Today’s soundtrack: it’s one two three four take the elevator
Today at 12:22am: Activating my E-Z Pass


When the light turns green on the West Side Highway at 57th Street, everyone stomps on the gas and starts jockeying for position.

The entryway to the Henry Hudson is wide and steeply slanted, so you feel like you’re on the on-ramp to Heaven. I love hearing the engines unspool and watching the pathetic taxis in my rearview mirror trying to get the best of me. Beat it, amateur. You’ve got twice the cylinders but half the talent.

I love the city in a way most New Yorkers do not, because I was yanked out of it at a relatively early age and socialized in a suburb. I didn’t get to return until college.

It’s midnight before Thanksgiving Day and I’m headed back towards that suburb, feeling neutral about it. I neither love nor hate the place but I’ve got history there. To prove it to myself I get off the highway early, taking local roads through the area where I went to high school.

Here we go. The now-closed restaurant I used to work in. The spot where I got into my first car accident (I wasn’t the driver). The hospital where I used to drop broken people off in the ambulance (I was the driver). The house where I lost my virginity. The parking lot I almost got my ass kicked in. And on and on.

The ‘80s seems so long ago. I suppose in a multiple-dimensions sense a ghostly version of my 17-year-old self is still driving around these parts in a battered Datsun. I can’t say who’s luckier. At least I don’t get sent to the principal’s office anymore.

I stop off at the diner to get some late-night chow and enjoy my little flashbacks. The place is packed with kids. A totally different generation. Looking out the window, I can see some of these little snits getting into their Saabs. Little whippersnappers...you call that garbage “music”....

The same guy is working the register and he still looks like Jabba the Hutt, but he’s older now. At first he doesn’t recognize me, I figure it’s the shaved head.

In 1989 I had hair and Detention.


“Hi, I hate you.”