The Garage

Tonight I met Ivan at The Garage in the West Village. We talked over live jazz salad, chattering people pasta, and clanking glassware cheesecake. I dug soaking in the details of his new relationship but it got particularly interesting for me when we starting talking about death and technology. He and I both rumble with the missing of loved ones past and I’d been meaning to ask him about suicide. Our words quickly cast us into a sensation I know well; The remembrance of the blip. Here for such a short scratch of something. Our lives each curled into spiraling tornadoes of activity fueled by personal and collective motivations that become impossible to truly separate. We tend to recycle a few core lessons for a lifetime and we both agreed, it feels like trying to learn “something” and for some kind of inconceivable but good reason. So why not make the most of it? Ahhh, Xanex au naturale.

I told him how I had smiled at a lot of people today. This city is jammed with folks wearing headphones. It makes it difficult to have random interactions on the street. We contemplated how our gadgets are turning us into one big brain and simultaneously killing our desire to BE together. I took my route back uptown with my ears naked and free. I heard gorgeous music along the long tunnels of the F line path. An electric guitar made another bare-eared man and I have a joyful pregnant mini stare-athon which concluded when he shot me an exaggerated blink. Is the future of "transit talk" eye-lid mores code? That might just be nonthreatening enough to work! I walked with so much expectation of headphone wearers that I even mistook one man’s sideburns for a set and cracked myself up :p.

Now snug above on the 50th floor, I pretend that each little city light is a person blinking up at me and the dark shadow of central park is the mystery we are all learning to live with, together.