Welcome

Time as you know it means nothing in New York City. It’s a place that doesn’t know where its going, can’t be bothered to remember where its been and is only concerned with the gas in the tank, the cigarette dangling from its lips and having the pedal firmly planted on the floor. Yesterday is ancient history, today is too late and tomorrow is already passing you by. Fasten your seat belts and hold on tight, baby baby – things only get crazier from here.
This city whispers the language of Babel. It’s thousand tongued breath whips through concrete, steel and glass canyons to snatch your hat off and water your eyes. Don’t matter where you’re from, my friend, everyone understands you in New York. It’s a labyrinth of the insane, which is just a cynical way to say that it’s the biggest, wildest party in the world and anything goes as long as you pay the piper. Farsi in the cab, Chinese in the restaurant, Japanese at the bar and Spanish anywhere else. Maybe you just speak that other language that comes up occasionally here, but don’t fret, baby baby, because everyone understands the green. That’s why they have come to this city reaching unto heaven and that is why you are here too. One world, united in the pursuit of dead presidents. That’s beautiful corruption – shining and stinking “like a rotting mackerel by moonlight,” *
Don’t be fooled by the fun. It may be a party, but it’s not a punch bowled, finger food and funny hatted affair. It’s an exclusive deal and the odds are on you not quite making the cut. Only the richest, hardest, best connected, or just plain lucky make it across the East River to sip 10 dollar biers and sneer at the less fortunate, and the more you think about it as you lay in bed alone at night, the more you suspect that maybe babee…that’s just not tú. It’s the biggest fishbowl in the world, my little minnow and everyone likes sushi, so grab some chopsticks, a bottle of soy sauce, and let the cannibalism begin because they strive like pyrates on Manhattan island – no quarter given and none expected – let the bones of the fallen pave the sidewalks.
Constant. Pathological. Renewal. New York has been the city of tomorrow since roughly 1939 and shows no signs of giving up that position. Unlike other places whose reputations are built upon past greatness, every day is a hey day in Nueva York. Every 24 hours the bar is raised, mounted, then raised again, infinitely onward because it’s too late to turn back and they lost sight of the ground long ago. Every morning, the city yawns, stretches and gets back to the grim business of outdoing itself.
And you want a part of all of this? You want a little slice of this concrete anthill that you can call your own? Perhaps. Or perhaps what you really want is to walk to the edge of apocalypse and out there in that rushing darkness you want to squint off into the directionless void and scream and howl right along with it. You can find that kind of thrill in a place like this. If you brace yourself and open your eyes, you can catch a flash of the true wonder and ferocity of the human endeavour. It will last for a second then disappear like the tail of a shooting star – a tear in the gossamer of reality. You can’t forget though. Not once you’ve seen it. Its burned into you with a white hot acetylene glow so you either slap a bad-aid on and keep swimming or sink to the bottom to have your bones picked clean by the other fishies.
The game is fast and the stakes are high in the Giant Fruit Machine, so keep your wits on your sleeve and your nose to the grind. If the rules keep changing, well…that’s par for the course, baby baby – it’s what you get for going 18 with the maniacs. If you fail to rise, sometimes you have to dig your way up through the basement just so you can get a seat at the golf-green table where the real game is happening. If you can’t beat’em, cheat’em,” as my acquaintance Kid Klipse likes to say; so if you get tired of the same, change the game, because rules mean nothing to the insane.

*John Randolph