camwyn | An open letter to the City of New York

Dear City:

I am not one of those people who believes only bad things about you. Neither am I the sort of person who knows you only through TV, movies, books, and music. I was born in one of your hospitals, in Manhattan. I was raised in Queens. I attended your schools, both public and parochial. When I give up meat for Lent, it is not the restaurants of New Jersey (where I live now) that tempt me; it is the dirty-water hot dogs of Manhattan's streets, the gyros of Astoria, that sting me with regret. I have been to the tops of your tallest buildings, both the ones that no longer exist and those that remain standing. I adore your museums, the names of your businesses, the very layout of your streets. I happily take strangers into your heart to show them around. I get very bewildered when my sister complains that she hates you, that she hates trying to navigate through your streets - how hard can it be, in Manhattan? You find an avenue that heads north and you take it until you find a cross street in the general direction you need to go, and turn down the cross! So what if the taxis are trying to kill you?

I have visited your parks. I have seen the gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo, and I like them and their straight companions. I love the aquarium in Brooklyn, the zoo in the Bronx, the vast stinky stretch of Flushing Meadow Park along Jamaica Bay where my first kite got eaten by my first tree. I laugh like a child when a plane I am on takes the OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE turn to come in and land on La Guardia Airport's runways. I've skated at Rockefeller Center and I've taken innocent people to eat at the Jekyll and Hyde Club, and they've thanked me for it. I've skated the main loop of road through Central Park more times than I can remember.

I worked out of a truck in lower Manhattan - as in Duane Street and West Broadway - on September eleventh, 2001, and on Liberty Street on September twelfth of the same year. And I'd do it again, if you needed me.

What I am trying to say, New York, is that I love you and appreciate you in a way that I do not think most people understand. You are my favourite city, no matter how many others I visit. I am happy to spend upwards of $12 a visit to get from where I am to where you are, just to see one museum. I adore you, I really, really do.

That being said...

Would it be too freaking much to expect ONE non-museum trip to Manhattan to go by in which I did NOT wind up stepping in dog poo? Huh? One! Just one! Jesus freakin' Christmas, how hard is that to understand? Dog. Poo. Does. Not. Belong. On. The. Sidewalk. C'mon, people, either pick it up in a baggie or bring a newspaper and shove it into the street, or over towards a tree, or something. I'm getting really freakin' tired of it.

Thank you. That is all.