A not quite dry run

An additional bullet point to an already long list of Not Great Decisions was added last night.  When the good people at Delta Airlines informed me I would not be flying from the Peach State to the Big Apple, I went to the airport earlier.  It did not matter that I'd had enough drinks over the previous 36 hours to satisfy Blackbeard's officers; that I would be flying slightly in advance of a deadly hurricane; that work was cancelled for the week and I did have options for alternative places to stay; I stood by for the earlier flight and came regardless.  So here I am savoring the potential final hours of electricity and clean water by election.  I very deliberately flew into my own cabin fever.

Does this say something about me?  Does this portend anything about my Impending Move?  Why would someone insistent on leaving go through so much conscientious effort to return to Rome just in time for its burning?

All potentially good questions.  Perhaps the egg is fertilized but not quite ready to hatch.  We're early in the third trimester and the womb is still warm, despite whatever acid-reflux tropical storms might throw our way.  It may be best to just stay the course until biology and suggested timelines reach agreement.

The question, the deliberation, the 9th hour incident of second guessing, none would be so relevant were I not just returning from the belly of the beast.  Not New Orleans, exactly, but Alabama.  If my weekend away in Dixie did not make me reconsider relocation, it did give me pause.  A little How you doin', as it were.  See, to leave the leafy confines of Brooklyn and go to, say, Upstate New York or Providence or even suburban Jersey, is a bit of a displacement.  The coffee may not be Stumptown or precision roasted (whatever that is, if that's a thing), but there're reasonably congruent establishments.  The people may drive SUVs, but they may not behave altogether differently inside a voting booth.  They are different.  They are, to me, less desirable.  They are not home, but I could live there under circumstances resembling only slight duress.

But New Orleans?  My God do I want to hear that town blow jazz and serve me sazeracs until the sky falls.  Beyond the city walls?  Well, beyond New Orleans is Louisiana.  Beyond that is Mississippi and Arkansas.  Road trips to Austin are tempting, though that's still a good five hours and there's a whole lot of Praise Jesus in between.  I suppose that I'm just coming out of Wedding Season and while still keen on the bride, I'm having some consternation about the bridesmaids.

Or maybe it is the storm.  Outside, the wind is howling and the burnt colors on once-verdant leaves will line the gutters.  Some neighbors are already flooded and the worst lies yet ahead.  I suppose it's apt preparation to stack the sand bags and fortify the castle.  Like my future residency in New Orleans, I'll ready myself to defend the precious interior from the Dangerous Elements lurking outside.  Certain things we can't control, others we can't avoid, and still a decent number we can place our warm selves next to and appreciate.  We can plan all we want to, but the best we can do is just tap our feet to keep up with the beat.  Time to put myself in a safe place, howl out to the Great Spirit, and play a little bit of jazz.

Graduation

School always made it so neat and clean.  Transitions were negotiated long before and promulgated well in advance via the calendar courtesy of your friendly PTA.  The school year ended on a fixed date and if you were in the eldest class, you knew it would be your last day.  Tell your secret crush you love her.  Pass along the yearbooks for final signatures.  Shed a tear as the bus pulls away because the public school is a bit too public for the likes of Mom and Dad.  Next year, you're in with the nuns.

Life does not accommodate so neatly once we're outside the purview of credit hours.  It seems as though most transitions are imposed rather than anticipated.  You work at a place until your salary gets too swollen for the Bottom Line and your new Friday task becomes cleaning out your desk.  Relationships don't end because Becky's dad got a new job in Minnesota; they end because Becky made a new friend at work and you're scheduling the couch you'll sleep on next week.  The landlord raises the rent.  The dog gets hit by a car.  Mom breaks her hip.  We live day-by-day until some new shifting of the currents throws us off course and has us regazing at the stars. 

I should consider myself lucky, I suppose.  For the whole White Anglo-Saxon, sure, but more topically that I get to point my finger to the outfield and call my shot.  January 3, I said, and January 3 it shall be. The foresight accommodates Last Hurrahs and all the minutiae necessary for my future Gas Food Lodging.  It also suits the arrangement of goodbyes.

We're still A Couple months out, but no longer A Few.  It's too far out to start calling in the salutations; it feels odd to even imagine doing so when it is that time.  But it's already been on the minds of others and therefore imposed on me. 

Let's get together before you leave.
You're going to have a goodbye party, right?
Wait, when do you leave again?

The anticipated post-mortems make me the ghost of my future departed self.  I want to scream that I'm here now, but we all know that the knot is about as tight as it ever could be and there's only unmooring ahead.  Departure's got us all in a holding pattern and all we can do is enjoy the fleeting moments and wait for the yearbooks to come out.  And after that, we'll reassure one another to have a great summer, and to don't ever change.

Twenty-seven

One week ago today, I watched my sister pledge the rest of her living days to one man.  It was in a mountainous part of America, a bit chilly, with many attendees and, in my opinion, a little light on the hors d'oeuvres.  I wore a suit.  If you've witnessed an immediate family member swear their soul to the guy (or gal) taking up the fifth placemat at the dinner table, you get it.  Nostalgia, pride, joy, all of that.  Well-wishing.  I even shed a few tears. 

And of course there was family, as were family friends.  It was the horse stable of all the stable relationships that existed and formed around me in my formative years.  A few new ones too.  And it went without saying that I would not have a date.  And it went without saying that my unique forms of employment were, um, interesting.  And it went without saying that uprooting to move to New Orleans on a whim would not elicit approval from your dear grandparents may they rest in peace. 

I'm the prodigal son, not quite the black sheep, but definitely the apple that fell from the tree, found the steep embankment and just kept rolling on and on and on.  I know it, I own it, my family makes a genuine, heartfelt effort to tolerate it.  None of this will likely change. 

Or, will it? 

I watched my sister, seven years my junior, do the second-most adult thing a person can do and reflected on the fact that more than half of my net worth has a power button and an Apple logo.  She's well on track to make me an Uncle during the next presidential term and I cannot even commit to buying health insurance.  Which is all to say that we have differences in personality, and these differences have manifested themselves through lifestyle choices.

I could embark on the solid riff residing in my heart about the dangers of consumption and the emptiness it leaves behind; I have it in there.  It's not that I want to start looking for meaning in conventionality and I know there's not a living room set that will help me achieve Nirvana.  But there's something to be said for Stability, planting one's roots besides the other willows and saying I Shall Not Be Moved.  Committing to a course and seeing what other chips fall as they may around me. 

Bear with me, a Tangent (I'll bring it back around):

I have this theory that every adult without children in New York City is twenty-seven years old.  Those that are younger in age are forced to adapt to a more mature lifestyle because this city's mechanism for Natural Selection will cast out the Weak Beaks.  Those that are older parade around in the delusional fantasy that they are younger better smarter and more gorgeous to boot, fueled by red wine, fashion, quaint eateries, and the amorphous notion that they are the first to be informed.  It all adds up to a feeling of superiority.  Show me a frat house in revelry or a sotted hobo in the street, and I'll point to the crowd slothfully exiting the black tie after party of a Lincoln Center performance.  Because they're all drunk, they're all escaping, and they're all the same.  Put me in that lot as well.

So what I think I'm trying to say is that I just spent enough time outside the Twenty-Seven Bubble to feel like the shoe no longer fits.  I am thirty-two, and while I aver that I will never be that old, however old that happens to be and act whatever the norms attendant, I realized that I'm also not so as much into post-collegiate Arrested Development.  Maybe it's time to make it unmistakeably clear to everyone that I've gone from Boy to Man.  Which is all to say I'm going to get a dog.

Love and Honor

I will try not to watch tomorrow night as Drunk Uncle Joe stands across from the young whippersnapper in America's least relevant dick-measuring contest.  One of them will be one clogged artery of Destiny or a .22 trip to the temple away from sitting in the Big Chair, but there's no need to get carried away.   Even those of us non-swing staters without televisions or cars have heard all we need to know.  And that includes from the number twos.  I'd rather see them smile and bake chocolate chip cookies together, using the oven time to tug each other off under the counter top while a list of their policy influences and major donors disappear atop the screen like its the opening credits to Star Wars.  Two men blowing hot air and Key Words into the klieg lights and Camera One until our minds die is not my idea of a Fitness Test for the highest office.  I could learn all I need from a dossier and color photo of the candidate at twenty-five.  That, and their porn preferences, and consider me to be an informed voter.

I already have one of those mental dossiers preconfigured.  It is not from MSNBC or Fox, from the Times or the Post.  Not the print nor the magical color box nor even the great big interwebs had to tug my ear and say, "Let me tell you a story."  Because I attended Miami University, and I know Paul Ryan.  Maybe not him, but I knew dozens like him from my years between the red bricks and under the stately trees.  He was skinnier, hair about the same, maybe wore some Russel Athletic sweatshirts to morning class.  He was a Delt, so he definitely got pretty drunk and probably played along for those parties where they put a bunch of sand in the basement.  He was the guy who bought a table-full on Quarter Beer Night at Attractions and refused to give one to somebody outside his crew.  He cut in line late night at Bagel & Deli and then smirked at you when you bitched.  He was the guy with the car who said he was too busy to drive you to the airport, then spent the next few hours blasting his pecs at the Rec.  At least once per semester, he offered some form of support, be it moral, financial, or in understanding, to a date rapist in the best interests of Brotherhood. 

He will do quite well tomorrow night, I imagine.  After all, he was the kid in Econ 101 who scoffed at the professor.  He has always liked to challenge authority in the name of an authority more strict and irrational than anything that ever wore buttons.  He will channel Hitler's economic policies with a blue-eyed twinkle that will have every grandma from Oshkosh to Walla Walla wishing to pinch his cheeks.  It won't really sway the election, but people will see the Antichrist and think him a Nice Young Man.  Those of us who care about politics will decipher its minutiae for weeks, while the fate of the free world will actually be decided by the reaction of one man in Toledo to the gas prices on November 6. 

So I know that if it matters, it won't be worth watching.  If this two-man regurgitation is talked about in one weeks' time it's owing to some shitbrick Uncle Joe laid while ad-libbing.  Millions and millions of people will be willing to dismantle every civil, social, and economic privilege they have because the Good Guy has a big nose or abandoned The Script for one fatal sound byte.  The stakes are high, the value is low, and it's right before the Colorado-Arizona State kickoff.  They've been real shit of late, but they're coming off a bye week and the freshmen are starting to come around.  Plus, they're getting their safety back, and we all know Thursday night leans to the home team.  And they are playing at altitude, so, with any luck.....

And I'm already off track.  Which, is a case in point.  My heart can only take so much; time to step away from the politics, if only for a moment.

Sound barrier

If something happens somewhere, anywhere, outside the Five Boroughs of New York City, does it make a sound?

Kinda sorta, but not really.  Sound bytes and speech clips can sneak inside the walls of the steel canyon, so too a few choice quotations from some man-on-the-street.  But for all the politicians' pronouncements about Potomac Fever, there is no place so enamored with its own voice as the Big Apple.  So much so that there is no irony in the Brooklyn Industries t-shirt featuring the two vowels replaced with headphones.  We seem to only engage with others when we turn off the iPod to tell those surrounding us that we liked that last beat. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than outside the echo chamber, which I have been for nearly two entire weeks.  I have found that the oxygen is plentiful and the water clean.  The night sky has stars and the air below is devoid of the ruthless banging noise comprising so much of daily life in Gotham.  Not needing to be heard over taxi horns and scraping rails and police sirens, fighting neighbors and car stereos and ice cream truck jingles, cell phone conversations and Chinatown chatter and Puerto Rican barbecues, the rest of the nation can speak a little softer.  It pains me to tell you they speak slower and are probably heard better as well.  And they really don't care as much about Brooklyn as we do.

None of the above is news.  Or new, even to me.  A cursory familiarity with population density is enough to understand the acoustics.

What is new is being outside the castle walls and realizing that this will soon be more than conditional.  Just like the past ten days, there will be no texts or infrequent calls inquiring into Evening Plans.  I'll delete but not unsubscribe from the nonsenseNYC listserv.  The barbs and inside jokes traded on Facebook's walls will be old if not tired and both parties of the exchange left wanting for opportunities to make fresh material.  I'll be reduced to recognizing its landmarks on serial programming.

There will not be may sympathizers in the world Out There, as I have discovered.  For many, NYC is a place they do not want to be for the perceived frostiness of its people and the unsolicited noise of the aforementioned sources.  I'll remember that the taxi horns and scraping rails brought me to and from epic shows and raucous nights.  Fighting neighbors made for great stories and some of those cell phone conversations were mine.  Chinatown meant dumplings and I'll be damned if an accidental run-in with a Puerto Rican barbecue didn't both fix my bicycle and initiate fruitful access to marijuana.  I'll be leaving in search of quiet, so long as it's not too much.

Love & the Interregnum

Living one's life so as to avoid meaningful companionship is the vermouth of the self-loathing cocktail.  The gin or vodka portion should remain proportional.  One goes about their day the same, but certain conversations are curtailed and ideas tempered lest they interfere with tortured notions of manifest destiny.  Considering that a great number employ this as their modus operandi for the entirety of their lives, seven months shouldn't be considered too bad. 

This latest loveless interregnum is a product of the decision to move to New Orleans and the requisite time frame to wait out potential hurricanes and save some seed money.  It has been a semi-fulfilling  rebuttal to any aphorism in the vein of carpe diem or 'no day like today.'  There is more of the present I could be seizing, but it's some comfort to be in my third decade and following a dream while so many see their own expire years earlier of SIDS.  That's the sexy part.  The nuts and bolts of this life pause are not worth growing rubbery over.  There's the extra job, for one, cutting into Free Time.  Living transiently is another.  Anyone over the age of thirty with stacked boxes in their bedroom who tells you Life is Great is nothing if not entirely full of shit.

Playing a bit role in the whole production is the avoidance of intimacy.  It's not as hard for me as it would be for most.  Being overly sensitive, fiercely independent, brashly entitled, and frustratingly insecure does not hurt.  Neither does alcohol and contentment with sitting in front of a football game.  But even I know this is no way to live.  Because the books and songs all seem to point to something, that something that comes with giving oneself up for another.  And while I haven't felt It, necessarily, over the past few months, there have been hints and suggestions.  Every now and then I've reached the point in conversation where She would look at me with this-is-the-part-where-you-ask-for-my-number eyes.  Someone a little more involved in the day-to-day will occasionally do Something that makes me think a how-bout-that.  I always play aloof. 

It's not because there's no interest, because there is.  I want one of these Hers to burnish a signed contract good for Brainless Fucking that will expire at the end of this calendar year.  We'd get the occasional bite to eat and send a few texts in between for good measure.  But do I want to take some girl out on a Date?  Do I want to get to know someone and let them know me?  Most certainly not.  I don't want to spend the money/go through the history/relive the insecurity/avoid the Questions, and God forbid I actually grow to Like this person.  That would be a disaster.  Because I have plans.  And they don't involve Here, and that most certainly implies that they don't involve Her. 

Before every physical departure is a mental and emotional one and it's already hard enough to pack the luggage I already have.  Even if her smile is nice and those eyes are kind, they're sure just to take up room and I cannot sacrifice the space what with all the baggage fees nowadays.  The surest way to give something up is to never take it up in the first place.

So it's give nothing.  Take what's mine.  Earn as much as I can, spend as little as possible, then head for the exits and leave everyone else behind.  You can't say New York didn't teach me anything.  And you can't say I'm not a Carpetbagger.