Stockholm Syndrome

"It turns your skull into a cage and your brain into a rat, and the city is just a stick poking the rat all day." - Patton Oswalt

Were someone to ask me to sum up my attitude to life in a single word, I would say, "more." Time has always struck me as patently unfair, as it constantly wakes me when I am dreaming, prevents me from attending two concerts simultaneously, limits the number of conversations I can have with my friends.

New York City both exacerbates and soothes this need to experience the muchness of life as richly and often as possible. There are so many neighborhoods whose architectural oddities I've yet to discover, so many diners whose ability to make a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato I've yet to sample, so many people whose capacity for humor and wonder in the face of existence I've yet to appreciate, but the amount of stimulation I receive any given day in New York can fulfill any demand I built up while asleep. Conversely, as anyone with who exercises or ingests substances will tell you, a tolerance builds up and there is a greater baseline required before one can reach The Zone.

There are people who can see the city's flaws. They see the lumpy sidewalks, the flooded intersections, the broken bottles of malt liquor, the homeless man asleep on the subway platform, the graffitoed construction awnings, the rats and roaches and say, "this place is fucking filthy." They hear the unending babble of other people reporting the details of their sex lives or pontificating their views on the Whitney biennial, the rumble and screech of the subway erupting from the sidewalk grate, the blare of horns up and down Canal and say, "this place is a fucking cacophony of misery." They smell the clouds of cigarette smoke, of exhaust fumes, of restaurant Dumpster soaking in the heat and humidity and say, "sweet fucking Christ, Hell has actually broken out on Earth." They see the disciples of capital jabbering into their Bluetooths or the chain-smoking men on the Chinatown corners or the medallioned guineas tooling around Bay Ridge in SUVs or the tense mothers cheering at soccer practice in Prospect Park or the hipsters in their dark jeans and bright sunglasses or the pale and fat-faced Orthodox with their endless broods of little rituals and ask, "who here is not hateful?"

Me, I just chalk all the inconveniences and horror up as The Price of Admission. But I know that's not quite right. Because there's something so wonderfully honest about the city. About the way that it confirms and destroys stereotypes, forces you to confront certain realities about capitalism, democracy, authority and the primacy of day-to-day interaction over theory, and above all its focus on sharing - shared streets, shared transportation, shared parks, shared eateries, shared beauty, shared shame. Not that the city is socialist in its politics, but rather that there is constant exposure to the best and worst of what humanity can create, on both the individual and societal levels.

Another way to put this: I like having my rat-brain prodded with a stick. The response shows that the old mainframe is still booted up and working, that I have not gone somnolent and retreated behind the soothing repetitive images of a screen-saver. I can hear and smell and see and taste and even when my senses are repulsed by what they encounter, they still want more.