Got A Cough

Once again, i've taken a slight extended break from posting. There's the practical hurdle of being free of direct computer access, but this would be only a cheap excuse. No, there's a contributing-factor that is playing a far more dominant part in the explanation of my absence from this page. I'm flat. It's not writers-bloc, i have a multitude of subject matters to cover, songs to quote, grumpiness to expel and witticisms aplenty to sprinkle around. It's a general malaise that has descended upon me. Not just me, but, seemingly, most of the city around me.

House Hunting

I had an hour spare between the apartment hunting appointments this week and found myself outside the very impressive Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway. A massive stone and concrete, turn-of-the-20th-Century affair, it's a hulking edifice complete with the almost ubiquitous Museum Roman Columns. But you'd probably miss them at first glance, for they've dressed the entire entrance side of the building with a bizarre 3 storey high, glass and steel 'bib', that serves as a reception area. It looks completely out of place and entirely like the 100-year-later-afterthought that, in reality, it actually was/is.

Vice

'You keep me searching for a heart of gold and I'm getting old'

Neil Young, 'Heart of Gold'

I have a question i sometimes ask upon meeting new people that intrigue me. I firstly define the word 'vice' to mean 'a particular thing that you enjoy. Something you derive a heightened sense of pleasure from, yet at the same time, it can and does also have a somewhat detrimental effect of you - whether that be health, wealth, emotional state, lifestyle or other'. Then, i ask:

"What's your vice?"

Pornographic Zoetrope

'My life has been full of terrible misfortunes - most of which never happened.'

Michel de Montaigne

 
I was thinking of all the women I've seen naked in my life. Not those on a page or a screen, but rather those i'd seen up close (up close and very personal). I wasn't thinking about them in a manner akin to gazing into a pornographic zoetrope in my mind, but rather of the actual people themselves. To be even more specific, I was thinking of how many might now regret revealing themselves to me in such a manner. Not because of anything I may have done at the actual moment of the clothing hitting the floor, but due to something that may or may not have happened further on down the track to make them feel not so fondly of/towards me.

What's in a Neighborhood

The party is over. My free-rent lifestyle is about to be curbed. Up until now, i have been crashing in the spare bedroom at my sister and her husband's apartment in Brooklyn. Whereas the neighborhood itself has been sparsely providing and entertaining (unless you're into the whole Kosher/oily food/girls in wigs thing), it has provided a perfectly stable and efficient jumping off point for my time in The City. But now this experience must come to an end. The reasons are many, but suffice to say- even if you do find the proverbially impossible 'free lunch', at some point, Lunchtime will end.