Wandering in the Wilderness of New York

 

Walking in the dark evening through the streets of New York.  Rain, snow, both?

Where the two events on the same day?  I don't know.

My time walking the streets of New York waiting for the midnight bus all seem to blend into one series of events, as if they all happened on the same Saturday in Manhattan.  

When I was young I learned a philosophy of life from watching the Rod Serling television program 'The Twilight Zone."  I didn't know the genre term 'film noir' then, but I got the concept of a shifting world where nothing is ever certain and rules that apply somewhere else might or might not apply as one tries to figure out what other people's motives are, and who is friend or foe.  

"Kill me, or I will kill you," is a most basic level of conflict.  People are killed every day in New York City.  People die naturally every day in NYC.  There are about ten million people in the metro area, so just about everything that can happen to a person throughout life and into death is going to happen in New York on any given day.  Live with it, or, die with it.  

I found some books on the street.  Nobel Prize winner Ulysses by James Joyce.  Antique China with Pearl S. Buck resurrected from the library dust by Oprah Winfrey.   

My main problems related to 'killing' in NYC was 'killing time.'  I also was constantly looking for bathrooms.  In order to sit in a restaurant or shop one must at least buy a drink.  So, one must relive one's self at some point.  I found that I could just go into the Port Authority Bus Terminal and descend three floors to the bathroom because I had a bus ticket and a right to be in the building and the bathroom.  I also learned to go up to some construction dumpsters and pee while not looking down or holding my dick.  

After relieving myself one rainy night I went back to Times Square to sit in the open public area and watch people until my time for the bus back to Boston came.  I sat under an awning of a food stand and also had my umbrella to one side as a steady rain fell.  I was a little cold and damp, but not to bad in my warm jacket and snug against the hot dog stand wall.