Observations in NYC

Words sometimes flow. Thoughts always do, that's for sure, but the words for them... sometimes there are only images, and the words act as descriptors, but these descriptions take time. I look out my window, at the pitch-black sky, the concrete of New York City lit in pools of light from street lights and cars... there's a certain charm to it. I understand the tendency to think of dark figures jumping from building to building in the darkest grips of night when I look out at such sights. I can also understand why the notorious Dark Knight's home is a fictional version of this city. There's something about the brown buildings with jet-black fire-escapes that seems inviting somehow. I can understand vigilantism and I can also understand crime. Everything seems so easily accessible in this city, the windows, the women, the drugs... it is the city where everything flows through whether it can make it through the channels or whether it will get clogged up and drown.

Which is, in essence, how I feel most of the time in this cruel mistress of a city.

I've always been fascinated by monsters though, so the fact that this city casts its many shadows intrigues me. Not that it is exactly a frightening place to stay-- hardly. I came here after everything has calmed down, and violence has been something that has, luckily, eluded me. I've seen a handful of disturbances, and I'm not sure how, but some of my friends have encountered more than I have. I find it funny that this scrawny white boy, stumbling through various spots of Harlem at various levels of light, in various levels of sobriety, has never encountered so much as a paper-cut.

Not that I'm complaining.

I'm not sure what fascinates me so much about the darker aspects of everything. I think that's why I'm so attracted to this city, this Gotham City. It doesn't bristle with palm trees, it doesn't cast sun-spots in your eyes on any but the warmest summer days, but I like that. There's a sadness here, a sense of loneliness, a sense of desperation everywhere, that for some reason I find rather beautiful.

I picture a lonely figure walking down these streets, perhaps wearing a dark overcoat, a thin trail of smoke slipping between his lips as he sucks on a cigarette. Street kids play around him, though the hour is much later than they should be out, but you know how kids are, especially in this fearless city. However, as he takes each step, he could not be further from his surroundings. Lost in his own world, he walks into dark alleyways, oblivious to any dangerous creatures that may be lurking there, in the shadows. The air is brisk and cold; the concrete has finally started to freshen up in the winter breeze.

He marches down a steep set of stairs leading to a basement apartment. The paint on the steps is chipped and rusty. The street lamps cast an eerie glow on the side of the walls, his figure casting funny little shadows as he walks down.

And into the belly of the beast he enters.

I've felt that way many times, going down into the subway. There's something about it that is like entering willingly into the mouth of some great dragon, especially at night. In the daytime, people enter into the city's orifice in such a casual way that it is hard to feel any drama, but at night, there's a certain oddity about descending into the city itself. The streets are dimly lit, but you walk down and the light shines up at you. The dirt and cracked tiles are the first thing you notice, and the juxtaposition of the white walls and the dirty brown subway tunnels themselves. Every now and then a rat smiles up at you, hoping that you have a kernel of something to drop to its lucky little maw.

There are, hidden in broad daylight, shops that clutter the streets that would be at home in another universe, perhaps where Lovecraft's monsters walk the earth. It isn't that they are of services that obscure-- a psychic here, a dominatrix there-- but rather that they just... seem so obscure in and of themselves, like the deep red paint in Soho that marks either a psychic's abode or a dominatrix studio (I haven't really decided which it is). And as you walk the city streets and come across a shop or a studio you never noticed before, it is easy to think how something arcane and obscure could easily be hidden in this city. For all we know, there is a store inside this city that sells articles that may lead to the end of times. A part of me would not find the idea far-fetched.