NYC ... A love story.

Two trips to NYC in the last two weeks after a prolonged absence reminded me of something.

I LOVE NY.

I always have and always will, but I didn't come by it naturally.

When I was a kid, we would drive to Rhode Island to see my family, and my parents would bicker about whether to take the long way around the city via the Tappanzee Bridge. In those days (and I'm sure still today), this would add hours to the already eight-hour car ride, but you wouldn't have to navigate the madness of the city on a Friday or Sunday. My father would curse wildly even for him and profess his hatred for the run-down gray buildings, potholes, and never-ending stream of taillights and tolls (mid-80s). My mother provided the balance and would subtly nudge the positives of the shorter route, namely that the traffic wouldn't be any better, and while we might move at 35 instead of 13, the shortest distance between two points was — and always would be — a straight line.

The back seat was always an adventure for me. I learned valuable lessons like if you had to pee, you'd better make plans in NJ or be ready to hold it til Connecticut. There were no phones and no GPS, and when traffic sat dead stopped on the GW Bridge you didn't have a benevolent digital overlord telling you that you only had to endure 17 minutes worth of backup. That dead stop could keep you there all night for all you knew, and on one such return trip toward the Nation's Capital, it very nearly did.

In fact, I never got to stop in the city until I was of an age to transport myself there, the idea of actually taking an exit and getting out of the car, a feat that wouldn't even be remotely contemplated by my parents (definitely not my father). When I got the chance, though, I went and took in my first Broadway show, The Phantom Of The Opera. I don't remember a ton about that trip, but I remember the phantom swinging in from over the stage, buying a Yankees hat, and a fake Tag Heur watch that I thought made me hot shit. I remember being in love with the chaos and driving like the apple was still attached to the tree, cursing wildly and zig-zagging through the fray with the collected poise of two or three whole years of time behind the wheel.

It was intoxicating.

Fast forward close to thirty years, and I don't know how many times I've been here now. I know it's been a while, and I know that I've missed it. New York is pure energy. It's alive, and its streets breathe in and out from the grates that belch white plumes of steam from somewhere deep in the bowels of the cavernous underground. Today, it's recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time, but I don't know that I've aged a day here.

I'm still a kid at heart when I come here — only now, I have the good sense not to buy fake jewelry, and I root for the Dodgers because it's fun to like the same thing as your kid. The whole place smells like weed now, the dispensaries taking an open door policy, unlike the ones in Florida that cover the windows like it's the red light district. I assume they do this so that kids don't think there's something cool going on in them, but based on what I've seen here, I don't think there's any risk of that.

Along the sidewalks, tired-looking vendors still hawk their wares to wide-eyed tourists enthralled by the glass buildings. To find paradise here in between the subway grates and the delivery cyclists would take more than a semester of Zen. It could only come from the accumulation of a lifetime of wisdom that can find the beauty in the batshit and the clarity in the crazy.

That, or they need a steady diet of chemicals to help ease the anxiety.

Everyone looks like they belong except the people that don't.

They stand out like blood stains on hotel sheets and invite the snakes to their front door, as if their bags were filled with rats and not souvenirs stamped with three-lettered professions of love. It is the perfect encapsulation of the universe, the Yin and the Yang, God and the Devil. If either are real they most certainly reside here and it's possible they even live next door to each other. The place moves comically fast and maddeningly slow. It's the great social experiment compacted into a tiny island full of untold riches and destitution that has little compare. It's a dance between the five-star and the no-star, the famous and the never will be. It's a Tango to the tenements and a Salsa to the skyscrapers. It's rehearsed and completely unscripted in the same breath. It's perfectly balanced and careening toward madness all in the same block.

It's New York City, and I still love it with the wild eyes of the child I wish I still was and the wistful old man I hope I'll become.

EO