Voyeur of the Mundane
New York is romantic as hell. One could be forgiven for wanting to fall in love upon moving here.
It’s a scene that pens itself: You’re walking a green, shaded street in Nolita or a cobbled street in the West Village. It has a name like Prince or Charles or Elizabeth that draws your chin up just so. You pass a townhouse that belongs to someone from a movie you loved as a kid. You peek inside as though it’s normal, and it is. It’s nighttime but it’s warm. Your belly is full of Pizza Napoletana, negroni, and butterflies. Tension, expectation, curiosity.
That didn’t quite happen.
Others might expect to fall back in love. I’ve watched longtime couples get that eye-spark back within the city’s swirl. They see each other in a way they hadn’t quite before, or in a while.
That did sort of happen; I fell back in love with surfing.
In The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch writes, “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” The shift from innocence to experience is a new birth. Goals are quaint, like black and white TV. Experience is a 3D, surround sound, olfactive kick in the chest.
My East Village apartment is on 2nd Ave, a 3-lane, north-south thoroughfare. The noise here, as in many parts of the city, is ceaseless. (Unless there’s some once-in-a-century pandemic that causes activity to drop by 96% https://citymapper.com/cmi/nyc).
The most noticeable part of quarantine in the city was the lack of noise. I missed it.
Why? The city’s noise is the exhaust of raw, human ambition. Whether it’s the pounding of feet on sidewalks or the MOVEIT! honking of horns, you either ingest the city’s energy and make it yours or you find it unbearable.
I had appreciated the frankness of New Yorkers before, but came to really appreciate the efficiency that it betrayed. The two kindest things you can do to someone else in the city are (1) tell them what you want (“gimme a Bud heavy” not “Hey there. How are ya. Can I have a Budweiser?”) or (2) just get the fuck out of their way.
Maybe start with #2.
I found New York isolating a lot of the time, a product of the harsh juxtaposition between being around a lot of people and few you know. I’m far from the only person to have this experience. I read a great book about it called The Lonely City, which made me feel better for a little while, until I realized I still didn’t have a remedy. The obvious (talking to more people) isn’t always easy.
Today I’m packing up to head west. It’s a warm day in late May. My stay is ending on terms that aren’t all mine, though I’m in a more fortunate position than most to have a family to go to in a beautiful place.
I’m going to miss little stuff. A bunch of nada that doesn’t matter by itself but together invades your viscera.
The sticky summer high-noons. Warm fall days that cool off in the evening and pull your skin tight. The rattle-roll of trains going under you on a street, or next to you while you’re biking over a bridge. Every single park, parklet, and garden. Llhasa Fresh Food, Teranga, and Cafe Mogador. The people I hung with along the way — for minutes, hours, days, week. The density and diversity that allow you to be a voyeur of the mundane.
What I learned from re-examining my relationship with surfing will probably endure the longest.
Things like changing into a wetsuit when it’s below freezing with a wind that cools your organs. The mornings that I’d watch the sun come up from the ocean in Rockaway then bounce from car to train to bike to make it to work in the World Trade Center by 9:30. The raw stoke of beginners, to whom everything is possibility. The joyful “you are here”-ness that’s palpable in the water when conditions come together.
This is the start of my 24th summer surfing. The love has come and gone a few times, bumped around by other priorities and distractions. Surfing in New York jolted my perspective and brought back that love I needed the most.
