I’m Too Much with Myself

“You’re back in your old neighborhood…

I want to thank you all for nothing”

–“Misunderstood”, Wilco

Day 7 in NYC and I’ve starting to go from nothing to anger and I don’t like it.

It seems when I’m alone I feel best and most calm and detached from the immediate.

NYC is a walking town so its me and my Zune on my Windows phone lost in noise rock and feedback, enveloped in a womb of distortion while traveling down the lower east side.

That’s better than actually feeling things. Seeing old haunts and neighborhoods I spent a good deal of my 20’s wasting time in. Cruising by the first apt my wife and I lived in before we were married. The bars we hung out in and markets we frequented. I’d say about 50% are still around. Good odds these days.

The trip to Zuccotti park to see the OWS crowd was one of the few truly inspiring visits I took. It managed to distract me from myself to something bigger for about an hour. I still think of it now occasionally.

Whatever you may feel about the movement, to me a bunch of people getting together for weeks (possibly months) on end to gather and collectively display their anger and frustration without actually calling for any concrete demands and without any visible leader emerging  is somehow comforting and inspiring in all it’s Quixotic awesomeness.

An amorphous collective of humanity gathering in a park in downtown Manhattan as a representation of discontent with the way Things are and that’s it.

Can you feel it? Can you beat that?

I know I can and can’t.

Unfortuantely these walking tours have to end and I arrive back at my parent’s Riverdale apt where I start to notice emotion trying to crawl out of the detachment like an ugly rat out of a subway grate.

Maybe I need a Zuccotti park of the interior. A place I can go to join a collective of the soul to vent against the unfairness of it all. A place to commune with others while protesting the darkness.

Where the hell is such a place?

In me? In my heart? Mind?

I’m not the spiritual type so I suspect the answer for me is not very metaphysical.

I’m pretty sure my Zuccotti park is back in my (real) home in Charlotte, NC with my wife and kids.

My family.