I wish i had a hometown - moved around too much as a kid to feel any real proprietary sense of place for anywhere, whatever I may have said about New York at various points of my life. The Upper West certainly doesn't feel like home now. And really the only time it did was in early May, 2001. And maybe May-August 2000, that summer after high school when things were simultaneously lazy and lonely and pregnant with possibility - particularly before my job started and after it ended. Now it feels like a haunted strip mall. Like Scottsdale Arizona transposed 3,000 miles and with all the peole replaced by parents and siblings of people i went to high school with or their younger, high school-age cousins and every store is replaced by a commerce bank or Starbucks. The people my age I see around here are all either making exponentially more than anyone I know or have someone else who's payign their rent, or both. I'm up here because Thursday is my dad's 58th birthday and Lev's here for two days and I had to put in some family time. And now I need to make the long trek back to Sunset Park and classes start up again tomorrow and I feel pretty fucking ambivalent about that. And I am feeling what may very well be a profoundly reactionary yearning for a sense of rootedness and safety sorely lacking in a cityscape transfixed in the shifting geographies of capitalism and gentrification.

There is a stand-up comedian offering witticisms on a reified, binarized gender difference in masturbatory practice, my brother's collapsed in the other room, and I should really be getting home, but am enjoying the late-night internet access outside the panopticon. I really need to get wireless in the apartment, and I want to figure out ways this year to contribute something to my neighborhood other than a footprint for the increasinbg numbers of young white people i see at the 45th Street R station.