Thanksgiving

I was riding home tonight on the train back from Delaware, the past couple days spent with my family outside of this city, outside of my comfort zone, a bit bored. It was what it was. Good and surely revitalizing in the ways that being with the family are - in ways that are both clear and also very unclear, very below the surface, that some good on the atomic level comes about by being around these people you spent many years on this planet with, with the people that brought you forth into this world, the people responsible for your atoms. And yet there are atoms just as well responding to their influence in less receptive ways, pushing away from each other, making you want to distance yourself from this type of life in the suburbs, this type of comfort, that this is why you moved to this city, and some sparks long thought blown out again show a small orange ember and there is the desire to live differently, to make it in this world and to live a life worth meaning, said with emphasis, verbally letting you know that in print this is a part that would be italicized, that you want that type of life and are serious about it, that this desire is again rekindled by being around your family, which though you love, you also want to be very different from, other than.

I watched too much television over this time, realize how much of it I watch in New York - too much since I knew about all of these shows, these stars, was able to partake in conversations easily concerning them. I wanted to distance myself from this culture, create a different one, and that's why I moved to this city I now live in and something happened and I am not sure what but I was reminded of some original intentions these past couple days, again wanted an old beat-up Saab 900 that I could cover the back of with bumper stickers that articulated far more forcefully than I would ever do so now, ideas and concepts I was excited, proud, to embrace. There is a critical distance now where a pride that proud becomes something else, tacky, gauche.

I slept and read a copy of Men's Fitness that I bought in the Amtrak waiting area in Wilmington for $4.99, the headlines revealing ways for me to obtain abs and sex secrets, and how could I not purchase a thing promising such things? I have been on a fitness kick lately that is tied to a perhaps unhealthy zeal about trying to get abs and to become more built. After I finished this magazine that I was only mildly embarrassed to read on the train, shielding it a bit when people walked past, I tried reading 1Q84, but that put me to sleep much as it did on the way down to my family's house. I slept and didn't and looked at what type of people showed up on my Grindr feed in these towns outside of New York. The lights of New York began to appear out in the dark, past my own fluorescent-lit reflection and that of my fellow passengers, the city's lights visible if I unfocused my eyes, let their focus on a close world relax enough so they could see the one beyond this one, the many other ones there. A skyline I used to see was there in this new one. Freedom Tower is now gigantic looking when you approach at night from New Jersey, it towering over anything near. It has a flat top, as it's still being built, no antenna yet to give it more shape. A massive block of light on each floor, the floors rising week by week. It's nice to see. It changes the skyline and doesn't. It's still a big light of hope saying EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE when you approach it from New Jersey after saying goodbye to your family. It's the same place you ran to, the Emerald City we staggered to through poppy fields. Even with that gigantic Freedom Tower now there, it is still the skyline I saw when I first moved here, this place I had dreamed of since I was a kid, and finally, finally fucking made it to, that, tonight, I was again so fucking grateful to have made it to this place.