When I first arrived in NYC in 1997, I thought I was only catching up to a friend of mine who had already bravely entered 4 years earlier, part of NYU. She had a head start on bravery and balls, on going to parties and drinking and doing drugs. Everyone I thought was cool ended up going to AA before they graduated college.
I don't regret all the drugs I didn't take. I'm glad to be ignorant of that, of all the stuff we do to ourselves before we even embark on our life mission.
All those dark kids, those who felt comfortable at night, hanging out in doorways, enough money to go out drinking & with money left over for cigarettes.
How cute we all were, thinking that our drama was dangerous. That the plot and the in-jokes were a secret we kept from the audience. Only after theater & art going (MOMA) and parties where everyone was trying to shock everyone else, and everyone was trying not to be shocked.
It was the best education. A finishing school for my later return to the city, My Dinner With Andre. New Yorker Sundays, listening to Jonathan Schwartz while watching the Hudson River from the 8th floor.
It was so exciting, we were all so young, even the dirty air smelled like electricty. Before things were torn down to make way for glass and steel stripped of history, of graffitti and the layers of paint. We enjoyed the wealth of a space that everyone else had abandoned. Until it got sold. Collective Unconscious. Surf Reality. (Nada Surf?) Nada Surf Reality.
And Ohio....
I don't regret all the drugs I didn't take. I'm glad to be ignorant of that, of all the stuff we do to ourselves before we even embark on our life mission.
All those dark kids, those who felt comfortable at night, hanging out in doorways, enough money to go out drinking & with money left over for cigarettes.
How cute we all were, thinking that our drama was dangerous. That the plot and the in-jokes were a secret we kept from the audience. Only after theater & art going (MOMA) and parties where everyone was trying to shock everyone else, and everyone was trying not to be shocked.
It was the best education. A finishing school for my later return to the city, My Dinner With Andre. New Yorker Sundays, listening to Jonathan Schwartz while watching the Hudson River from the 8th floor.
It was so exciting, we were all so young, even the dirty air smelled like electricty. Before things were torn down to make way for glass and steel stripped of history, of graffitti and the layers of paint. We enjoyed the wealth of a space that everyone else had abandoned. Until it got sold. Collective Unconscious. Surf Reality. (Nada Surf?) Nada Surf Reality.
And Ohio....
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