Dense.

This past week, Language Foundry writers Joseph Makkos, Carmen Tracy and me, and tech crew Jose Luna took a trip to New York City under a bad moon. We were heading out to read as part of a Small Press reading done monthly at Greenwich Village's Think Coffee (thinkcoffeenyc.com/cup-and-pen). The reading was sweet, though we rolled in 20 minutes late after a series of unfortunate events-- the kind that come with such severity, whimsy and synchronicity, it's hard not to read some sort of meta-narrative into them. Like, are we supposed to skip this trip entirely, now that the 60 mile-per-hour winds are blowing, and the electricity's gone, and all the male intuition around us has its red alert blaring?

But we made it, and the reading was great. If you're from New York, check out Think Coffee. I was really impressed with the list of upcoming events I happened to see advertised there. Friday night, there was a panel on alternative energy, including staff from Just Food (a great NYC organization that sets up CSA's and urban gardens: www.justfood.org).

I ended up stranded in the city for two extra days after buses into Cleveland were cancelled due to weather. I walked around a lot, saw many different sections of the city... New York's tough. I think I tend to assume that when you have such a density of people, you'll see a lot of interesting social interaction going on: the magic of chance meetings. Instead, I got the feeling that the density has really made people put up invisible auras around themselves to ward off possible conversation or contact. You can be standing a half-inch away from someone on the subway and never make any indication they exist. In fact, that's par for the course, the accepted way of doing things.

I was lucky to get to talk with several people I love who now live in New York-- Angela, Megan and Manuel. All of them had things to say about the social isolation of the city, most interestingly, that they felt cut off as artists and activists from other artists and activists, which is pretty crazy, given how I'd always thought both were alive and very well in New York.

Which they are, just not on the surface. What's on the surface is money, not people. People are everywhere, but getting to see their faces is so very difficult-- so much social expectation to navigate, so much fashion sense to cut through, so many rules about where you can sit and how much it will cost you.

It was good for me to see this particular dynamic, as depressing as it was. I've written about how suburban culture pushes people away from each other, and how I believe urban life in certain forms can combat that, just by people being in proximity to each other. But New York really underlined to me how in the end, proximity can help people get in each others' space, but it doesn't mean people will choose to relate with one another. Relationship really is about making a choice, and we seem to be excelling in America lately at coming up with mores that distract people from doing that.