Oh Yeah

"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless." 

— Simone de Beauvoir

Late and a little bleary-eyed this morning after the HUD housing neighbors decided to allow their autistic three-year-old to blow off a little steam in the hall outside our door between 3:30 and 5:30. It seems Dad, the guy who lit their apartment on fire after getting into it with Mom two weeks ago, needed his beauty rest, so Mom took Junior outside, where he went fully feral and started howling.

Slane couldn't compete with this; didn't even try.

The child's favorite phrase is "Ooooooh Yeah!", repeated literally hundreds of times, with the same gravelly menace as the talking Kool Aid pitcher that used to burst through walls in those ads forty years ago. In between that little incantation, he'd let out some kind of cross between a howl and a growl, making a sound that seemed to convey the feeling of religious ecstasy and passing a rather large kidney stone.

These people shouldn't be in this building, not because they're poor but because they're genuinely awful neighbors, with zero regard for anyone around them. A city of 8.5 million people can only exist because we all mostly stay out of each other's way and don't behave in a way that makes it impossible for everyone around us to do their own thing.

At least that seems to be mostly true in Manhattan. I'm told Queens may be a different thing.

Yesterday I worked a little in the morning, then stepped off around 11 with P for the day's adventure. We started our peregrination with a trip up to McSorley's on 7th Street.

The oldest bar in New York, McSorley's has been serving either dark or light beer in little mugs since 1854. Abraham Lincoln bent an elbow here.

Inside there's sawdust on the floors, and the walls are cluttered with 170 years of memorabilia. The place is dark, free of televisions or Muzak. In other words, perfect.

A nice young native with a thick accent, in the traditional barkeep's gray tunic, brought us beer and fries and a wonderful Feltman's hot dog. Even Peg seemed to approve.

Afterward we walked down Broadway to the subway station to get on the M for the trip to Roosevelt Island. The train was delayed by about twenty minutes, which was annoying but what do you want for $3? I then mistakenly disembarked at Rockefeller Center, which led to a very long but pleasant walk down to the East River and up ten blocks to catch the cable car tram that crosses the Queensborough Bridge onto Roosevelt Island.

Once there we chatted up a couple nice docents in the visitors' center, a converted trolley station from the late 19th century.

Roosevelt Island is a very strange place, but in a good way. It's quiet---I mean really quiet, with leaves rustling in the breeze and the sound of the East River lapping on each side. Back in the day it hosted a smallpox hospital on the south end--now a crumbling ruin that seems to be a favorite place for Canadian geese to hang out with their goslings--and a lunatic asylum on the other. In between are a few apartment buildings with commercial spaces on the first floor. Free red buses circulate on the perimeter road that rings the long, skinny body of land, but one could certainly walk it.

We started south to see the monument to FDR and to the Four Freedoms.

Reading the Four Freedoms chiseled in stone there reminded me of how far we've fallen as a country. Freedom from Want? Really? Sounds like some sort of commie plot to me.

Up on the north end we found the island's iconic lighthouse and a series of sculptures of women's faces interspersed with quotes from Nellie Bly, a journalist who went undercover into the lunatic asylum in 1887 and wrote an expose about the deplorable conditions there.

Finally we found the Octagon itself, the old administrative building of the asylum.

They've redeveloped the place as luxury apartments. It's quiet as a tomb inside, and outside were lots of families with small kids taking walks or playing in the leafy playground behind the main building.

And it's all just one stop on the M from the heart of Manhattan's restaurant and theater district.

Yes, we're thinking about it, but not too hard. I sense we could live there and be pretty happy, but maybe it would make sense to rent something for a month after we've been away awhile, and see how it feels.

A busy one today--I have a witness interview in a couple hours, and a big Zoom hearing a couple hours after that in which I have the lead speaking role. Later we have friends coming into town from Corning, and we'll spend the weekend hitting a couple art shows and enjoying the down time before graduation festivities next week---no one's emailed me about a failing grade, so I'm thinking this may actually happen.