Blue Sky Thinking

Marriage is panning out to be pretty glorious. To qualify that, it's not the institution itself, but more the woman I am married to.

It's a sunny autumnal day in New York City, and after a few chores this morning, I'm off into Manhattan (I'm having to forcibly restrain myself from using my habitual phrase 'I'm going into town'...I don't think there's any place on earth for which a grander understatement could be concieved) to print out a few CVs and send them off, and then in the afternoon I shall have a bit of a wander around the West Village (oh, whoops, no. I was wrong. There's that grander understatement) to pick out a venue for tonight's meal.

I need to get out into Manhattan, into New York, more. I'm not just talking about the nightlife (of which, for the first time anywhere I've lived, I'd say there is about the right amount) but the city itself. I put my hands up and say that while I love it to pieces so small they could be used as cat litter, I do find it a bit intimidating sometimes, but never when I'm there; only when I'm at home and the have the idea of it. It's a mood thing. I'll get used to it, I'm sure. When going into the city gets routine. It's less of an intimidation, really. That's the wrong word. I'd say more of an overwhelming...and again only because of what has gone on in my mind.

Before I arrived in New York I thought, idly, to myself, that the best way I could use the time (possibly the afternoons, after jobsearching) before obtaining gainful employment was to Get To Know The City. Pound the pavement. Get to know the Big Apple on a foot scale...walk around til I have a mental map of the place, and know a few of the landmarks, the neighbourhoods and the more noticeable bars and cafes...that sort of thing.

Something which might have been a bit much of a task to set oneself whilst sitting on a sofa in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, waiting for SSX 3 to load.

Sometimes, catching the subway from Astoria to Manhattan, the city feels like poetry. Motion in four dimensions, with myself as a part of the pattern as it expands, intermeshes with every other element and goes on, moving, walking, driving, flying, existing in and around and through itself, linkages unfolding and spinning through each other as the carriage comes around on an elevated track a hundred feet above the cars below it, lining up with the bridge, you can see the skyline of Manhattan; the Empire and the Chrysler buildings above the river and the carriage moves into the interlaced girders and tracks and platforms and the looping feeder roads for the bridge and the track angles downwards and you plunge through the complex web of steel and concrete to the tunnel under river, and above and through it all is the light of a setting sun and a few pale clouds...it's beautiful.

I romanticise. The city is people. People and the places they have built to do the things they do. But it is itself as well, and the sheer mass of it is breathtaking.

There is intense small-scale detail on top of the majesty of size, which makes it all the more overwhelming for the mind to take in, if indeed, it tries.

That is the option I don't want to take. I don't want to stop trying to take it all in, to see it all and to get to know it. It's just an impossible task, but at the same time, something which will happen...by itself, gradually, I suppose.

This little-town boy is melting away.