It's hard to tell what I was trying to write after that parenthetical remark (contd) after two months have passed. The former entry was probably written on some air-blown mattress in Honolulu where I got stuck because I chose an airbnb tucked in the mountains. I remember not feeling well so ordering bibimbap through uber eats and complaining to uber for thirty minutes so they would refund me the money I had paid.
Traveling different parts of this country the past several months feels very weird. Following 651 miles driven in California and several hundred more in Hawaii, I embarked on yet another road trip a few weeks ago. A short and long weekend, to Las Vegas, where I would head to Utah and Arizona and get ticketed somewhere lost in Utah. Where I would almost fight with a passenger next to me on the flight back to New York. New York. These two words have a strange resonance. In Spanish they translate the New so that they say Nueva York. In French they don't, New York stays New York. Oftentimes abbreviated as NY, or some people prefer NYC because they need to say that it's the City they are talking about not somewhere around Buffalo.
New York. Fitzgerald probably wrote in his seminal work that the view from the Queensboro bridge is always anew, the repetition of that same kind of sentiment you felt when you first entered New York. How do people enter New York anyway? It's strange that the entry to New York occurs through the Queensboro bridge -- hence New York here would primarily mean Manhattan and your having been in Queens won't matter at all. And there literally is no landmass past Queens and Long Island, America finishes right over there.
And don't people also drive here? What about through Lincoln Tunnel if you're coming from Jersey like so many people do? There are so many routes into this little tiny city you could've as well taken the George W Bridge uptown and then you won't be necessarily greeted by the skyline that is so downtown.
Well, so cutting to the point I'm sick of its resonance and what it offers. On the subway two nights ago with unastoundingly took more than an hour because all trains were rerouted and why are trains there in the very first place if they are going to be rerouted all the time there was this ad I had seen for the millionth time on sending money. Miss your family but love the city? Send money as cheap as $3.
It reoccurred to me that no one really lived in this place, and that people just inhabited this weird space. It was a weird ad. Why do you assume that people have family in other parts of the world? When someone lives there won't you more readily assume that that person is a real resident there -- with family and friends and the schools they attended in some ten mile radius? It was a weird ad that was only applicable to this stinky city.
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On my drive back to Las Vegas after one speeding ticket and 1141 miles driven within the span of four days about fifty miles or so left casinos started popping up and a distinct mass of lights that is Las Vegas. We often say it's a mirage, but what else is not a mirage. Isn't this city full of people who don't have real homes or family an actual mirage. Who actually lives here I had asked numerous times and since my first questioning I have luckily encountered some who were actually born and raised in NY and only moved out to NJ recently. Back in Las Vegas I was so worn out and my feet were all swollen. I had probably driven four or more hours that day.
Be it highways or hikes you are in this tubular state of in-between, you aren't there yet, so you are in this sort of tube whose end you haven't seen yet. On my drive to Boston last week it snowed as we passed by Providence -- and the discovery that Rhode Island is further up north! -- and driving 70mph in a uhaul van in all that snow I felt like being sucked into that vast vacuum of a tube. As if my eyes were playing a trick on me. Isn't driving like that all the time in the end. The roads, this open expanse of nothingness, are eventually this vast vacuum of a tube, for tubes don't have to be these closed-off casing sort of things. Intestines are tubes, but you never know if intestines are actually inside or outside, it's a cavity in the end.
1141 miles left me imagining weird things up. Perhaps we'll share my wild imaginations in the future in some form, but this is it for today.
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