Marmalade Daydreams

The other night my friend Bonnie challenged me to justify my choice of New York as my home. More than most other native denizens, I have tasted the fruits of other cities, other settings, and have chosen to return here. True, the comfort of having family and friends close by has proven significant in my weighing of options, but, I said, there is something else: an ineffable character in New York's streets, is brownstones, its waterfronts, an energy present nowhere else. Her reply completely ignored my off-guard grasping at straws -- how could the anyone who can afford to live here have time to benefit from the inspiration, this "energy", and produce art? My stoop is occupied by older Carribbean alcoholics who can no longer afford the rents of this gentrifying neighborhood and the materials of their art are cheap enough, at $5 a six-pack -- what chance do the welders, the photographers, the glass sculptors have? I hear the desperate mice behind my bookshelf, chewing on tablets of Pepto-Bismol. Sad.

And as, while we sleep, the stars, exploding Roman candles that illuminate distant worlds, so eager to live that their light, created only via their own destruction, struggles to emerge and flicker through the midnight blue that fills the space between the acid orange halos of the streetlamp's excited gases, we urban-dwellers, children of the Apple, revel in the drops of sweet nectar that descend to our lips through the monotony and the filth; I struggle through conversations with painfully stylish women with whom I share nothing but a seat on the subway; I endure seasons of blind bureaucracy for the sweet months of summer freedom; I withstand weeks of abuse from adolecents for the brilliance of God's gift to the worker ants -- the weekend.

For a well-spent weekend in New York really is justification enough, a sweet carrot to make one forget the sticks wielded by our resident tyrants, from the developers to the homeless. To emerge from the subway at Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island on a beautiful Indian summer Saturday, en route to a seaside game of miniature golf, and to be confronted with this incredibly beautiful and sad mural from another planet, awestruck for the better part of half an hour, speechlessly pouring over the dumpster loads of imagination that poured through the nozzles of spray paint cans, pointing at the dreamscape detail of a fantasy nightmare portrayed in exacting detail, we were shaken from our contemplative solace by the bellowing of an older woman, head wrapped like a Russian peasant, wheeling a shopping cart full of indiscernable rubbish, yelling "BLAA!" -- well, that folks, that right there is worth a kingly ransom in rent. So, I guess live here for the crazies.