New York Minutiae

I see a million interesting things, here, every day.

There's a open-air market in Union Square on the weekends, with vegetables and fall-decorations etc. I look over and, under a tree in the park, there's this squirrel clutching a decorative, dried ear of Indian corn. Theif! Dried stolen corn is so, so sweet.

There are so many actors, in New York, that I feel like if I walked into Grand Central Station at 5 p.m., or any crowded street corner and shouted "Zip!" I'd be barraged by "Zaps!" and "Zups."

It's hilarious when people start laughing, on the street, and get loud and boisterous in their own languages.

I'm noting what people read on the subways, and (discreetly) making notes in my Moleskine, @ what that book might say about them, as a character.

I have a sense of New York being a city of a billion windows -- the impression I got from the top of the Empire States Building. For some reason, walking alone on Park Ave. (alone among 8 million people), thinking about "1984," and about how one room represented individuality, freedom and connection for the hero. And how maybe, in a city with such a wealth of windows, there might be the possiblity of such a connection for me.

Espresso like blood -- warm. Thick, and taken from a living thing.

How you're right in the middle of writing down a thought, and you reach your subway stop, and you can't finish it. You can't just ignore your stop, because you'll end up down at the Brooklyn Bridge, and you'll be late for work. You close your notebook with a half-finished sentence, and hurry out.

Pouring an iced coffee -- where the ice cube looks like a black mandarin orange, with cream marking the veins in the ice.

New York as an experiment in nerve -- being as bold and comfortable with new friends of 6-months, as if you'd known them all your life. Actually doing something, rather than over-thinking it. Writing something, and hitting "post."

Being confident that, if you're wearing sneakers, you'll get down Madison Ave. at lunchtime fast -- you can walk on the subway grates (not wearing heels), if you can stand its warm, "subway breath." Not that it stinks; you just know it's exhaled up from the subway.