NYC

So I'm waiting for the new itunes to finish loading up. I have to say I'm not that thrilled about it. Apple made such a fuss over that "coverflow" thing, but something like sixty percent of my albums still have a blank square with two quarter or eighth notes, whatever those things are, as their only "art". For whatever reason itunes can't pull the artwork from its own store. Sorta BS since apple knows the more OCD of us MUST HAVE ALL THINGS THE SAME. But I am dredging up my DIY/Xerox artwork/The Beauty Is In The Seams personality from my adolescence to deal with that. I haven't really been that thrilled with any apple product of late: I have a new MacBook and I am not into the keys at all, and the screen sorta looks like crap already. Granted, I don't want a PC either, but I sure would like something that combines apple's design sensibility with Windows' just "git 'er done" behaviors. I know apple claims they don't crash, but that's bs since this thing was crashy like right out of the box.

So, anyway, what am I thinking about this morning? NYC. It's getting a little colder here in LA, and that makes me think about running around NYC in various numbers of layers. I guess my only thought about NYC this morning, oddly, considering everything that happened to me there, and so much of it being totally awful, is that NYC really is a giant playground that lets you not grow up as long as you want not to grow up. It's a town that fosters this strange double immaturity/self-reliance. Something about hearing Regina Spektor's "Twenty Years of Snow" this morning as I type is also forming this impression. I didn't spend 20 years in NYC, but I did spend six strange ones there. I had tons of fun, but also tons and tons of not-fun. Granted, I wasn't shooting heroin and turning tricks in the South Bronx, but that was mostly because those activities involve effort - finding heroin is not easy and the South Bronx is a haul.

I have often remarked that in many ways my life between Choate and LA passed as a strange dream, and much of it I truly do not remember. I do have some great pals from Brown, and I have two great friendships that were created in NYC. I had a third, but she died. Suddenly and strangely. I suppose death is always strange, and I am certainly not the first person to note that. Time is so weird. I guess that's why I'm thinking about the fostered immaturity thing. In NYC, no one looks at you sideways if you are wearing the ame thing you wore to that punk rock show twenty years beforehand, as long as you are in the right part of town, which is always the East Village for our kind.

I could ramble on more, but I have to hop in the shower to get ready for work, I've dawdled and lost a lot of time.