No matter what you do, here, you can never stand out in the crowd. No matter how "weird" or "unconventional" you may be. Here all freaks are standards. Here everything is accepted. It has all been seen before. You cannot shock anyone. You cannot make anyone stare at you with a puzzled look.

These people - they have seen it all, and they keep on seeing it all each and every day - in the subway, on their way to work, on a street corner, once they stop for their daily hot-dog. Right next to the Chinese fast-food counter. On the Metro stairs, the ones that are taking you from the city that is on the surface, the city above, to the city in the tunnel, down below, where there is no natural light and the sky are not to be seen.

They see it on their lunch break, at a bagel deli. On Fifth Avenue, doing shopping. In the great breathtaking hall of Grand Central, that is almost 24 hours a day packed with people coming and going in such a rush.

In Central Park late at night, when the street buzz has somewhat subsided. In Central Park on a bright sunny day, when you see parents with children walking peacefully or playing on the lawn with rolling laughter, joggers and roller-bladders swing by, old people on a bench reading the paper, baggers asking for money, artists and musicians performing or displaying their arts, mad people making abstruse conversations with themselves. Dogs and cats and scrawls and birds of all kinds.

You see everything in every corner, between those mountains of bricks and concrete, so high that in order to see a piece of sky or sun you really have to stretch your neck until it hurts. From your office window on the 43rd floor of some high building. In a mad club with alternative music and the freakiest of the freaks, right behind an ancient church doors. In gay bars where the lady-boys are playing "bitchy-bingo" and pulling each other's legs to the entertainment of the crowd.

You see everything, everywhere, in every corner, behind every closed door.

And you can see a piece of sky here, in this Sky View

Part 4: Overloaded with emotions

this travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
about bookshelf links contact submit