Briefly, my life.
Firstly, let me hurl apologies toward you in compensation for not writing more and sooner. People ask me to do it but it is like a terrible chore that I cannot face even when I know how much I enjoy it when I start. There is so much about New York I like and think of writing that I cannot start. And there is the strong knowledge that what I like about this place is unexplainable and will only be sullied by an attempt to justify it in words.
Lame excuses.
I will start with news from my birth land. My mother's stepmother, whom we knew (as far as we knew her, which was not very far) as Granny Edie, died last week. She was the youngest, most active of the three of our grand mothers, but the other day her heart stopped and she fell on her face. Boomp. Over.
I have deep respect for how kind her heart was to her, especially after seeing the conditions that many ancestors live in. I was shocked a little by the news and saddened by it, especially for my mother's sake. I did not know Edie well, and so her death did not affect me. Death is not sad unless the life that preceded it was, and I believe she led a wholesome and kindly life.
For my mother, though, it is very sad because it is a hole in her history. Recently I have begun to feel very badly that I have essentially been away from my family for 2 years now, and am not experiencing their life nor they mine. How my mother must feel about her family in South Africa must be this feeling exaggerated ten-fold.
I also still miss Africa - especially when I speak of it to other people. I have a swelling pride when people ask me about the dark continent, and I speak of the places I have travelled, where I was born, my family there and the politics and struggles and the daily life. I know only a little more than nothing about it, which is more ignorant a position than to know nothing at all. So I am a purveyor of untruths, but I love speaking about it.
My days in New York are quite predictable and largely similar to my days in the little country town of Brisbane, Australia. I awake most mornings naturally - I have done away with alarm clocks. I get to work usually around 10am, which is a leisurely and comfortable time to arrive because I avoid the putrid crush of people on the subway. At peak hour, that crowd underground would make a misanthropist out of Jesus Christ.
On most mornings, I eat cereal with milk and a banana sliced, and I have found a 'health-food' store a little way away that sells proper full-fat full-sodium full-fucking-taste yogurt, and so I keep the fridge stocked with that and gulp it down with honey for breakfast, for snacks, for lunch sometimes on the weekend, and for dinner if I am too lazy to cook. Which I am surprising myself at not being - I made a lasagna the other day which swelled my ego pleasantly. Not that it was nice but that I had forced myself finally to buy, assemble, and prepare the ingredients. It was nice, by the way, though it made my teeth gritty like they were all lined with concrete. I took some to work and nobody complained of this even when I asked so perhaps it was because I ate half of the 10-layer thing in one sitting.
My apartment is small. I have a single room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, essentially. There is a lounge also, but I rarely use it - it is largely the domain of my Chinese female flatmate, Melissa, and her shoes. Shoes that fill shelves. Shoes that line the floor beneath the couch. Shoes that I trip over in the night, that hang from the rack over her door, that spill out into the hallway, and steal most of her tiny room from her. Shoes that eat dinner with us and go to the movies and don't wash up after themselves.
My room is small, though not as small as Melissa's, and relatively shoe-less. I am populating it slowly with plants - intent on building to my dream of living in an indoor jungle, walking on lichen and sleeping beneath hanging vines. So far its 6 or 7 pot-plants. I care for them well and so far I've only lost one grown plant, and some seeds. The basil seeds died lonely and unborn beneath the soil.
For the first 2 or 3 months, my night-life was hectic. I went out most weekends, arriving home at only 3 or 4 in the morning - mostly following Melissa around and chaperoning her in glitzy clubs in the meat-packing district. I enjoyed myself, but have now ebbed into a slower flow - through no act of deliberation but in line with my new knowledge that I am not a 'party animal'. I like my drinks unsweetened, my company audible and my music inspired not inane. What I do miss, though, is the dancing and general sense of abandonment which is totally missing from the social life of a White Male American. White Female also, I imagine, but I'm not one so can't be sure. I admire the more primitive societies for their sense of fun that doesn't require inebriation. Could it be that we are too intellectual and beset by a depression and inhibition born of stronger insight into the malign truth of the purposelessness of our lives?
New York has changed me - not so much in my behaviour that I would be very different when I return home (I always apply a social skin to fit my environment) - but enough that I am noticing things I do that I have heard and read of other ex-patriots noticing. Things like anger at strangers in the street. New York can allow you to expose much more of your anger at other people. It does not make you angrier in general, nor are the people here more worthy of anger, but the place is so completely uninhibited that you can allow your anger to escape - it would seem antiquated and weak to bottle it up inside, which is the modus operandi of the typical British commoner, from which most Australians are indistinguishable except by accent.
I am as depressed here as I have been elsewhere - the city has not raised my general happiness. But when I am angry I am more openly angry, when sad more honestly melancholic, and when happy - more unabashedly jolly. The feelings NY gives me send shards of contradiction through my mind - I find it so difficult to explain why I feel this never-sleeping mayhem is relaxing or why I feel like the people on the streets are happy and content and, there is no other way to describe it, relaxed. The contradictions: the stress and pace and the relaxation; the bombastic stupidity (Hello America) and the insightful intelligence; the pale-white ugly Jewish man bobbling by in his crinkled suit and the handsome negro rapping to himself on the subway; are a sure sign of the health of the community here - and the truth of my opinion. Not truth in objectivity, but that it is really what I think. Whenever I find myself with an opinion that seems obvious and does not contradict itself, I will find sooner or later that it is a silly and worthless opinion. My opinion of NY doesn't know what to do with itself.
Thank you for your time. I still enjoy writing although I have not streamed my thoughts into words like this for a long time. My parents and some of my friends deserve more effort from me, but this isn't a fair world, so I'll probably just pour myself a gin and tonic, sit down to my latest Hemingway novel, listen to the wet mist of rain outside and wile away the time till tomorrow when I will go sailing for two days off Long Island Sound.
Lame excuses.
I will start with news from my birth land. My mother's stepmother, whom we knew (as far as we knew her, which was not very far) as Granny Edie, died last week. She was the youngest, most active of the three of our grand mothers, but the other day her heart stopped and she fell on her face. Boomp. Over.
I have deep respect for how kind her heart was to her, especially after seeing the conditions that many ancestors live in. I was shocked a little by the news and saddened by it, especially for my mother's sake. I did not know Edie well, and so her death did not affect me. Death is not sad unless the life that preceded it was, and I believe she led a wholesome and kindly life.
For my mother, though, it is very sad because it is a hole in her history. Recently I have begun to feel very badly that I have essentially been away from my family for 2 years now, and am not experiencing their life nor they mine. How my mother must feel about her family in South Africa must be this feeling exaggerated ten-fold.
I also still miss Africa - especially when I speak of it to other people. I have a swelling pride when people ask me about the dark continent, and I speak of the places I have travelled, where I was born, my family there and the politics and struggles and the daily life. I know only a little more than nothing about it, which is more ignorant a position than to know nothing at all. So I am a purveyor of untruths, but I love speaking about it.
My days in New York are quite predictable and largely similar to my days in the little country town of Brisbane, Australia. I awake most mornings naturally - I have done away with alarm clocks. I get to work usually around 10am, which is a leisurely and comfortable time to arrive because I avoid the putrid crush of people on the subway. At peak hour, that crowd underground would make a misanthropist out of Jesus Christ.
On most mornings, I eat cereal with milk and a banana sliced, and I have found a 'health-food' store a little way away that sells proper full-fat full-sodium full-fucking-taste yogurt, and so I keep the fridge stocked with that and gulp it down with honey for breakfast, for snacks, for lunch sometimes on the weekend, and for dinner if I am too lazy to cook. Which I am surprising myself at not being - I made a lasagna the other day which swelled my ego pleasantly. Not that it was nice but that I had forced myself finally to buy, assemble, and prepare the ingredients. It was nice, by the way, though it made my teeth gritty like they were all lined with concrete. I took some to work and nobody complained of this even when I asked so perhaps it was because I ate half of the 10-layer thing in one sitting.
My apartment is small. I have a single room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, essentially. There is a lounge also, but I rarely use it - it is largely the domain of my Chinese female flatmate, Melissa, and her shoes. Shoes that fill shelves. Shoes that line the floor beneath the couch. Shoes that I trip over in the night, that hang from the rack over her door, that spill out into the hallway, and steal most of her tiny room from her. Shoes that eat dinner with us and go to the movies and don't wash up after themselves.
My room is small, though not as small as Melissa's, and relatively shoe-less. I am populating it slowly with plants - intent on building to my dream of living in an indoor jungle, walking on lichen and sleeping beneath hanging vines. So far its 6 or 7 pot-plants. I care for them well and so far I've only lost one grown plant, and some seeds. The basil seeds died lonely and unborn beneath the soil.
For the first 2 or 3 months, my night-life was hectic. I went out most weekends, arriving home at only 3 or 4 in the morning - mostly following Melissa around and chaperoning her in glitzy clubs in the meat-packing district. I enjoyed myself, but have now ebbed into a slower flow - through no act of deliberation but in line with my new knowledge that I am not a 'party animal'. I like my drinks unsweetened, my company audible and my music inspired not inane. What I do miss, though, is the dancing and general sense of abandonment which is totally missing from the social life of a White Male American. White Female also, I imagine, but I'm not one so can't be sure. I admire the more primitive societies for their sense of fun that doesn't require inebriation. Could it be that we are too intellectual and beset by a depression and inhibition born of stronger insight into the malign truth of the purposelessness of our lives?
New York has changed me - not so much in my behaviour that I would be very different when I return home (I always apply a social skin to fit my environment) - but enough that I am noticing things I do that I have heard and read of other ex-patriots noticing. Things like anger at strangers in the street. New York can allow you to expose much more of your anger at other people. It does not make you angrier in general, nor are the people here more worthy of anger, but the place is so completely uninhibited that you can allow your anger to escape - it would seem antiquated and weak to bottle it up inside, which is the modus operandi of the typical British commoner, from which most Australians are indistinguishable except by accent.
I am as depressed here as I have been elsewhere - the city has not raised my general happiness. But when I am angry I am more openly angry, when sad more honestly melancholic, and when happy - more unabashedly jolly. The feelings NY gives me send shards of contradiction through my mind - I find it so difficult to explain why I feel this never-sleeping mayhem is relaxing or why I feel like the people on the streets are happy and content and, there is no other way to describe it, relaxed. The contradictions: the stress and pace and the relaxation; the bombastic stupidity (Hello America) and the insightful intelligence; the pale-white ugly Jewish man bobbling by in his crinkled suit and the handsome negro rapping to himself on the subway; are a sure sign of the health of the community here - and the truth of my opinion. Not truth in objectivity, but that it is really what I think. Whenever I find myself with an opinion that seems obvious and does not contradict itself, I will find sooner or later that it is a silly and worthless opinion. My opinion of NY doesn't know what to do with itself.
Thank you for your time. I still enjoy writing although I have not streamed my thoughts into words like this for a long time. My parents and some of my friends deserve more effort from me, but this isn't a fair world, so I'll probably just pour myself a gin and tonic, sit down to my latest Hemingway novel, listen to the wet mist of rain outside and wile away the time till tomorrow when I will go sailing for two days off Long Island Sound.
Comments
Great post. I only just found it, i gave up on your blog months ago. nice to read about your life. i couldn't be bothered, you'll have to come and visit me.
and i like that you got 'bombastic' into that one too :-)