Genesis

Chapter 1 OR The Application for the Atonement of Aforementioned Atrocities

Chapter 1 OR The Application for the Atonement of Aforementioned Atrocities

Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you with the David Copperfield, "I AM BORN" type stuff. I'm sure you get enough of that in here. Plus, it isn't like you absolutely need to know that stuff anyway. It's not pertinent or whatever.

So I'll just start in the middle of the night, somewhere on the dingy streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

What was I doing out at such an ungodly hour in a pretty crumby side of town, you ask?

I'd normally try to plead my case with a, "Oh, I don't sleep. I gotta occupy my time somehow." But yeah, that is total bullshit, some halfway coherent babble to get those insects off the age-old case of the shut-in and the shrew. Although, there's no shrew.

You can just call me a brown recluse, because I picked some hole in the wall to reside and never left. Also, most of the bull that comes out of my mouth is poisonous.

Anyway, people always say, "At least go see the city, you've lived here for years. Explore, see the sights." And I say, you gotta be a tourist to enjoy those things like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the 9/11 memorial. And I'm not really a tourist-y type. Honest. Tourists look up to admire the views of such an achievement of modernity, and I can assure you I am only looking down when I decide to grace the squalid streets of The Big Apple.

Besides, the only part of the city I want to see that isn't the inside of my apartment, is the smoky innards of my favorite jazz club on 52nd. But, by this point, I hadn't been there in over two years or so.

I've always hated cities. This modern age is sold to us by the government to make more money off the back of capitalism, masquerading as conveniences and shortcuts to an easier life. And modesty? Yeah, go ahead and hang that up, I once saw some dude having sex with a prostitute against a car parallel parked outside Saint Bart's on Park Ave. Noise that's almost as bad as the air quality. No privacy aside from nearly translucent walls and doors that could be bumped open by a slightly drunk passerby. You can't park anywhere, even so, no one drives themselves. People are strangely rude in this extremely unheard of way. Okay, maybe not unheard of, but it's like civility has warped into this boorish display of self-preservation. I think you get where I'm going with this.

But, in some way, New York is different from those other large scale cities. It still has all those things, don't get me wrong, but it is tolerable for those of us that can keep our heads down and mind our business.

New York isn't just a concrete jungle, it is the Concrete Amazon. If you spend too long wading the river, you will get swept away in the current. If you spend too much time exploring the trees, you'll be stripped of your possessions by the natives and left to fend for yourself. And I must say, there is something rather serene about Central Park, unlike almost everywhere else in The City. Amongst a sea of gray monotony and conformity, lies this little, fragile, sliver of green at the very center of Manhattan, almost, if not literally, breathing life into the entire island.

It is transcendent.

It's as if the founders of Manhattan put that resplendent Elysian Field in the middle of this dreary wasteland to remind us that the world is slowly dying. Soon the only thing we will have to remember it will be those little slivers of green. Don't mistake my love for Central Park as a love for all things natural, because that is simply not true. It has been the years of being utterly surrounded by those gray gargantuan that I finally learned to at least respect nature. Maybe even miss it, to a degree.

I think I first fell in love with New York because of the excellent twenty-four-hour service, especially when you're like me and come from a small village-town that has everyone in bed by ten in the night. I find that I believe being an American consists of being able to get your cigarettes made in North Carolina, whiskey made in Tennessee, and snack cakes made in California at two o'clock in the morning, and literally everything else made in China or Taiwan. And that was definitely my intention for the night.