I took the B train this morning. It travels over a bridge and you can see out over the east river, either up towards Queens and Harlem, or down, where I was looking, towards the upper bay, Governors Island and the Brooklyn Bridge. Today and especially this morning were rainy. Today is the second to last day of March and we broke the record for rainiest March, it was a hundreds of years old record. And the storm and the grayness and my tiredness made me realize something, a passing thought that has really stayed with me through a whole day and most of an evening. That is; New York is a place. The popular association, the one that can attach to the brain without an image or sound or smell and is connected only through phonetic connections or passing secondary thoughts, is of a bright and glittering center of human endeavor. This thought is inevitable and in an every day sense useful, but it is not honest or helpful. New York is a place with weather! Lots of weather; weather for the summer and fall and all the seasons and even within those seasons there is surprising and unseasonable weather. Completely un-unique New York. Rainy weather no less, I'm more used to rainy weather than a rain forest. This revelation made me feel free and light, untethered to the idea of the place and it made me feel grateful for being there, even though i didn't want to go to shitty old work.
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