aztecs and incas.

So, I've been here in Manhattan for days, and I just can't get comfortable. I really noticed it the first night, when I was thrashing in my sleep. I woke up with a stiff neck from it. Maybe I should just sleep on the couch. Last night I finally lay there with A Lover's Discourse in my hands, and I fell asleep on the book. [I thought that was only something that happened in movies about stressed out college kids, normal people don't just fall asleep mid-sentence.] I woke up with it crammed between the edge of the bed and the night stand. Open to the passage called 'How Blue the Sky Was'. I had underlined one phrase. Historical hallucinations. Sometimes I feel like I'm hallucinating my life. Making it into what I want it to be. Like I walk around and see things and want to see what I want to see, so I do. I ignore what I don't want to acknowledge. That can't be right.

In any event, I talked to Jenny on the phone the other day and she told me a really funny story about this group of girls who really like Aug. Or maybe it was one girl. Anyway, she was a real piece of work and the way Jenny described her made me laugh really hard. I felt bad cause I couldn't think of any funny things to tell her — I let down my end of the deal. I told her about the girl in Union Square who told her mother about how she's in debt and she's breaking up with her boyfriend or husband (I couldn't tell if it was a divorce but there was definitely something big and wonderful for her that turned into something big and terrible for her.) "I want the rug. For my room. That's the one thing I really want." Later: "I just want that TV we had in our bedroom. He already has the big one. That was his thing and I don't care if he has that. I just want the little one."

The thing that strikes me the most about the way people work here is that it's best not to acknowledge the presence of a million other people. I don't feel any connection to strangers at all. It's like they won't even give me the courtesy of staring at me to make fun. It leaves you feeling kind of lonely, even though that's impossibly counter-intuitive.

Last night I went up on the rooftop again. It's better than the fabricated parks, which kind of feel like they're only there cause someone decided it was okay to PUT them there. Up on the roof, you get the feeling like the buildings are nature — a weird, man-made imposing nature, but the way things should be occurring, I guess —and you're alone up there to take it all in. There's ambient noise and everything.
One day, Emily, George and Jzana joined me up there. George and I talked about the buildings, we both liked the silhouette of the UN. I wondered if the city was built that way first, and then people acclimated to the way the architecture was (vast, enormous, impersonal, intimidating) or if the people had that quality already, and that's why the buildings were so designed. We also stared into people's windows for nearly an hour. One kid just sat on MySpace all night, and would randomly sit up and go to the window. It cracked me up, watching this person's routine. Someone joined him eventually. Everyone was kind of boring, but it was entertaining enough to leave us staring for a while. Maybe it's just cause we were stoned — we could have been staring at anything and using our imagination to make it fun. That's probably the trick of it.