nyc tmrw.
I’m going to New York City for the first time tomorrow. This seems to baffle everyone I speak to about it. As if I haven’t seen STAR WARS or something.
First time...since you were a kid? First time...this year?
How has everyone else just had some sort of opportunity to do this? Of course, many of their sojourns were structured. Family visits. Choir trips. Tourist destinations.
Not many people are traveling with a high school photographer bud and literally no itinerary except to experience a lot of whatever the city has to offer/not go entirely broke in the process.
It is interesting to think about how much the mystique of the city is due to never having been there and how much is due to having been there via fiction endless times. Movies and TV have emulated (or mimicked, horribly) this place to the point that it’s essentially diluted into becoming the quintessential concept of a c-i-t-y.
When I was a kid sighing on the prairies and barns that saddened me with their sparsity, I always yearned for noise and music and chaos -- general city-ism’s that I eventually got bits of in places like Kansas City, Chicago, Orlando, Minneapolis. Living in L.A. for 3.5 years has given me even more of a taste. But how much of it is genuine culture and how much is just the presence of a parking meter?
Already I am nervous regarding this trip not being meaningful or impactful or interesting enough. I am afraid of spending too much money. Of feeling like I’ve been looking forward to nothing. Especially since last summer’s reading of Meet Me In The Bathroom, I have strangely felt called to this place. And a drunken phone conversation with Tim before leaving Albuquerque on a near-Thanksgiving trip in late 2017 drenched my stomach and limbs in anxiety.
But as per usual, I am far more afraid of being bored than I am of being lost, anxious, alone. The same kid who liked orange best and invented his own Pokémon instead of learning math and tried stand-up comedy at 19 is the 25-year-old person who’s going to spend all day flying to NYC tomorrow.
Damn, maybe I’d be less stressed if I shelled out a little more fucking money for a better airline. 90 dollars round-trip to bring a backpack with me, Spirit? Go fuck yourself.
In any case, my Built To Spill LP spins in dizzying ways I hope I won’t succumb to tomorrow. And in the worst case, I have VenMo and friends who care about me.
I hope I plan enough but not too much. I hope I get lost and free in the crowds and madness. I hope I can embrace being cold for a bit.
I hope I find love or at least someone gentle and wicked fucks me.
See you in a while, California.
-eric