blah, blah, blah

I hope the execution of Timothy McVeigh brings everyone the happiness they think it will -- call me a healthy skeptic, but I think not. Just saw on the news that five people were shot execution style in Midtown in a drug-deal-gone-bad. The world's gone mad, but i'm not going to jump in and make it worse -- instead, I just have a few words to say about nothing in particular. Off to Los Angeles for a week -- all the news when I return.

Today I learned from the newspaper that my all-time idol, Frances McDormand, shops daily at Fairway. This is interesting news. I used to shop at Fairway when I lived in the neighborhood, before I lived in an apartment big enough to have a kitchen.

But I also learned from reading the newspaper today, and other days recently, that apparently, we’re all supposed to be heading out of town for the soon-to-be-arriving summer weekends. Hamptons. Martha’s Vineyard. You know the drill.

Or do you? I don't.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been a good New Yorker – that’s the problem with having been around here for too long. If you’re part of my Long Island family, it’s not even New York anymore. It’s ‘the city’. or more commonly, ‘in there’, as in ‘why would we want to go in there’. When you’re from the suburbs, you don’t revere New York. You see it as a place to make a lot of money, to get something accomplished. Like make money. Or begin a career.

And the reality is, when it comes to all the things that midwesterners and Germans alike care about and often move in for, well, a true New Yorker just doesn’t give a rat's ass. He’s been taking the Long Island Rail Road too long to have any feeling left in his posterior or his brain. Who are all those dazed people riding the subway? They aren’t necessarily NYU film students – they’re moms with kids, and they’d really like to catch the 5:10 to Massapequa or Central Islip so they can get the Hamburger Helper going before the kids get home from soccer at seven.

Basically, we’re just a bunch of boring people. Sometimes a little more than culturally unaware – lots of us don’t go in for the Arts. Most don’t go in for long nights at Nobu and others may never know the pleasure of a leisurely Sunday in Central Park. I have a distant relative whose spouse works a high-paying, what any outsider would consider glamorous show-biz job. Actually, it’s one of the sexier jobs held down by any one anywhere remotely close to the family. The guy, by all rights, should have a nice Upper West Side brownstone and a cottage (at least) in Sagaponack or Sag Harbor.

Try again. Can you say Centereach? Try to get him to talk about his job, and all he can say is “yeah – it’s going okay.” And then he goes on to complain about the mexicans and how they’re basically the downfall of society. You know, the issues that shape the Long Islander's world. Never mind that most of the ‘mexicans’ on Long Island come from El Salvador. Which is another one of life’s little mysteries. When you’re in El Salvador, do you think Long Island, and in subsequent word association tests, “Fame! Fortune! Okay by me in Lake Ronkonkoma!”

Who knows. All I know is that New York is very different when you've spent your life in places like Queens, Suffolk, and places like Kingston that are barely even connected to the city except when some idiot from the Bronx gets arrested on drug charges because the cops found it suspicious that an NYC yellow cab was speeding through the light at Broadway and Franklin at 2AM on a Friday night. I don’t know what tipped them off.

So anyway, I’m pretty much held suspect in front of my entire family for even wanting to be in the City – it’s enough that I live in here, let alone a questionable section of Brooklyn (well, questionable can be taken so many ways when we’re talking about Park Slope) where the rents are too high. Everytime I return to Suffolk County (which is less and less frequently) it’s “Hey – how’s the City?” Should I actually find something to say in response that I think they might find interesting, all of a sudden, they have to rush off to clean their teeth or watch RAW IS WAR in the back bedroom.

God forbid I should get more black in my wardrobe or get a subscription to the Met, buy a beach house or get my nails done. I’d never hear the end of it.

Truth is – most New Yorkers have a healthy mistrust of anything that has anything to do with the image that New York projects out over the Hudson and on to the rest of the nation and then the world. And that’s probably true of most cities, where residents of outlying neighborhoods generally dislike or view the essence of the city with some suspicion. If you think about it -–Manhattan with it’s puny 1.4 million occupants (I guarantee you that a good .5 of that million are pretty boring) against the rest of the metropolitan area of 20 million?

At heart, we’re just a bunch of working joes. Some of us are even pretty trashy, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Suddenly, not so Okay by Me in New York City. What's the point in staying, when I can be trashy in Milwaukee. Or Pittsburgh.

Which I actually happen to have a major soft spot for. But that’s another time.