Reflections
from New York
Part 3: Everything, everywhere
No matter what you do, here, you can never stand out in the
crowd. No matter how "weird" or "unconventional"
you may be. Here all freaks are standards. Here everything
is accepted. It has all been seen before. You cannot shock
anyone. You cannot make anyone stare at you with a puzzled
look.
These people - they have seen
it all, and they keep on seeing it all each and every day
- in the subway, on their way to work, on a street corner,
once they stop for their daily hot-dog. Right next to the
Chinese fast-food counter. On the Metro stairs, the ones that
are taking you from the city that is on the surface, the city
above, to the city in the tunnel, down below, where there
is no natural light and the sky are not to be seen.
They see it on their lunch
break, at a bagel deli. On Fifth Avenue, doing shopping. In
the great breathtaking hall of Grand Central, that is almost
24 hours a day packed with people coming and going in such
a rush.
In Central Park late at night,
when the street buzz has somewhat subsided. In Central Park
on a bright sunny day, when you see parents with children
walking peacefully or playing on the lawn with rolling laughter,
joggers and roller-bladders swing by, old people on a bench
reading the paper, baggers asking for money, artists and musicians
performing or displaying their arts, mad people making abstruse
conversations with themselves. Dogs and cats and scrawls and
birds of all kinds.
You see everything in every
corner, between those mountains of bricks and concrete, so
high that in order to see a piece of sky or sun you really
have to stretch your neck until it hurts. From your office
window on the 43rd floor of some high building. In a mad club
with alternative music and the freakiest of the freaks, right
behind an ancient church doors. In gay bars where the lady-boys
are playing "bitchy-bingo" and pulling each other's
legs to the entertainment of the crowd.
You see everything, everywhere,
in every corner, behind every closed door.
And you can
see a piece of sky here, in this Sky
View
Part 4: Overloaded with emotions
this
travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
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