Daytona

Blog Post for everything that occurred in May.

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"The Mangrove Coast, Florida, 1941" by Walker Evans

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It’s morning in Chinatown; the old men are bent over smoking cigarettes, the hand trucks carrying stacked crates of meat criss-cross the sidewalks leaving behind thick streams of blood, and the cafe downstairs has just opened. The cafe window is exact, like a landscape painting, and everything that occurs is evidence of celestial guidance or simply not at all. I have no answers; the only thing I offer is a pouty face, by the window, that the tourists outside must misconstrue as a veritable expression of the literary underbelly of New York. Nothing could be farther from the truth, I’m simply reading proust, mixed up in the wrong crowd. I’ve seen how tourists giggle at the jade cock statuette in the “oddities” shop (western for non-western objects) and how silent the cafe became after it shattered into a thousand jade sparks that flew across the pavement and how the crunch of the clergy’s sandals continually punishing the bits of jade atop the ground made me feel uneasy for the rest of the afternoon. Yet I’m no paraclete (catholic for advisor), but they should know; the church bells always gong at 8am.

Have you tried any of the pastries from the bakery in the morning? I don’t know the name of my favorite one; it’s ochre-colored and topped with sesame seeds and delicately crumbles at the blare of the habitual police siren on Canal Street. I prefer to pair it with a cappuccino from the coffee house on Doyers Street; the one with the neon sign and interior cozy enough to have a resident cat, but doesn’t. I take my collected breakfast and sit in the cafe downstairs; I never buy anything here, the cashier returns a disapproving look, but never intervenes; he senses the tear down my cheek, my smile … upcoming. I pay rent on a windowless tenement apartment upstairs; please let me feel local in peace.

I know this native urge every morning and it gets so strong that I regret my past. I remember that you were my everything; the isolate of my world. I would sit by the bus window, waiting without control, M14+ sbs East Village to Union Square, too busy reminiscing that I couldn’t see a fucking thing. You loved the haircut in my face, the pearl beads between my teeth, tongue … misguided; new sex hit the city, and I faked it for the adoration of the crowd. Spent every night healing; ketamine on the coffee table, Ulysses by candle light, dancing with the vines clamored against the brick wall. Wake up the next morning, and do it all again. I must have done it all for the city; I committed to you, for reasons that you didn’t have a say. Even now, monochrome flick, crystalline tears of the actress, I still think of you when I ask someone new if they’ve been to the Metrograph theater. I’ll admit it, you looked nice, cozied beneath the light beam of flickering movie frames, and how noir it all was for the puffs of vape smoke to rise and obfuscate the beam while you tried to hide your nicotine addiction and blow it all out underneath your jacket.

I had that thought again, 2 years ago feels like a century of life; the past is constantly on repeat. And you haven’t seen how I’ve changed, or why that would matter to you. I’m in a place you can’t imagine; Daytona, windswept sands, blue waters splintering against the rocks stretching into the sea in great crashing waves, sunburnt bodies grilling cheap meats, country music fading in and out from portable speakers carried by those wandering vacationers seeking a more secluded islet for contemplation, tortoises nesting in the dunes, pick-up trucks decorated with American Flags, and I oblivious to it all walking miles upon miles along the same interminable stretch of beach in search of a sand dollar burrowed in the cool slurry of sand and saltwater. They were all dead, chipped and broken. That’s what I think Daytona represents to me; the uber-america, and somehow the summation of my country is secretly disappointing.

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"Manhattan Skyline from the Brooklyn Bridge, 1928" by Walker Evans

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Glimpses of Daytona are still felt, all of my friends are gone, just like my sister. She’s graduated, now a pilot, ready to be encased in metal and disappear into the sky. I still think of her, when I see the sun. My unclothed back lying outstretched, stomach to the sand, head tilted up slightly to observe the sky. New York, is totally grey, but Daytona has an abundance of light. On my back, it was a comforting thought for my sister to be smiling down at me from the sky, and I to return the favor, as the earth established itself as the simplest pleasure that New York had made me too callous to remember.

And have you, remembered to savor the sunlight, as it threads through the tall buildings on the Lower East Side, blinding you, smiting you, forcing an uncomfortable closure of eyes as the brick exterior shielding so many lives, fades from view? I sometimes ignore it too, as I leave the train station, ready to return to my apartment. The birds, chirping from the windowsills of the countless renovated tenement buildings, are soundtrack now. They’ve made their veritable return, and how often I ignore their presence. But fuck them, right? The guitar solo from “Ten Years Gone” by Led Zeppelin is playing on my headphones, and somehow it fits the moment much better.

Daily life, if you’re not careful, can be interrupted by an impenetrable loss, a loss you can’t fully identify. It’ll punctuate quiet notes in conversation, make a sunset at the Manhattan Bridge a bit more contemplative, and suddenly you’ll forget, and not even remember when you forgot, and feel a strange pride that the abuses of time have not usurped your ability to smile. There’s a place I want to take you, invisible and imaginative child, where the vista is so grand, yet momentary, that you’ll feel that feeling and sip the wind in one cathartic breath. For me, it was Daytona. For you, you’ll spend the rest of your life searching.

And the memory merely vanishes, gone, and it’s one long glide until you’ll replace that memory with another one. I can feel Daytona vanishing as well, its sun-bleached canyons sparsely populated by aging drifters all funneling towards the ocean. The bikers, too, squatting on their chrome and leather rides, all spitting in huge wet globs into the cracks of the numerous bars, convincing each other that they have a few riding years left, but inevitably death catches up with them, no matter how long they spend drifting nameless across the Floridian peninsula. And I, on the beach, leather shoes and a copy of the Power Broker, amongst it all, still heart broken about New York being at the opposite end of the East Coast. Even when I fly back, it’s heartbreaking to learn that my sister won’t be the pilot, and that she will always have the ability to visit, but never will.

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"South Seas: Seascape, 1932" by Walker Evans

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I’ve convinced myself that I understand. New York is not as beautiful as Daytona. Sometimes I forget there’s even water 10 minutes away from where I live, and how the waves dissipate secretly beneath the steel of New York, the sky above, behind the skyline, with planes lacerating the clouds, reminding me that sky too is inhabited. My sister must be unsatisfied by the view of the East River, as millions can eek out glimpses from the ground, but few can truly live in the sky, and rarely interact with earth.

I too, rarely interact with earth. I’ve been known to slink out of parties without saying my goodbyes all because I’d rather be in my apartment and read alone. It’s not healthy, I’ll admit, but so is faking my love for strangers. I’ve grown nervous, jittery, solvent, too attached to those I love to meet new people. Where can I, a Lower East Sider, be silent and nameless, to have strange conversations beneath the hum of streetlamp, yapping about the beauty of New York, with strangers, all while living the same lifestyle as the entire population of drifters in Daytona?

There is no immediate answer, I collect myself on the table in the cafe beneath my apartment, thinking of when’s the next best moment to call my family. I believe to be the perfect isolated Daytona drifter, as I have no contact to the digital society of New York, and instead share the similar aspiration of seeking out sunshine wherever possible. My social life consists of collecting flyers on the next book club meeting, and never going. All of my interests are researched, instead of being fed to me by an instagram algorithm, and for some reason this gives me an immense pride, to acknowledge that I alone am the greatest influence on my life, but the downside is that all of my peers are dead authors, and the life I live is too romantic to be sustainable and real.

Have I convinced you yet, of the beauty of Ossining? The entire town is perched on the sloping hillside, every house tall and destitute like an abandoned factory, millions of grimy windows cascading down the hillside with the same thin Italian man lunging from a window into the breath of the catskill zephyrs to smoke a cigarette. Migrants, who’ve traversed all of Latin America, and maybe more, stand motionless in groups of threes in the archways of desolate smoke shops, eyeing the empty street and grey sky, in never ending wait for the promise of work. Then the elite, who’ve forcefully docked their boats along the Hudson River due to bad weather, are eyeing the migrants from the insulated interior of the Turkish restaurant, and then me, the only tourist on Main Street. The wood sheaths of the homes are rotting off, the wind blunts any feeling in my skin, frigid, alone. And as I left, the train sank deep into a ridge to avoid looking at the prison, the passengers are oblivious, and are instead delighted when the river, and New York, return to view.

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"Ossining, New York, 1931" by Walker Evans

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Note to readers: Expect more long-form content from me, as I’d like to exercise committing myself to page. I’ve been writing in my diary everyday, in the aforementioned cafe, and Chinatown has never felt more like a home.

Every month, I collect all of the new music that I’ve listened to and condense it all into a playlist. Inspiration for this month’s playlist “Dimes Square in May” is feminist rage. You can listen and enjoy here.

Here’s my recommendations of things to do in June: gaze at the ceiling in the Morgan Library, eat the Bronte Burger at Dudley’s, and of course, nap in Prospect Park.