NYC part I

And so I sit, looking out at Manhattan through a parrot cage (a real one), from the 42nd floor north and west from 42nd street. Out in the distance are small bumps in New Jersey that are probably geographic features made of earth, but I don’t believe it. More real is eighth avenue stretching north, which from up here reveals it’s intelligence, gulping calculated bites of taxi’s, trucks and buses, sending goods and people where goods and people are needed. The brain needs that suit who is in that taxicab. Those shoes must make it to that store to get on the feet of that fashionista. The white blood cells in that ambulance nudging cross town must make it to save that gasping old woman who feeds the pigeons in the park.
And there’s me, the Alaskan Clown sitting in a lent apartment, parrots preening, a small dog on my right, a grey kitty on my left.
My first night I stood on the balcony and got the worst vertigo ever.

“The world’s got me dizzy again, you think after 22 years, I’d be used to the spin, but it only feels worse when I stay in one place, so I’m always pacing around or walkin’ away” Land Locked Blues, Bright Eyes.

And so you don’t. You don’t stay in one place. That was me when I arrived. Afraid of the beast. I’m making friends with it, now. I’ve ridden the edge. Like when my video camera was needed to tape that woman’s solo show and I was half an hour late and was going to cause that woman’s director to be late. Pushing east and then north from Brooklyn through the plod of rush hour, my bike became a hymn that I sung out through open eyes, narrowed psyche. That bus doesn’t want it enough, it slowed for that mother, and so I’m off, soaring, weaving through the drifting Midwesterners of Times Square, the foreign bodies that the city engulfs and dazzles with lights and height, and then picks up with Pedicabs. Because I’m so pushy with the city, the little dog gets to pee, everyone makes it to the solo show with plenty of time to schmooze, and the city lets out a sigh.

Funny that everyone personifies this city so much. It seems the only way to relate with something so inhuman, so unnatural, yet made by human madness and muscle.