New York is buildings and money, food and drink, glances and remarks. It is streets, not roads. It is filth, not dirt. It is noise, not sounds. It is highways, not freeways, five hour drives of one hundred miles in stop-and-go traffic instead of five hour drives of four hundred miles doing 80. It is rats, not gophers, pigeons, not herons, roaches, not moths. It is weather, not natural disasters, humidity, not fog.

In New York, money flows in and out at high volume. Everything costs at least $4, and more likely $8, or $15, or $35, or $80. The background panic of New York very often has to do with money, and if not money, time. But bears never cross my mind.

New York is appointments, constantly being made, rescheduled and pushed back in increments of fifteen minutes. In the West vague plans are made and rarely spoken of until the moment of their execution or expiration. In New York, someone might send a preliminary email, text, or Facebook message (rarely, these days, a phone call) inquiring as to one's availability this week or next week. Or someone may simply express the desire to get together, followed immediately by a statement of the impossibility of getting together. Negotiations are then open. Should it be dinner or drinks or coffee or brunch? Who has work and where and when? I'm free after 9. I'm free until 7:45. Call me when you finish rehearsal. Call me when you get out of work. Still at work! Still uptown! I'm supposed to go to my friend's reading/opening/show. Maybe I can get you on the list. I'm at the show, where r u? It was so great to see you, sorry we didn't get to talk more because it was my reading/opening/show. Sorry we missed your reading/opening/show, but let's get a drink after! Text me when you're done! Now I'm tired, going home! Would love to see you but I'm filming/recording/performing/on tour/on call/working nights until Sunday, until September. So sorry, I'm running half an hour late! Order without me! Get me some to go! Meet us inside! We're in the back! We were there, but now we're not! The show got cancelled! The party got moved! I fell asleep watching The Wire! We're leaving for Oaxaca! We were just in Tulum!

On the West Coast, planning is more like this. Let's go camping/hiking/rafting next week. Is it time to go camping/hiking/rafting now? Oh, sorry, I'm five hundred miles away camping/hiking/rafting somewhere else. Yes, it is time. Okay, where do we meet? Three hundred miles from where you are. Start driving!

Or alternately, people live in small towns where you never lock your door and everyone's recently or long-ago ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend comes in at any moment to borrow tortillas and you never text or call or make plans because everyone is going to the same potluck, bar, show or party, where plans can continue to not be made and local gossip can be discussed. Or no one is even going anywhere at all, they are just being. But if you get the urge to camp, hike, climb, raft or surf it can be accomplished very nearby, often before dinner.

People go to a lot of festivals out West, where you camp and there is music and many types of vegan and non-vegan burritos. By the time I came back East, the Oregon Country Fair was a distant memory and Stringfest was over a month ago. The Organic Planet Festival had just gone down in Eureka and Burning Man was about to draw so many people from the Bay Area that the city decided it was an opportune time to close down the Bay Bridge for construction. Earthdance was on the horizon and everybody was making plans for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

In New York there are film festivals I have little hope of attending since my one seriously connected film friend went to grad school in the Czech Republic. There is no camping at these festivals. There are celebrities and interns and laminated badges and panel discussions with glasses of water.

Time and space are very different on the West Coast. Traffic is hardly a factor. In the eight weeks I spent in the West I was stuck in traffic for exactly one hour, trying to get over the Golden Gate Bridge on the 101 on a Sunday afternoon. Once outside the cities there is very little traffic. There are instead very evocative and terse road signs that say things like "ROCKS" or "ELK" or have graphics depicting sharp curves or steep grades, which are redundant to the three-dimensional versions of these things on which you are currently driving.

In New York, you do not wear Chacos, fleece, zip-off hiking pants, board shorts or belts made from the webbing used to rig rafts or climbing routes unless this gear is actively in use. People are not routinely covered in a myriad of healing scars and abrasions of unknown provenance. The most common scars of unknown provenance are bruises to the head from crowd surfing and really vicious injuries from urban bike accidents.

Most people in New York are quite thin. Most people are quite pale. Tans are remarked upon with and combination of suspicion and admiration. Everybody knows you didn't get that extra melanin here.

In the West clothes have a purpose. If they convey something to others it's often one's activities as much as subculture, and everyone gets naked sooner or later anyway to jump in the swimming hole or soak in the hot springs.

New York is outfits, not clothes. The time and attention given to one's outfit in New York can only be appreciated by leaving New York. In New York dressing is a performance and a form of self-expression. New York is an aesthetic experience and your job here is to contribute to the aesthetic. Even when you think you're not, you are. Though the L train fashion show effect is often contemptuously lamented, there are days when I walk the Lorimer platform like a catwalk and then stand in awe of the collective effort this group has expended on dressing. There is a deep satisfaction in being part of such a fleeting, superficial moment, in being one of several hundred people standing stonefaced and uneasily posing in a public space, engaged in the activity of being ourselves. It's so exhibitionistic and narcissistic it becomes beautiful in its singularity of purpose. It's like one of those sand paintings Buddhist monks make, the ones their masters then sweep away.

Many people are drawn to New York by a desire for self-creation, to remake themselves before a captive audience of millions. There is a tacit agreement among the citizens of New York to work on some undefined project together, a project of seeing and becoming and watching and ignoring.

The old story of Western migration is also one of re-creation, but often through achieving mastery over or oneness with the land. In the West the land is so big and we are so small it feels at times like it's all headed toward dissolution. In New York it's distillation. The final product is the self, and the outfits. The personality of the lifer New Yorker gets bigger and bigger until he or she can be drawn with a few broad strokes, like a Hirschfeld cartoon, or summed up in a single pithy remark, like a New Yorker caption.

New York is a performance rather than an experience. Sometimes you are on stage and sometimes you are a spectator, but someone is always watching or listening. Even if you don't leave your apartment you'll hear death threats, stock tips and an average of one stranger's orgasm per week. In a single block you can field a compliment on your outfit, glare at a dirty remark, sneer at a bad driver, refuse two beggars, give generously to a third, feel guilty about your arbitrary nature, and read the headlines of three major newspapers, while reporting all of it to the internet on the phone, while also talking on the phone. Out West your phone will lose reception and then it will die before you can charge it.

On the West Coast people are brought close by sharing experiences as much as by talking. You DO things, often in places where you can't even talk, because of the high winds or rushing water or the fact that you are separated from your buddy by hundreds of feet of rope. Rather than talk about other things they did, thoughts they had and things they saw, people do things together. I suppose they talk about them during and after. I certainly did. But no one on the West Coast talks as much as I do.

Everyone talks more in the East, and louder and faster. Everyone is visibly more nervous. Everyone is more actively interested in getting the last word. New York is first and foremost and always and forever a battle of wits.

In the East more people are on psychotropic medications, or speak freely of being so. In the West more people are getting stoned, or speak freely of doing so.

In the East when you smoke at a height and contemplate the moon you're out on the six-story fire escape. Out West it's a giant boulder. In the East when we settle in to drink we stay in one place. Out West just when you think we're really unwinding with our drinks and our smokes and our lounging positions, someone jumps up and commences another wilderness activity, or goes to bed in preparation for an upcoming early-morning wilderness activity. No one stays up all night, hardly ever. Plenty of perfectly healthy able-bodied young people go to bed before midnight.

You can pee at will in a hell of a lot more places out West. In New York your outdoor peeing options are limited to the space between the fenders of two parked cars, the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge at night and the odd dark alley. But of course there are almost as many bars in the city as there are trees in the woods.

Out West people leave the house with a full set of camping gear in their cars because they may at any given moment spend the night up a mountain. Out West you can decide to go camping at the last minute, because you don't have to rent a car and borrow a tent and drive three hours in summer Friday rush hour traffic to get to a litter-strewn campground full of various youth groups. Out West many people have beds or the makings of beds in their cars or trucks or buses or vans. Out West many of the cars are trucks or buses or vans.

Out West people really do say "rad," "gnarly" and "sick," and these words have specific and apt meanings. In New York no one says "rad," "gnarly," or "sick." This may be because nothing in New York is "rad," "gnarly" or "sick." Things in New York are "crazy" or "awesome" or "interesting" or "a nightmare" or "totally fucking insane." Out West they say "rage" when they mean "party."

I am out of my element out West. I don't know if there really are bears or snakes everywhere or everyone is just fucking with me, I don't know until I find out that you can drive up that steep dirt road, that you can jump in that river, that you can climb that tree. I don't know where the secret trails and swimming holes are. Back East I know things. I know where you can get a cab, and how to dart ahead in the crowd to make the train, how to tell who is getting off at the next stop so I can have their seat, which trains run local after rush hour, which trains don't run at all, which subway transfers are labyrinthine and which are expedient, where to cross the park when, how to get the bartender to notice me, how to sneak into certain venues, when various restaurants will be fatally crowded and when you might get a table, where to find just about any kind of food at any hour, and where all the delis are. This knowledge is of no use to me out West.

Labels: East Coast, money, outfits, space, time, traffic, West Coast

Teenagers, I have discovered, are like alcohol or drugs. Many of them also like alcohol and drugs, but that is another matter. I am herein concerned with the glaring similarities in my own life, between teenagers and that most famous of drugs, alcohol.

Lately there have been more teenagers and fewer alcoholic beverages in my life, and I'm surprised to note that they are nearly interchangeable, in certain ways. I need the teenagers and I need my drinks--to pay for my life, to pay for my sins, and to make it all a little less painful sometimes.

In the case of both teenagers and drinks, the right amount of them can be amusing, but too many are vomitous and may even be deadly. The numbers in both situations are uncannily identical. Two is really the best amount, the most I can have and remain myself. Three or four can still be metabolized, but after the fourth I feel it's really enough. Five or more invariably produces horrible results, and six is just vile, even spread over many hours.

Teenagers can be savored in smaller amounts, their individual flavors appreciated and their nastier qualities swallowed with nary a grimace. Some teenagers--and some liquors--are positively artisanal, created in small batches under unreplicable conditions by loving hands. But there are just as many made as cheaply as possible and smothered in plastic too soon, or left to sit on shelves too long. After a certain amount, all you can taste are the poisons of their brattiness, wealth, entitlement, laziness, narcissism. Some of my favorite people embody these traits in varying combinations, so I'm not knocking any of them, but as with alcohol, a steady flow of these things into the system eventually induces the gag reflex. In these matters, it's all about quantity.

Sometimes, however, a particularly painful overindulgence can lead to an unexcpected moment of clarity.

The other night, slogging through the cash-bought final session of the evening with the most daunting of beasts, the only child of divorced parents (their guilt + the kid's uninterrupted self-centeredness = holy terror), having changed location several times among the various late-model Apple computers installed in every corner of the townhouse, my charge was still refusing to place her hands upon the keyboard and produce the personal essay that had been outlined for her--by hand--by yet another tutor. I was bloated with work and money, my two least favorite vices. And they are vices like any other--the Puritans just had the worst taste in vices, and we who have even marginally inherited the civilization they built pay the unfortunate price.

"My, you have mature-looking handwriting for an eighth-grader," I said to the girl, who looked as if her "i"'s should be dotted with hearts, or maybe dollar signs.

"Oh," she said airily, "I didn't write that. My other tutor did. He's the best."

"You mean you said it out loud and he wrote down what you said?"

"Oh no," she said, "I mean I tell him what my essay's about and he writes down what he thinks I should write."

With this remark I made a stunning discovery.

I've always thought I had no ethics and no moral code. I believe completely in reciprocity and kindness and not at all in law or obligation, and I hope that between these threads of intention things will work themselves out, or alternately, remain at least mildly interesting. I try to be a good guest and a good hostess. I try not to take advantage of or openly be an asshole to other people. I try not to hoard my fine cheeses. I don't steal from individuals, only from corporations. I occasionally steal from rock bands, but only liquor, and I try to compensate for this by sharing my drugs and snacks. I try not to lead people on. (Though to be honest I've realized the reason I don't lead people on is because I don't enjoy the weight of attentions I can't return, not because it's wrong. All's fair, I believe, in love and war, and by that I mean it's all carnage.)

The only thing that really pisses me off is when someone does something to me or asks something of me that I absolutely, positively would never do to or ask of them. Then I grow enraged and rant and bang things around. "I can't believe he said that! I can't believe it! I would never say something like that to him! This aggression will not be tolerated!" "How could she ask that of me? Would she do that for me? Would she? Would she tolerate that kind of behavior from me? WOULD she? NO!"

I long ago gave up on ethics and moral codes because they are boring, and the people who talk about them are boring and don't dress as well or have as many mind-altering substances on hand as those who flout them, because I found the philosophy that asked whinily, "What is the best system of laws for people to live under?" far less exciting than the one that said defiantly, "What stops us from being free and how can we destroy it without hurting anyone and run wild through the night?" There is no good system of laws for people to live under, save a strict environmental code. Tell me how not to destroy the planet and don't bore me with the worst kind of lies, the ones that are neither beautiful nor interesting nor true.

So you can imagine my surprise when this kid presented me with her half-finished essay written by another adult and I thought to myself, "That is so wrong."

I beg, plead and sometimes bully teenagers into have original thoughts. I engage them in a dialogue and probe and probe at the even mildly interesting issuances from their hormone-addled brains until I draw forth some kind insight, and then I pound at this insight like a piece of veal until it flattens into coherence. When this happens I almost weep with relief. I try very hard not to add my own original thoughts to their original thoughts, though I will admit that sometimes I crack. What's the harm, I sometimes wonder, in making this essay a little more interesting, especially if I am going to have to read it thirty-seven more times? But I don't spoon-feed them sentences and I don't alter their syntax and I sure as shit don't write their essays for them because that would be wrong. Also, I am rather miserly about my writing and want to keep it all for myself.

I realized, suddenly, that this kid had hired one tutor to handwrite the rough draft of her essay and was probably expecting me to type the final one myself. Well she had that wrong. I wasn't going to lay a finger on glossy surface of that 24-inch iMac, nor would I touch the keys of her MacBookPro. Here, in this townhouse in this astronomically wealthy zip code, only one of many where I lately seemed to be leaving my dignity and will to live in pursuit of what Virginia Woolf so aptly called, "money and a room of one's own," I had unexpectedly found my moral center. While I had been finding it, brushing the dust from its surfaces and turning it over in my hands, trying to discern what exactly it was, the kid, I realized, had been talking. When I tuned back in, the evening offered up in compensation for my efforts and burgeoning headache in its second and final moment of absolute clarity as I came to another realization.

"Abercrombie and Fitch is my favorite store," she was saying. "They do all the real designing, and places like American Eagle Outfitters are just copying from them."

I've changed my mind, I thought. The revolution will be violent, and you will not be spared.

Labels: alcohol, capitalism, money, morality, Puritanism, revolution, teenagers

I have a really stupid question. Maybe it is so stupid I shouldn't even ask it. My stupid question is about the evil people, the really bad ones, the ones who are fucking everything up. The oil people and the defense people. My question is: Why can't they just find a new way to make money?

I try not to spend money, but I still do. Plenty. I spend money on ice cream and tuna tartar. I spend money on DVDs. I spend money on clever gadgets I mistakenly think will improve my life. Sometimes I spend money on gadgets that actually do improve my life. Gadgets break and are lost, so I spend even more money. Some things can be easily stolen or wheedled with smiles or made myself, but most cannot and so money is spent by me and therefore made by someone else. This says to me that there are other ways to make money, other ventures these fine fellows, these fucking assholes can pursue.

Can't the oilmen just make iPods or iPhones? Can't they make leather purses and sell them to rich ladies? I have read that rich ladies will go on fifteen-month waiting lists just to pay as much as a car--a car!--for a leather purse designed by the right temperamental gay man. But I know a lot of vegans who won't like the leather purses. In that case, can't they make up some new substance and kind of wind it around Kate Moss's body a few times? Anything you wind around Kate Moss's body is bound to be appealing to lots of people. She's had a kid and done tons of blow and she still looks great. (Remember that, when they caught her doing the blow and vilified her? Models! And rock musicians! Do drugs! Scandal! But it's all okay now. She can still sell stuff, like clothes and makeup that intimate the concept of doing cocaine with rock musicians that will instead be bought by middle-aged women in the suburbs who hate their husbands.)

Or maybe Kate Moss doesn't look so great. Maybe it's all done with computers, but if that's the case, can't they just wind something around her body with computers?

Maybe they could clone Kate Moss, and wrap her in titanium. Everyone loves titanium! Titanium-wrapped Kate Moss! Think of the profits!

And what about diamonds? Sure, it was DeBeers who invented the diamond as precious object, but now it is one. What if all the oilmen got together and made just a gigantic diamond and sold it back and forth to one another? Would that be satisfying to them? Could they stop now?

What about the workers? What about the workers? I got a plan for them, too, since you asked. Roller coasters, in every city park. And the best part of roller coasters is they don't even use fuel. These roller coasters will need to be built and maintained, and we can prove that the economy will not collapse without oil and war, and oil wars.

I'm not saying my solution is the best, I'm just saying we need to start thinking outside the box.

Labels: Kate Moss, money, oil, roller coasters, war