the big apple. how i hate thee.

friends and family,

philly seems to have been merely a village compared to what we now see. just walking a block down these crowded streets is enough to make us need a nap. of course, living where we do.. we always need a nap. back in philly we had been kicked out of sleeping spot by the police so we slept in a park… just waiting to get kicked out which didn’t happen unless you count the sprinklers that turned on in the middle of the night… forcing us to move and sleep on wet grass… already wet… and cold. life is beautiful. so we caught our bus for NYC yesterday at 1:45 with $1.20 in our pockets. quite enough to get by in a city we’ve never been. at least not like this. anyway, central park closes at 1 a.m. so we slept by a fountain. the police here seem to be … rather rude. anyway, we slept until dawn and then moved into the park and slept till 10. so we actually got plenty of sleep. then we had this very long one way conversation with an interesting lady who claimed to be a traveler, but by that i’m guessing she means she travels from one side of central park to the other. she had about three different suitcases and plenty of pointless things. i think she said she was robbed and didn’t have the money to leave. anyway, she gave us some good info on shelters and such, but we had to walk further to get to lunch than we ever had to walk in a day in philly. life here will take much adjusting. other than food, there are people playing instruments everywhere you go, and despite the news that you could make 3 or 4 hundred bucks on times square i don’t think we’ll be making that much money here. i could be wrong… i usually am, but everything is so loud that you can barely hear yourself speak. let alone hear a guitar in passing. everyone is in such a hurry. right now we are in the Apple store on 59th and 5th. it’s madness in here… much like everywhere else in this city. 

we are being taught many things, and many of these things we did not expect to learn. many of them we did expect like exhaustion, hunger, frustration, loneliness. on the latter, life here gets more and more lonely. i can’t imagine doing this without ben. i have come to longer be surprised by the men walking down the streets talking to themselves. there is a need for people to let things out of themselves. i feel it. we need to talk and when you are all by yourself you are your only option… unless you invent someone which i have yet to do… but i might.  

we may have mentioned the police run-in we had in philly, but if we didn’t… we met this cop who was fairly nasty. he was perverted – yelling out to girls in the street. he was mean – calling a black woman an animal. anyway, we ended up telling him what we were doing because he seemed fairly relentless with his questions, and he told us that there are three categories of the homeless : 1. mentally ill 2. veterans who are mentally ill 3. crack addicts. it was sad to hear that the people “protecting” our streets have no care for the homeless but only for those that pay their taxes and therein pay them. i knew of this, but hearing it from horses mouth was sad.

well, we will be here for a while, but i’m not sure how often we will be able to get into this place to use the computers, for we smell much like a dumpster. we got to take our first shower in two weeks this past wednesday, and after we got out, i noticed that before i had even put my dirty clothes back on that i still smelled awful. nice.

well, ben is back from being lazy… we move on now.

dimps.