Since the proverbial cat is out of the bag, I thought I'd list some reasons why I left NY. I cut out two separate things from New York's paper:
Sharon Jones, the songstress, answered the following upon being asked
What could be different about New York to make it better?"In my 20's and 30's, I thought,
I love New York; I don't ever want to leave. But now it's just so hard, watching people struggle, unhappy, working two or three or four jobs just to pay rent. It was nice here at one point. I still love it here, but I'm ready to settle down, buy a home. What can you own here? Nothing. If they decide they want back the land you're on, then you're out. That's not how it should be. People should be able to work one job, make a decent living, pay decent rent. Feel like they're someone."
The second article I cut out was from a long time NY resident, a writer, Luc Sante, calling himself a "haptic poet:"
"I still get people asking me to write about New York, which I basically don't do anymore. For awhile, I was consumed by this sort of angry nostalgia, remembering the New York I knew. But now it's just gone. So I can marvel at what they're doing to the Bowery and Little Italy, putting up these pocket skyscrapers on these blocks of six-story tenements. Fuck it--let 'em do it. The more they erase my New York, the further it's emotionally removed from me, the better. Let them turn it into Bejing."
And tertiarilly, I quote Chuck Palahnuik from
Diary: "The way people are coming...more and more every summer, you see more litter. But of course, you can't cap growth. It's anti-American. Selfish. It's tyrannical. Evil. Every child has the right to life. Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We're entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it--but that's the system of checks and balances, the way the market adjusts itself."
Personally, I prefer recalling the old fashioned rat experiments of the seventies: Put two rats in cage, they get along swimmingly. Add another, OK, they can still cohabit peacefully. But those scientists kept on adding rats and soon they were eating their young.
Just thought I'd write that so everyone knows.
Despite all my rage, I was still just a rat in a cage.
