If you can make it here...

Ah New York.
It's a place where I couldn't quite make it. Well, I suppose I wasn't starving, and I had work here. It was more of a question of dealing with such a large, relatively cold place at a time in my life where I needed something that was a bit warmer, friendlier, more coddling.

It is a place that always makes me wax philosophical. This city is a place where poverty, opulence, grand social vision, and blind ambition all make themselves known on scales which are difficult to ignore.

I do miss the place when coming back to it, as I suppose one always misses what has passed if it was not too traumatic. Most of the trauma of New York was in my mind, but that is really the legacy of the past.

And I miss the friends I left behind here. A lot of good Kenyon folks, and a few others besides. I was sitting around in a restaurant in Chinatown last night with Dave Livingston and Cait Weiss and Wayne, a friend of Dave's I met on last visit through, and I found the conversation running the gamut of normal things, but also finding its way into the truly absurd, as seems to happen quite often with Dave. He has a way of taking a conversation and twisting it with the mind of a sex-crazed 14 year-old. Wayne has similar sensibilities, continuing a conversation far past the realm of good taste. Cait's roll in this always seems at first to be a person who is too polite to say much, but her wit has a way of exploiting the conversation for the bits of more sophisticated humor hidden within the obscene. And I realize how much I miss this every time I'm back. Sure, these conversations are by no means in sophisticated, offensive in nearly every way, and not the sort of thing that you would publish in any form, but it is entertaining.

The old neighborhood has changed a little over the last few years, but it's nothing that I couldn't have thought possible. More people, higher rent, some renovations, but it's still New York, still dirty, and still a place I have an odd, fond memory of.

I'm staying with Dave and Porsche in their place about a block from where we used to live in Williamsburg. A few new bars, but it still has the same flavor, people still having the same complaints about the place. But it's home of a sort, and I've come back for a few days.