Hello World
My walk to work passes under the BQE, where it’s a straight run of highway overpass and roadway and the streetlights converge to points in the distance both ways late at night. During the day we look out over New York Harbor. The sunsets are unbelievable, and the days are bright and windy.
It’s weird because I don’t associate vanishing-point views with New York City. It’s not a place that works like that. Space and time and memory aren’t linear here, they’re interwoven and written through and traced in Copernican epicycles and intersecting Spirograph arcs. From the subway to Manhattan I can see the building where my grandfather’s first office was; in Union Square I pass benches where I fell in and out of love. Experience is intertwined with place, as memories overlay memories and very little runs straight on to the horizon.
For a while now I’ve been hiding behind the convenient fiction of being a man better with his hands than with words. Tangible things are less tricky, somehow - I’ve also had a knack for partnering with women readier with words than I, and a comfort with the restricted code of technical language and the shop.
That only goes so far, though, and at some point I need to get back to the world of language - dialogue, explanation, conversation, and perhaps even a little bit of speechifying.
Hello world. Nice to be here.
