of paper, uninvited memory sparks with pain of a life unlived. Either a past that was never fully present or a projection into a future of a persistence denied. Each moment attached wants to expand. I want to fold myself back into them, good or bad, in defense of what comes, remaining ignorant at the moment of how much worse, how much harder it can get.

Today I am in the parallel world of fear, sadness, anger, concern, and desire for freedom and selfhood. As usual everything knocks on the door as anxiety, and my chest wants to break. I gave myself the task today of a faux heroic act, not to forget, to drown, to disappear. It is really a question of not giving into a cheerful nihilism, the urge to say fuck it, and forget. It is a defense against the depth of feeling of everything that has happened. If I sat and felt I would be ripped apart, that feeling in my chest an explosion, a raging scream torn from my lips as my body shreds. A fantasy of dying before anyone else? Am I scared of the power? Of risks, of loss, of disappointment, of other people’s feelings, of doing the wrong thing?

It all has to come off as if beyond my will, twisting into places that betray care with indifference unto self-destruction.

A perverted self-care, to wander the streets just skewed enough from reality to take it in. An absence from feeling or connection but a vibrance of other life seen otherwise. Just over the border, I can breathe and feel it all loosen up. I can’t rest in care because it is so tempestuous. An obsession with other timelines that never existed and won’t ever exist.

Watching the clock change (11:10-->11:11) is how to jump the timeline, to THIS timeline.

Maybe everyone thinks New York belongs to someone else but feels it belongs to them.