On Living in New York City in 2009, After Watching a Documentary on New York City in the Late 1800s
God's honest truth, I wake up every morning when my clock punches out its dulcet, insistent clangs, a setting called Ultra Zen Up & Out. I brush my teeth with a blue dollar store toothbrush and watch one of the five morning TV shows designed to let me know the weather and traffic every ten minutes, despite the fact no one I know in NYC owns a car, or can afford one, really.
At 8:35am, I don't teleport to work, nor hovercraft, nor take a slick clean monorail. I take the subway, or rather three subways, to work. It takes me 45 minutes and I usually see one of the four following people: crazy chatty religious woman; former classmate I pretend not to see & who pretends not to see me; cute guy who always looks a bit sad, a bit drunk; and a woman I fear is compensating for her weight with enormous accessories, despite the fact that she is beautiful.
At work, I eat yogurt with granola I have to hide in my desk (office rules: mice, roaches). I sometimes use a fresh plastic spoon for the guilty thrill of it instead of the morally right re-usable metal spoon. Have you guys fixed the environment yet? God, I hope so.
Work for me isn't very dangerous. Maybe some eye strain, or repetitive motion injuries, or general fat assedness. Everything is inputting into or printing out of my computer. Even putting stamps on envelopes is computerized. No licking necessary. Do you guys lick anything anymore? I knew the invention of the motorized lollipop was a step in the wrong direction.
After work I guess some people go to bars, or have affairs, or snort expensive stuff. But cheap sober me, I just take my three subways home, this time with mostly tourists or dizzy students whose clothing confuses me. When home, I eat. Then there is more TV and writing, plus looking up old boyfriends on the internet or looking up writer friends and begrudging them their successes (also on the internet). I should brush my teeth before I go to bed, but rarely do. Outside my window, hundreds and hundreds of people in the Astoria beer garden hum like happy drunk hive and I fall asleep.
So that's me in 2009 for you. What about you, you who are reading this in the future? Have we cured cancer yet? Are apes sentient beings? Are we still dressing dogs in raincoats? Are people stacked on top of each other? Do cars still run on gas? Have we used up all our water? Do you still fret about using plastic spoons, still debate whether words need to be banned, still always sucking it in? Are we all still obsessed with thinking we should all be happier than we are? Are we happier?
What about me? Did I ever make it?
If I did, did it make me happier?
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Author's Note
The local PBS station was showing the Ric Burns documentary on New York City, the segment which dealt with 1880s tenement apartments and the charming-named gangs that ruled them. Watching it, it was alarmed to see how similar the tiny, crooked apartments in the archival photos looked like my own small, crooked outer-borough apartment. It made me want to write very precisely about the present, looking both forward and backward: all the things that are different now, and all the things that might be / might stay exactly the same.
This piece is currently submitted to one of my fave lit journals, Monkeybicycle (submitted 7/8/09), but I'm still waiting to hear back.
This really moved me; all your office-drudge details are so true and sad, and I love the Cosmic View perceptual leap at the end. Brava!
Not sure if you are looking to revise, but if you are you could consider 19th-century NYC images -- what the tenements looked like, the factories, etc., and the imagined emotions of the people in them.
Lemme call out these: "students whose clothing confuses me...hum like a happy drunk hive...are we still dressing dogs..." Great.
For last I saved "...motorized lollipops..."
I haven't been to NYC in a while and kept wondering if the lollipops were real or a fiction like those novels mentioned in famous novels, not real but convenient to quote from or describe the plot.
You made it. And you're happier you wrote this. It is of course only a 647 word fragment of your book.
I love New York stories. I love everything about this and particularly how you play with our current ideas about the future and how you make the ordinary extraordinary. The way you balance humor with narrative is also great.
Thanks Roxane & Amanda! Both for your generous & helpful comments & additionally, for encouraging me to finally post, instead of merely lurking!
Larry, thank you for generous feedback as well. I was tickled at the lines you pick out, and can definitively tell you that motorized lollipops do indeed exist! While kids in my day had to endure the hard physical labor of actually moving the lollipop around to ensure all sides were being properly licked, kids today merely have to pop out their tongues and push a button, and the lollipop spins for them. Ah, technology!