Saturday, December 31, 2011

New, and New, and just as natural.


Happy new year, everybody. Our vanity says this is the big one. If we could only be so lucky. Instead let's get together and solder on through another year of Doing the Right Thing©, with some time now and again to reflect on the implausibility of the universe in general. In New York, someone's dancing across the city, and someone else is walking every street of it. Be sure to participate or give these people their required approbations or encouragements. The latter journeyer, I hear, likes cookies.

The last, say, 6 months for me have gone by in a bit of a haze, involving dozens of places with at least a dozen states of activation, learning, fuzziness, out-of-sorts, inspiration, and connection for each. I have emerged from this dream-like state and find myself in a space of my own for the first time since about fall of 2010. I've been realizing that Brooklyn is my new home and it's a comfortable feeling, I like what I've made for myself here and wherever it's heading.

I've been writing up a storm, stacking up shale-like fragments with the hope that a structure emerges, eventually, Meeting the city, inventing myself in relationship to it, and tinkering with my new apartment, in which my roommates and I have already introduced a hundred imperceptible changes to make the place our own. I like my room tremendously and will probably never leave it. I built my desk out of free wood that I carted from a loft on Bedford, lashed to my bicycle. My radio is yellowed and silly, a frumpy little cube that blares WNYC constantly, giving me a window to the world and only occasionally asking for member contributions. My bed is a bunch of bookshelves turned on their side, I took my mattress on the cross-town B38 Bus and engaged in a battle of wits with the bus driver to secure passage.
"What'll you do if it falls on someone? They'll sue the MTA!"
"Dude, have you been in a pillow fight? It's like a giant pillow. They'll love it."
My dresser is a pathetic little thing, which wobbles and sways, I truncated its legs off to cover for a missing drawer and to allow my shirts to hang. Little changes. I stand before the bicycle map of the city, two sides stitched together, and wonder where I'll end up next. My books, bicycles, milk-crates, clothes, and pantry all bear the mark of communication-as-currency, things acquired through conversation, craigslist, and currents more inscrutable. There is always someone to talk to, and everyone's a stranger.

I came here in a fury of action, my schedule booked. I was riding down to Occupy Wall Street every day, working on a project for Digital Democracy, consuming literature about the movement, writing a little and being -just- too slow to contribute to the literature. I was sending out ten bids for freelance jobs a day, and hearing back from very few, jobs with pay tallying a pathetic count which I'm willfully vague about. New York is the city of the intern, the volunteer, the start-up, the deferred until distributed 3-ring circus. Now, with a lease, 2 bikes, and a (purported) heating system, I find myself taking a breath, and realizing that the hermetic, bopping, productive lifestyle that I pursued in Salt Lake it possible here, with the addition of an insane, buzzing, ever-present little creature that reminds you constantly of the flowing honey of events, ideas, projects, productions waiting for you to get involved with them.

The buzzing thing (I think it has fur) won't leave me be, but I appreciate its motivation. Input=Output, castle building. All the better to navigate this unsleeping world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

best of journeys into the new year, Davey.

z.

Bye