no, please, tell me all about it:

one of the best things about new york (file under: perks of being nocturnal) is the way weirdos sit around and kvetch.

no, really.

as is my nature, i often find myself staying awake all night in a 24 hour cafe in manhattan (my favorite yet is the esperanto), drinking tea, working on projects of some variety and every single time, come four or five in the morning, I wander outside to get a look at the sky turning to blue, and i find the oddest assortment of people, usually all strangers, sitting around, all in a huff about some topic that somebody must have pulled out of a hat.
(says the big bass player in his thickest new york accent) "my mother always said, 'marraige is the biggest admission of a lack of self confidence a person can make'. discuss."

tonight the huff was about: motorcycles (specifically: motorcycle safey education, near death expiriences, the coolest bikes they have seen on craigslist) traps that bosses set to test their employees, marraiges of convenience (all the reasons why its a bad idea), and draft dodging (did you know: "during 'nam you didnt have to go all the way to canada! just go to Minnesota, like in Fargo, and nobody'd bother you there!") with a slight sidetrack somewhere in there about how marraige in general, was for fools.

invariably, if you are awake at this hour, and are spotted outside of a cafe, someone pulls out a chair and says "sit down, honey!!" and then you get sucked in. these people are not crackheads or bums. they are artists and actors and barflys and hotel clerks and forign nationals and the strangest array of people. they talk to you like you are an old friend. while I have also expirienced this odd sort of random stranger kvetch-sesh during the day, I feel like I am in some sort of secret club when it happens at night, for i am quite certain nocturnal new yorkers are by far some of the friendliest and strangest people alive.

goodbye my coney island baby.

Tonight I went to Coney Island (which is less of an island then I had imagined) and met up with old friends (the kind I hadn't seen in years) I rode the Cyclone, which is a rollercoaster that just had it's 80th birthday, and is, apparently, a UN national heritage site. it is as rickety and horrifying as you might imagine, and more so. I walked under carnival lights. I ate fried clams and drank beer and caught up with friends and looked at the Atlantic ocean (realizing this may have been my first time really seeing it from US shores.) It made me think of the last time I stared into the Atlantic, while flying over it more then a year ago now, coming home from Ghana, and all of the things that any ocean, Pacific or Atlantic came to symbolize for me when I was first home. I would stand on the cliffs of Isla Vista and think: Sacrifice, Dependance, Poverty, Labor, Slavery, Danger. Children still in diapers throwing nets out into the ocean for a days eats, or being offered up to the ocean as human sacrifice. I got annoyed when the people around me looked at the same thing and saw nothing but an elegant backround, or a place to play, or something calming and non-specifically poetic. In my first few months back, hearing the waves crash out my window every night would drive me mad. It exahsted me to think that they never ever stopped. It exahsted me to imagine all of the people lacing every shore on every side of the world toiling to dump things into it, or pull things out of it or move across it, and how it all came down to what side of the ocean you came out of the womb on. But as I looked out at the ocean tonight, it wasn't until relating a travel story to this friend whom I hadnt seen since before I left and came back from Ghana that I realized, at some untracable moment somewhere in Isla Vista, I had come look at the ocean and see peace again.
On Coney Island, the ocean was just a pretty black and sparkling backdrop to a fun night on the peir catching up with friends, and a subtle, and wisely ignored urge for some nightswimming. The transition must have been so slow that I hadnt been able to feel it. Its a relief, but not without the wonder if I have been trying to forget something I really ought to remember. I think now, that maybe I can feel both things simultaniously.

It is an odd feeling, to know a group of people in a way that is very attatched to one particular time and place, in this case, Isla Vista, California, circa 2005 and then suddenly several years later, after having only minimal contact, realize you are all in the same place at the same time again, only somehow, this time, it's Coney Island, New York, and then spontaniously reconveine. It's an odd way to measure what's changed and what hasn't changed. It never seems to be the things you think it would have been