2001-04-28 - 9:33 a.m.

This one's pretty long.

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I go to New York. I�ve still got a little money left over from my old job and some more coming in from my drone temp job, so I figure I�d better go now while there�s nothing better to do. A strong contingent of old college and high school friends have congregated there in search of fortune, and some of them have found it. I drive nine hours to Buffalo, where my brother is finishing his degree, then eight hours to Boston, where I celebrate Easter with my family, then four hours down to New York. My car is very tired.

My friends may be paying twice the money for half the apartment I have in Chicago, but they are living it up in New York. Money is treated like a plaything � you make your money, you spend your money. You eat out four days a week or you go out drinking till six in the morning. They are treating themselves more because I am there, but still, the economics of the situation just work out this way, Jason tells me. Rents are so high where he lives, on Manhattan�s Upper East Side, that adequate kitchen space is too expensive, and the grocery stores are tiny and expensive, too. It�s easier and more tasty to patronize one of the dozen ethnic restaurants on your block.

The selection of restaurants doesn�t make life any easier. When I stay with Jason and Emily, we have so many choices that we agonize for half an hour over where to go. Jason wants sushi, Emily wants Italian. If you go out to eat enough, you have to wait until you are in the mood for a certain type of food. Back in Chicago, I am usually in the mood for anything that isn�t a Lipton noodle packet, but that�s what I usually wind up with anyway.

To help us make our decision, I step onto their tiny balcony and look in either direction. We will choose among the six or seven restaurants I can physically see from their balcony, and we settle finally on Thai food.

This is my fifth meal out in four days. As I am running out of money, I select from the less expensive items. Then Emily notes the frog legs, which cost five dollars more than the item I planned to get. I think back to my childhood watching the Muppet show, and how Kermit would cringe at the idea of frog legs, and I think how I always wondered at what frog legs would look or taste like. I realize that I had always thought I would get them some day. I see that this is my chance � to make this meal not just another gorging in the whirlwind New York tour, but to make it the memorable once-in-a-lifetime occasion when I got frog legs.

The meals come. My frog legs look and taste like little strips of chicken. Not even particularly good chicken. I can hardly even believe that these strips of meat ever belonged to a frog. I sense that I have been had. But we share the food all around and enjoy it, and I can say I have fulfilled my childhood dream of at least ordering the frog legs. Besides, I think, this will probably be my last meal out, as I am leaving the next day.

The next day, though, I decide to stay to see a show with David � a one-man show by a gay black man and about his life. Afterwards, he asks if I am hungry. I tell him no. We just had some hummus and vegetables five hours ago, and besides, I�m running out of money. He�ll take none of that, so we go to this little spot on Avenue A with an outdoor table just for us. It�s a nice night and a fine meal and we are treated well, but I try to articulate why, today, I have decided that I don�t feel much like going out to eat.

There�s one obvious reason � I just don�t enjoy food that much. I put it in my mouth, taste it, it goes away. Maybe it�s because I don�t have much of a sense of smell. Or maybe it�s partly because I�m always a bit too aware of how much money I�m spending on each bite.

David is in another place in his life here in New York. Having spent his college years scraping by selling his plasma and collecting change from under the couch, he finally feels free. He is making more money than he ever has at a part-time Internet job, he has paid off his debts, he is free of his parents. He has his own place and his own studio and he just wants to relax, to make a little money and spend a little money and enjoy himself a bit. I can appreciate this.

Besides, going out to eat is just what one does here in New York. Nobody makes their own dinner. It�s what you do to commune with your friends, he says. This may be true, I think, but I wonder if it is a good thing. Is it a good thing that you have to spend money in order to commune? That you have to become part of the lifestyle of consumption to relax?

I have heard from many sources that once you�ve lived in New York, it�s hard to live anywhere else. You become so accustomed to the lifestyle, to ordering fine cuisine from nearly any country at any time, from having your choice of every imaginable sort of entertainment, to being able to wake up at four in the morning and have a veggie burrito delivered to your door, that living anywhere else seems like it�s not living.

Perhaps they live more fully in New York because of this. Some do, anyway. But not everybody�s happy. Some, I imagine, become accustomed to the lifestyle and they start to expect it. There are diminishing returns on so much eat-til-you�re-stuffed living. You can only enjoy a treat so many times before it stops being a treat and becomes part of the routine. And your mind turns to something else while your top-notch appetizers, meal and dessert are being delivered to you without your having to lift a finger except to select from the hundred choices on the menu.

Because the enjoyment isn�t in the food, it�s in you. It�s in your being able to appreciate the raisin or the slice of bread as much as you possibly can. It�s in learning to appreciate the people sitting on the subway or loafing in the park, not just the high art of the finest museums and performances. It�s learning to love life without money, because once you can you can never be unhappy. And then, when you�ve really discovered those things, then you can work yourself up slowly, giving yourself a little treat here and there, and recognizing it as a luxury, even if the luxury is as simple as buying the brand-name cereal rather than the generic brand. At least that�s my going theory.

Everybody has little neurons of some sort in their brains, I�m not sure exactly what they are, but they fire off when you experience pleasure. From the best I�ve been able to gather so far, getting those neurons firing off is what makes life worth living. We�re just wired that way. So you have to figure out how to get those neurons firing as much as possible for as long as possible, to get the most pleasure for your actions. If you don�t do anything for yourself then those neurons don�t fire and you can�t be happy. But if you overload your senses then maybe � and I could clearly be wrong on this � maybe they get a little tired and readjust, so the same sensory input makes the neurons fire less frequently. And you can�t appreciate what you have anymore. But if you can learn to appreciate just life, stripped of any major excitements or indulgences, and slowly work your way up when you�re ready for new experiences, chances are you�ll have the neurons trained to fire at maximum frequency. Because once you�ve adjusted to an overstimulated lifestyle, like once you�ve lived life in New York, then you can never go back.

I say something of the sort to David over the meal, and he knows what I mean, but he�s sick of living in poverty and just wants to be able to let himself be happy for a change. I can dig that. So maybe this is just my little view of the games I have to play to get the most of my experience, and it isn�t relevant to everybody. But I bet a lot of the people around here know they live in the best place in the world, and they can�t be happy even here, and that just makes them even more miserable.

But David can be happy here because he�s learned to enjoy life with nothing, with no expectations, no destination, just doing the next thing that comes to mind and deciding to enjoy it. That�s the way I like it, just wandering about, learning to enjoy the journey without worrying much about the destination, because there�s no guarantee you�ll enjoy the destination, but if you enjoy the journey you�ll never be disappointed.

So we wake up in the morning and Jake comes over. He�s doing an East Coast tour of his own. We steam up an artichoke and peel the meat from its leaves with our teeth. We cut up a kiwi and eat that. We pick up the half-inflated basketball that David picked up from a thrift store and start bouncing it. We drive into Manhattan and bounce it all the way into Central Park, passing it between us on the sidewalks all the way. We play a game of three on three with some guys taking shots in the park. They are all better than us non-athletic schoolboys, except maybe for Jake, who gets a good share of drives in.

We don�t say much � there�s no need. We wander around the sports fields. We find a pair of sunglasses and a cigarette box with three cigarettes on a park bench. We decide that fortune is smiling on us and take them. We walk back into the streets dribbling our ball, and consider passing it to random people, to shake them out of their habits. A well-dressed bellhop asks for the ball and dribbles it between his legs. Another man holds his arms out in a circle and tells us to shoot. We�re too afraid we�ll hit him in the face and give him a bloody nose. Another man, without a word, hands David a baseball cap. Now we can put on our sunglasses and hat and bounce our basketball and have a grand old time, and enjoy these crazy people we pass in the street. Pass enough people on the street and some of them are bound to know how to enjoy themselves.

Some of my most enjoyable moments in New York are spent meandering, either with friends or alone. One morning after breakfast Jason, Emily and I wander back to Central Park again. We wind our way through the meditation gardens (at least that�s what Jason calls it), around the fishing pond. We see turtles hanging out in the middle of the pond and families casting their reels at its edges. I challenge Jason to a race up a rock face and we all scamper up, finding ourselves atop a grassy patch overlooking the north end of the park. We plop ourselves down and lay back, enjoying a lazy spring afternoon.

Jason tells me that Central Park was created long before the surrounding neighborhoods were fully developed, in a more formal time when men were not permitted to remove their shirts in the park. The winding pathways were created, he says, because the prevailing theories at the time were that winding paths are good for the moral fiber of the residents, good for the spirit. The straight and narrow path becomes, by default, the pathway to hell, or at least low morals.

This seems like a quaint but questionable theory, but I start to wonder if there is truth in it. The winding road seems endangered today � even in Manhattan, the earliest streets downtown were built jumbled and confusing, while the later ones up by the park are straight and efficient. Some (especially those who live downtown) say that uptown is a little more uppity, a little more dull and whitebread, while downtown is more interesting, more relaxed, and the people have more fun. I don�t know � I haven�t lived there long enough to know.

Winding streets everywhere are pretty much a thing of the past. The neighborhood where I grew up in Boston�s suburbs was full of them, but that place was established in about 1640. The newer suburbs, for example some of the new Chicago suburbs that I used to cover, have straight streets. You get on the highway, you turn once onto a busy street, you turn once more into the subdivision where everybody lives. You want groceries? You get out of your subdivision and get back on the busy street and the chain grocery store is right there. You want to travel across the country? You get out of your subdivision, turn once onto the busy street, turn once more onto the highway, and keep driving until you get to where you need to go.

It�s efficient, like a machine, and like any mechanistic activity it quiets the mind and siphons away your curiosity, helping you to ignore any life outside your directed path. Efficiency tends to do this � it gets you more and better of the things you are told you want and you wind up missing all the things you didn�t realize you want. The efficiency allows you to skip over the hassles, the delays, the people, the interactions. They get you done with what you need to be doing faster, so you can do more of the same thing and get more money and buy more stuff. In the time is money equation, time, the most precious commodity of all, is what always ends up sacrificed. Any spare time won thanks to the straight roads of efficiency is just squandered by people who spend it doing more of the same.

Perhaps most people don�t know quite what to do with themselves, because they�re not used to doing what they want and listening to themselves. That�s where I was just a month ago � living someone else�s dream and watching my youth slip away. But then something woke me up and started me looking around, and I realize that I don�t need to be shooting toward some sparkling career, that all I need is to look around me and appreciate what I see, stop and enjoy every twist in the path and let the world take me where it may.

I am thinking all this partly because I�ve wandered off my directed path again and, perhaps, I need to justify it. Upon returning from my walk to the park with Jason and Emily, I have taken the R train rather than the N train to get to David�s apartment in Queens. I must walk north a few miles in some undiscovered neighborhoods � even David hasn�t been here before. I pass kids playing baseball and quaint little flowered homes with the dad outside washing his car. I am aiming for a cemetery that will lead me right to David�s, but I overshoot it and end up walking along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, watching the cars zip to where they need to go, along those marvelous modern highways that help us save some time so we can do some more work. The highways throw me off because there are actually two highways that converge here and I end up going another half-mile out of my way.

But I tell myself to appreciate this long meandering walk, because even if it has taken me out along this boring, dirty expressway, at least I have also spent the time to consider what I have seen here in New York, and to appreciate my role as a wanderer. And it gives me a chance to think about my friends, and wonder if there�s anything that they themselves are doing wrong according to my little self-generated ideas, if I train my critical eye on them. And I realize that, no, all this is moot, because the only thing really important is to find happiness, and David has found happiness in having room to breathe and enjoy, and Jason and Emily have found happiness in each other, and each of them is trying to share happiness in his or her own way.

And I will go back to Chicago the next day, driving those straight efficient roads that allows me to leave New York at noon, drive and drive and drive, stopping for gas three times but never even getting off at a single exit, and be deposited at my doorstep without ever quite believing that I was in all those places that the signs and maps indicated, because I had to keep pushing forward to save time, because I wanted to get back home and get back to work, but mostly because I knew my most important meandering had to be done in my own backyard.

Question for readers: Do I sound preachy here, or like a know-it-all or something?

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