When I was 12 years old New York gripped me so tightly it left red streaks on my psyche. I watched reruns of Seinfeld after the Maury show everyday after school with my mother, scribing a map of the city into my hippocampus intuited from scraps of conversations like city names and landmarks.
I went to college in upstate New York and had won a prize for entrepreneurship. One of the perks of the prize was a visit to a conference held in New York.
In the morning, when it was still dark, I climbed into a chartered bus and rode to the city. The drive was the kind of pretty that made you hate yourself for how ugly your day to day was.
Staff glided through the conference hall offering snacks and booze. I was 19 but had been drinking since 16 and the served me with no questions asked.
Outside the venue reeked. The city wasn't alive as much as it was having a manic episode. It was my first time visiting the city since a child. I was born there. In Beth Israel in the middle of a snow storm while Michael Jackson was in the same hospital, sick, and my father wore scrubs and they had to slice me out of my mother because it had been ten months and I absolutely would not come out.
I just bought eleven acres in the middle of nowhere. My wife and I are moving in slowly, over the course of a few months, a box at a time.
Bubble wrap was supposed to be a type of wallpaper. You get it just as you are leaving a home, wrap everything up in it, letting the bubbles take the damage, then dispose it when you make it to the new home. It doesn't stay with you.
It was supposed to be wallpaper.