Lamentations of Boredom

I love the big city.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the bustling outskirts of Atlanta, and being the largest growing city in the US during the 80’s, there was no end to the vastness of the place and the beauty of the rising skyline.

And I miss the city. I long for the height and breadth of it. The flowing of people on the sidewalks like the quickening of a pulse….hot blood in your veins. Feeling alive.

So I am planning to go to the only place one can go to quench a thirst like this.

The Big Apple.

I don’t know how exactly I’ll make it happen, but in my mind – I am already there. My desire to be there swirls around in my head, making me giddy, depriving me of oxygen, and I want to stand on Broadway, peel off my clothes and feel the movement of the city against my skin. Melt into it.

And if I don’t get arrested for that – I’ll dance down through Central Park, oblivious to the danger, rebelling against constraints, and find a place on the grass to lay, looking up at the stars, drunk with the freedom that is the night sky, walled in by the steel and glass and noise. I want to wake wrapped solely in the ribbons of exhaust, energy and the sweat of the place. Watch the sunrise over Manhattan, and pause again to breathe in the vivacity of the city that never sleeps.

I don’t think I should even need to stop at one of the many exotic little restaurants, gorging myself with the fare of other cultures, or sipping the deep red wine I love. I want intoxication from the place itself. Pure, unadulterated life. I don’t want to shop, or waste a quarter in the viewing machines atop the Empire State Building. I want to take it in whole, instead of bit by bit.

If you’ve never been there – the place is like Gulliver in Lilliput – a body of living, breathing flesh laying itself in the harbor, cells darting from here to there to work or play or paint the world with graffiti. It is personified, and doesn’t hold itself to the rules of inanimateness – but flaunts itself in its virility. It makes me want to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

If I can’t get there soon, I think I should die of craving for its splendor.

Anyone want a postcard?