the humming of insect wings.

how could there possibly be so many people in one place? i recall well questioning the overabundance of humans in this city years ago, but find myself stunned a bit more this time. perhaps it has something to do with the lingering taste of the desert. that sour vomit sitting upon the tongue. it is in some way, more overwhelming to write about than to experience, for there are no words for this place. this place of wild boars running feverishly through an everchanging forest. a forest where everything seems to live and die with a million different trees. some ancient {petrified wood} and some nascent {saplings}. too many taxis and too many smells and too many unhappy people. televisions showing the spectacle of the olympics, and people carrying bags full of expensive things. somehow as stunningly beautiful and hauntingly grotesque as the desert. if two places can be complete opposites, {the cancelling out of nature} new york and the desert are them. if they were closer together, would they cancel one another out? would they both cease to exist, and simply spiral into some vacuum of eternity? oh, none of it makes sense. and the joy i feel, the extremity of my exhuberance is a moon in the sky. a giant and endless orb, spinning into a reckless blur of the most beautiful light. two young college aged girls, do math to my right. god help me. a woman sits across from me, combing her infant's hair. he wears blue, and stares about restlessly. a young bird peering out from the rim of a nest. his twin brother sleeps in a stroller, the diamond on the mother's hand the size of a grape. oh the wealth here is frightening. the shopping. the stores still oepn at 1am. how do people refrain from questioning this?

so mike and i narrowly escape the continuing thunderstorm, and ride into penn station at lunctime our bikes shaking about violently on the train. ahhhhhhh lunch in new york. the last time i was here, there was seemingly no place to have a burrito, which has since changed. mike checks into a hotel, and we walk out across central park, as the light begins to drop. and the day runs on forever. mike leaves by bus to go retrieve jennie at the airport, and i sit in the park on a bench watching the runners and cyclists pass by. i talk to keri, and lament that she cannot be here with me, the common lamentation of the trip. it grows dark, and i find myself riding up central park west, through the neighborhoods i used to know so well. the place where i washed my clothes, and the place where i caught the bus to ride across the park on rainy or snowy days. i turn left, and break into the ghetto riding slowly to try and absorb whatever feelings will arise with passing by my old home. generally speaking, i find that our perceptions of how nostalic and emotional the old places will be, always far surpasses what emotion really exists there. flat. a bag of wet sand, dropped to the floor. the street {103rd between central park west and manhattan} is littered with "tough" young men, listening to hip hop and drinking "forties" with pit bulls at their side. it is astonishing to me, how little this place is changed. how i feel a strange sense of comfortability as though i have some ownership as i once lived here. like i am invisible to them, though i am not. "four point six," the girl to my left says. i am so thankful, that i am not doing math right now. so i ride through the projects, and rise up onto the street where we saw the children hit and killed by that car so many years ago. i pause to let the images and memories run their course. the sounds of fragility, at the hungry mouth of steel. the brittle makeup of bones, and the sound they make when they die. i break out onto broadway and remember standing in that unbearable line at the post office around the holidays. i see koronet on the right at 110, and stop for pizza, before heading up to reid's place. they have raised their prices, and there is too little sauce on the dough, but it serves well as one of my coveted new york experiences. i drop down the hill to the water, and find some bike path that skirts the edge of the land. the area is littered with people driking and listening to music in lawn chairs. the population grows more and more dense and i ride further into harlem, and i find myself terribly lost down by the water, eventually reaching the washington bridge up around 190 {?}. and then i am at reid's. i am telling stories of the trip, and smiling incessantly. everyone leaves, and reid and i are immediately back on that plaza in barcelona, laying into the sinew of our lives. the muscle beneath the skin. we are speaking of music and of love. we are watching the sky cloud over as the light rain begins to fall on the city, the buildings a mess of flickering lights. i hold the phone up high as reid begins to sing, but the sound is a mess says keri. digitized. and then mike and jennie arrive. we sit for hours playing guitar and singing, handing the guitar back and forth. back and forth. sometimes, i think i could listen to reid sing for centuries, that sweet voice of his cutting the air.

the next day finds me hiding from new york, though unintentionally so. i wander the city a bit with reid and help him work on cabinets. drink far too much coffee. mike and jennie are out there, amidst the people and the endlessness of it all. water upon water. i meet reid's oldest sister for dinner and we sit by the windows above times square watching the spectacle of it all. the infinite strangeness of humans run amok. it is then, on the way home {reid's} that i call keri and stumble around the intersection for fifteen minutes or so, trying to figure out where to stand so that she can see me on the webcam. we laugh and laugh and laugh at the odd beauty in this. riding the subway home, i recall a letter written by a friend years ago who pondered as he stargazed in greece, if the stars were the same ones that saw my face beneath them on the other side of the world. though we both knew well that they are indeed the same stars, the potential connectedness of it all is staggering. cameras in new york, where the woman i love can watch me stand there. beautiful and overwhelmingly frightening in its implications in the most orwellian of ways.

and the rest of my days here, have been reserved for and consumed entirely by me. lunch at some thai restaurant in soho. dinner at the french place in greenwich. late night tea. pizza in washington square park, as the bucket players play their buckets and twirl their sticks. this people, is one of the more honest forms of music out there these days. not because it is primitive in its design {ie: the playing of buckets rather than drums} nor is it because of it's technical ability, but simply because of its passion. the buzz in the air is like the humming of insect wings by one's ear; completely inescapable. alas, new york. the place that i so love and so deeply despise all in the same instance. it is both the desert and the ocean, the earth and the sky. if new york was a bird, it would be a turkey vulture, with the mind of a dove and the soul of a cardinal. if it were a drink, it would be absynthe with just the slightest hint of irony. a color, it would be black. and white. gray perhaps. if it was a desert, it would be the sahara, flung out into the middle of the mediterranean sea. oh new york, you beast, you bloody beast. you seduce me and taunt me and love me and kill me. if it was a snake, it would be a black twenty foot python, with the weight of a butterfly. if it was a city, it would be new york. new york, new york, new york. you have stunned me into silence once again. you have woken me, and put me to sleep. you are an angel and a king. a devil. god itself. everything and nothing. sleep well, my dear prince, sleep well. i have so much more of you, but you wear me out. you tie my hands and my tongue. you close my weary eyes.