i know it's just the war

[rm]

I'm walking home with a sack of groceries, and as I pass down a block I pass down several times a day every day a man from a group of people hanging out there takes a handful of change out of his pocket, shakes it like dice and then pours it out on the ground. $1.37, but reading the results he informs me, "The signs say you will always have that ugly, retarded face and there is nothing you can do about it." The people he is with, of mixed gender and race, and all between the ages of about 20 and 35, laugh. I ignore it, and try tell myself it's just the war, not the one in Iraq, but the one that happens every day in New York about gentrification, race and money. I know half my neighborhood hates the other half and vice versa, but mostly, we all keep it to ourselves, except when things get out of hand like in the blackout or when the buildings come down.

It's hard for me to be surprised by these things. It's a rare day when someone doesn't call me ugly. Isn't that strange? It may be a rare day when someone doesn't call you ugly too, you just might not be as tuned in on the streets. Or maybe I'm just lucky.

Sometimes, I think it's because I don't have a modern face. It's such a throwback, the issue isn't that I'm not an MTV hottie, but that I look like someone who should have died decades or centuries ago. Maybe people see me and recognize the dead, and in their fear of mortality declare my features sin.

I wonder about things like that all the time. Strange mystical reimaginings of the casually cruel world. I also wonder sometimes if we hate the Arab world because they gave us the zero. Perhaps we do not see a revolution in math, an efficiency in accounting but an entire people that innovated the language of numbers solely so that we would at long last be able to name our worthlessness.

All of this though just underlines the reasons I don't do so well in the world. I think there's some sort of sublime artfulness under all the random hate and it makes me oblivious, both to the sheer bludgeoning stupidity of it all and of course the fact that I may indeed be ugly.

Comments

[darkdevotchka.livejournal.com]

I think most of those "MTV hotties" are absolutely foul!
Which neighborhood is this, by the way? Only because as you probably know, I've been to NYC 4 times and I am in love with the city, and feel I am "coming home" every time I visit. You probably understand considering you feel that same love for Sydney.

But yes, I saw things in NYC that I would never see in Sydney, and it both shocked and intrigued me. No wonder people become so goddamn hard there -- as we Aussies imagine anyway. I did come back to Sydney feeling slightly empowered, but also very bored because the city wasn't fast and aloof enough for me. Though, sometimes those Aussie yobs can be just as harsh too.

[rm.livejournal.com]

This is in the East Village -- yesterday on 3rd just west of C to be specific.

The weirdest thing for me about Sydney, well there were several, but one was the lack of homeless people (I saw three the entire time I was there, and I was _everywhere_), and the other was the glitter/gutter factor -- there's a lot of really skeevy stuff in or just around the corner from some really nice neighborhoods -- hence my fascination with Darlinghurst. Your city's relationship with sexual commerce could not be more different than mine.

In Sydney the number one non-political thing I got as an American was a "of course you can be famous, you're American, it doesn't occur to you that you shouldn't be." And I thought that was so fascinating, this belief that it's just a choice, and one that so many of the Australian performers I met felt they didn't have a right to make.

Next time we're each planning to travel we should maybe discuss an apartment swap.