Infected By New York

It’s happened, I’ve been totally infected by New York. I am not complaining. I have been reawakened by the mainline jolt of electricity that is now buzzing along my veins. Up until now, I thought that San Francisco was about the biggest city that I could handle, being the shy little Marin country boy that I thought myself to be.
But that boy is gone now, seared away by the epic truth that I have now walked the streets of a real city. I have walked the streets of Paris, and she is beautiful and large as well, but I am far too American in my soul to ever feel at home there. And though San Francisco is where I have always called home, I wonder now if I have just accepted San Francisco because of proximity and because of growing up in a place that everyone tells me is so beautiful and desirable. Yes, this is my home, my roots and family are here, but aside from those strong ties, I have never felt the instant affinity for a place like I felt on the streets of Manhattan.

San Francisco has many charms and does look lovely as it sits like a princess on an azure silk pillow…but once you get closer you find the people cold and unfriendly, rushing about furiously trying to justify the expense of sharing the azure pillow with the princess.

I wonder if the coldness that pervades most of the people you pass on the streets of San Francisco comes from a deep-seated discontent. So many people come here to California, and San Francisco thinking that this place is the answer to the restlessness in their soul, but then they discover that San Francisco is just another place and the answer that they seek is really supposed to come from inside of them…and it just isn’t there, the answer continued to look even further on.

Maybe I am just smitten with New York, like the vivid thrill inspired by a new lover, but something feels so right and connected within me now that I have walked those streets.

Does this herald a new beginning? I rebirth? Not sure, but I think that I need to explore this new lover some more to find out.

Halloween in Penn Station

After the American Cancer Society pasta dinner on Saturday night, we were planning on just heading back to the hotel and having an early night so as to rest up for the race on Sunday. As we were leaving though, Sarah Colloum, the project manager for the ACS Team pointed out that we were very near to Penn Station and that we might want to check it out, being that it was Halloween and all.

So we walked the block to Penn Station and ducked in to get out of the rain.
So there we are, in a walkway leading up to 6th Ave, watching thousands of people coming off the trains dressed up for Halloween…WHAT A TREAT!!!

Many of the girl’s costumes seemed to have a common theme:

• Sexy cop with badge and hot pants


• Sexy nurse with a cap and very short skirt


• Sexy zombie with bloody mouth and very short skirt


• Sexy ganster girl, with fedora and very short skirt


• Sexy…well you get the picture

Now, I wasn’t complaining, but I was more interested in the wild and unusual costumes that passed by, the ones NOT purchased at SexyCostumes.com.

And there were plenty to choose from, several pig outfits with the word Flu written on them, many centurions and gangsters and pirates and zombies and an extremely buff guy dressed as Snow White(boy wouldn’t the 7 Dwarfs been surprised!)
Then there were the just plain out there costumes that defied description, my favorite being a man (I assume) dressed head to toe in a bright green body stocking that covered his face and body completely…or the guy who was a walking Facebook Page with a cutout for his face where the profile page would be.
I was used to the parade and variety at the Castro in San Francisco, but this was truly a special moment for us and we just stood and gawked (and took pictures to be posted later).

Funny, I don’t mind being such an obvious bumpkin here. Besides, Halloween is made for watching and staring right?

Cosmic Tease

Even before we landed at JFK, there seemed to be some kind of cosmic conspiracy to keep us from getting to New York quickly. I know, the cosmos was just trying to build our anticipation, but enough already. Virgin America has wonderful in flight entertainment option s including a way that you can track your actual flight, so that was what I was doing as we approached New York. I popped up the nice Google map and saw our plane pointing East, taking dead aim at New York, but then a funny thing happened, the plan started pointing up (North) and then to the left, (Back West!) Along with the map, the display pops up altitude, airspeed and outside temperature (in case you were wanting to take a stroll on the wing at 30,000 feet, bring a coat…its a nippy 48 below zero and at 500 miles an hour the windchill might be severe).
For the next several minutes, the plane maneuvered through a series of complicated loops and turns that, according to the map, took us over much of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and quite possibly half the Eastern Seaboard. Finally the altitude started to reduce (the outside temperature started to creep up toward zero) and we seemed to get closer to something New Yorkish.

So, down through the clouds and onto solid ground again. We’re getting excited now and it helps that we are in row 5, so we figure that we’ll be some of the first ones off the plane (crafty thinking huh?), except that they don’t open the doors, and we wait, all of us on the plane flooded into the aisles or hunched over by the windows, waiting. Eventually the pilot came on and told us that one of our engines wouldn’t shut off so they couldn’t bring the jet way out to us. I could hear the engine whining in the background and had visions of some crazy cartoon jet spinning around on the tarmac with one engine blasting away…that didn’t happen by the way, we just sat there…waiting.

After about 20 minutes of this, the pilot came on and told us that they had managed to find the off switch and the door opened. We were released, New York here we come!

Not so fast dere bud!

New York wasn’t finished teasing us. We made it down to the baggage claim, only to be held outside the carousels by security guards who said that they were checking out a suspicious bag.

So, another 20 minute wait until they let us in, the suspicious bag having been checked out and whisked off to suspicious bag purgatory. But we were on our way…right?
Nope. The carousel spit out a couple of bags right away, and then…stopped. We all figured that between the delay before we were let of f the plane and then the delay getting into the carousel that there would have been plenty of time to get the bags out of the plane and into our hands.

We figured wrong, so another twenty minute wait…are we ever going to get to New York?
The bags came eventually, K’s alarm clock was going off inside of her bag so I was fairly certain that we were going to be descended upon by all manner of security forces…but they let that slip.

We had planned on taking the New York Airport Service bus to Manhattan. I had called a few days earlier to see if they would take us to the hotel and was assured that “Yeah, we can take you dere.” Funny though, when I spoke to one of the NYAS representatives at the airport itself, he looked at me with a grin and shook his head ‘no’.
He did give us a tip to go to the travelers aid who could arrange a shuttle for us. So we trooped on over to the traveler’s aid and a wonderful lady from Queen’s, Janey, got us set up with a shuttle.

Janey was pure Queens joy, with long blond to grey hair and friendly pretty face that complimented her open-direct demeanor. She was excited to find out that we were running the marathon and when we told her that there was a way to track our progress online, she asked for our numbers and then told us that she’d be at the 56th street bridge in Queens and that she would be rooting for us.
“You don’t gotta worry”, she told us, “Now you got family here in New York!”
Our shuttle driver arrived and we followed him out to the van where another couple climbed in with us.

Great we are on our way, New York here we come!!!!

“Heh, heh, heh. Man, you outta towners are the best y’know?”

The shuttle driver was really quite good, in fact he provided us with an extended tour of every possible turn and terminal available at JFK while he wound his way around looking for more passengers. I had no idea that one airport could be so convoluted and massive.

After a several stops we had filled the van with people and made it to the airport exit.

Woo hoo! Now we’re on our way! Just a quick ride down the Van Wick Expressway and we were there.
That’s when I remembered the Seinfeld episode where George was trying to get to JFK in record time except that, “I’ve never beaten the Van Wick”.

We didn’t either.

2 hours after landing we emerged from the tunnel into Manhattan and now it didn’t matter to us how long it took because we fell into instant tourist-yokel mode. Gawking out the window and being glad that somebody else was driving, especially when it became evident that New York celebrates the last Friday of the month like they do in San Francisco, with the streets being flooded with bikers participating in Critical Mass, although I have to say that New York Critical Massers have a far greater amount of courage than their sometimes noisy SF counterparts. These people were truly insane to try weaving in and out of New York traffic.

I have to say also, that while intense and crazy, I like New York drivers and pedestrians because both have an innate understanding of the physics and motion dynamics. None of this “how-dare-you-think-of-touching-me” pedestrian attitude that seems to pervade West Coast streets. No, here, people on the street understand that a speeding cab will run you down because they are faster and a whole lot heavier that you, so people on the streets pay attention and walk when there are no cars coming, not stepping blithely into the street as if they were impervious to physical laws and damage.

But, we’re here now, and we are ready! And already got family here!

In Flight

So, we’re in flight, somewhere over …umm, someplace snowy with turbulence. I have been bouncing off the walls for the last several days, the excitement about the marathon and getting to New York. K- has been doing a lot of research, which is good because my concentration is shot. I keep running through logistics: how will we get to the ferry? How will we get to the expo? How will we get from the end of the race to the first hotel to pick up our bags and get to the second hotel without collapsing?

But it will all work itself out I am sure.

And then there is New York. A lot of people find it hard to believe that I have lived this many years without ever setting foot there. I have seen it from the Jersey shore, and it is beautiful and thrilling and terrifying and mysterious…and I suspect, intoxicating. Though I wonder if I am still able to be addicted to such things.

We shall see in just a few hours.

Nothing at Face Value?

Last Thursday, I participated in a focus group that looked at various marketing campaigns for Internet Security Software. The other group members were all pretty computer savvy, and all of us had been burned in some way by a computer virus, or security breach of some kind.

The interviewer gave us four paragraphs that basically presented a marketing pitch for each of the systems, after reading them we were to talk about what we liked and what we disliked and then say how much we would pay for it.

Immediately, it became clear that none of us were buying any of the marketing spin that we saw on the paper. We were more experienced than that, and at one point, the interviewer had to tell us..."Just assume that it is true, then how would you feel about it?"

But that's the problem, not a one of us was stupid enough to just "assume it was true." As much as marketers and their compadres would love it if we were that stupid, there are very few people who have grown up in our age of media bombardment that will willingly accept any claim made on an ad at face value. Its absurd to rely on any evaluation of an ad given that caveat.

Add to this absurd assumption that the product, internet security systems, have repeatedly shown to fail at some time or another, either via coordinated system hacks, or through simple human error or avarice and the level of requested assumption drops to less than zero.

Fine, so the focus group premise was a joke...this is not the point that I learned last Thursday. No, what I learned is that my own cynicism and mistrust runs extremely deep within me, as it may within many people. I have been repeatedly disillusioned, deceived and otherwise disappointed by advertising, corporations, politicians and humans in general, and these things have changed me.

I am not a paranoid who believes that the world is out to get me, rather I believe that I am a rational, reasonably intelligent person who has simply lived his life in this modern world and paid enough attention to recognize that there is a pattern of promises not meeting reality that runs throughout the types of interactions that I sited above.

So what do I do with this deep cynicism, because I also have come to recognize that this cynicism rests at the core of so much of my personality. My humor tends toward the witty observation of inequity, or world-weary reality check. Sure, it makes people laugh, but what's the underlying cost of just accepting a world that continuously fails to meet its own stated promises?

Right now, I feel as though I am on the cusp of a change. A decision about how I want to live my life...how I want to be. This decision carries a lot of weight as the choice means that I may have to abandon this core foundation of cynicism, and with it so much of who I seem to have become.

Perspective: 30 Years in a Heartbeat

Interesting contrast.

A lazy afternoon recovering from my 30 year high school reunion and I ran over to the store to pick some things up for dinner. Outside the store was a crowd of high school kids hanging out.

And of course, that got me to wondering.

All the clichés are true of course. Time flies by in the blink of an eye. I knew that the kids hanging outside the store had no clue that in 30 years time they would be walking into a room filled with almost-50-year old adults, all of who bear ghosts of the faces that you once knew so well; ghosts now buried under 30 years of experience. And certainly, the almost-50-year-olds have only the vaguest memories of what is was like to hang out on a warm Sunday afternoon with our minds uncluttered by kids, and mortgages and college tuition and all the other mundane and “grown-up” realities that have filled our once-uncluttered minds.

It is the natural progression of things that we all get older. There is nothing profound in stating this obvious reality. But still, I think that in each of my classmates was a little cringe of just how vivid that reality was. It is one thing to watch our mirror gradually reflect back the receding hairline and growing paunch over incremental time. This slow progress allows us to develop our self-denials that time has much of an effect upon us.

It is when the mirror is stripped away and we suddenly find ourselves surrounded by all of these grown-ups that look like our parents looked, when they should actually look young and eager and goofy and all the things that we remembered them to be, and we wonder, can this really be true? Are these all the same kids? How did they grow so old when I haven’t changed a bit.

Ah sweet denial. I wonder how many of us were eager to go home and confront the mirror after such a night?

Still, seeing the faces of my once young contemporaries, I was encouraged that we all had arrived through our 30 years journey stronger and wiser and, in a deeper way, far more beautiful than the clichéd beauty of coveted youth. The experience etched around our eyes and drawn across our flesh is a coin of real value, for it is purchased in exchange of innocence and naive hope.

Our youthful dreams were once fueled by the innate certainty of immortality, of boundless possibility and an unwavering belief that we could accomplish anything. We had all the answers and the blind self assurance of unyielding possibility.

Now, of course, we know better that life is a formidable opponent. We know that despite our belief to the contrary, our youthful dreams must yield and adapt to the currents of our actual lives. Our dreams have evolved and become stronger by it. We have learned that the cost of making dreams real is long and hard work, pain and often regret at what has to be left behind so that we can move forward.

But, like the ghost faces of the kids that we once were, we can still recognize the shadows of the dreams that we once produced. We know that between those unrealized dreams and the realized dreams of our lives in a wavering and circuitous path that connects them, the common thread being ourselves.

We were once beings of pure and youthful beauty who have grown into the expression of our own beautiful experience.

My New Cards

So I finally broke down and got myself some new business cards. I have been contracting now for a couple years, and never got around to getting any cards made. So here it is.

I had them designed by my girlfriend's sister who is an excellent graphic designer. If you like them and are interested in having her do some work for you I'd be glad to hook you up.

In any case, I started out by just giving her some basic contact information along with what I did for a living. Then I also told her that I liked green, and that I wanted an oak tree on it. Yes, I have a thing for oak trees OK?

I also blanked the phone number, but if you want to give me a gig, let me know and I will give you the number.