Here’s an embarrassing confession but it’s 5AM and I’m jet lagged in Japan so I’ll just let it out. I’m 55 years old and I moved to the East Village in ‘95 from San Francisco in the hope that I’d find my crowd. I’ve always wanted to belong to a scene. I never found that feeling of being in the right place at the right time. It may not ex…
Here’s an embarrassing confession but it’s 5AM and I’m jet lagged in Japan so I’ll just let it out. I’m 55 years old and I moved to the East Village in ‘95 from San Francisco in the hope that I’d find my crowd. I’ve always wanted to belong to a scene. I never found that feeling of being in the right place at the right time. It may not exist. In the 90s I chased it from burning man to Sundance, from DaHaab to Prague. Then I stopped looking so hard.
I spent lockdown in my apartment on grand street working to keep my bills paid and growing insane with isolation. That left out feeling returned. When I read, like the rest of us, all these articles about Dimes Square, after the fact, a whole phenomenon blocks from me, I nearly chewed my fingers off.
My rational side understood that I’m too old, I don’t drink, I had no business being there and would have been bored and boring. But my irrational side felt completely different.
I get waves of desperately wanting to be a part of something. The internet often feels like a window on a street in winter and I’m looking in at the party from outside. But this feeling is something that, for me, is unrelated to my actual participation in anything. It’s not something that is sated. It’s a phantom.
I get the best break from the internet, and from the ache to belong when I spend a few days in a monastery, completely unplugged. Then, in the days that follow, I carry some peace inside until the tugging begins anew.
Here’s an embarrassing confession but it’s 5AM and I’m jet lagged in Japan so I’ll just let it out. I’m 55 years old and I moved to the East Village in ‘95 from San Francisco in the hope that I’d find my crowd. I’ve always wanted to belong to a scene. I never found that feeling of being in the right place at the right time. It may not exist. In the 90s I chased it from burning man to Sundance, from DaHaab to Prague. Then I stopped looking so hard.
I spent lockdown in my apartment on grand street working to keep my bills paid and growing insane with isolation. That left out feeling returned. When I read, like the rest of us, all these articles about Dimes Square, after the fact, a whole phenomenon blocks from me, I nearly chewed my fingers off.
My rational side understood that I’m too old, I don’t drink, I had no business being there and would have been bored and boring. But my irrational side felt completely different.
I get waves of desperately wanting to be a part of something. The internet often feels like a window on a street in winter and I’m looking in at the party from outside. But this feeling is something that, for me, is unrelated to my actual participation in anything. It’s not something that is sated. It’s a phantom.
I get the best break from the internet, and from the ache to belong when I spend a few days in a monastery, completely unplugged. Then, in the days that follow, I carry some peace inside until the tugging begins anew.