Bergen Street // Sunday, 3.30pm

  5261898They're predicting a Category 2 hurricane for the East Coast in these next few days. Traditionally called Sandy, the timing of this weather pattern, along with its admixture of winter storm, has led jocular weather-forecasting types to call it "Frankenstorm." Those cards; they calling it 90% certain that New York City will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain, flooding and maybe snow starting today, and stretching past Halloween.

Damn the weather. I don't want to be here any longer than I need to be.

The longer I spend in this glorious apartment, long and narrow and luxuriously lined like a designer shoe box, the less interest I have in venturing outside, where people are hurrying themselves along in the effort to live in a manner worthy of Washington Square Park and Lincoln Center and Palazzo Chupi and the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

The street outside is heavy with quiet. Maybe this is only on account of its being Sunday, but there's no way to know. The sky is wadded with lint-colored clouds and the air feels like when your ears get plugged after swimming all day; even the occasional siren can't pierce it.

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Last night, I heard a whooshing, grinding noise pass like a Panzer through the street. Sleep-hazed, I thought maybe the hurricane had struck already, and we were all supposed to be in a shelter, but [Will] has been out all day since yesterday (on a date), so maybe I was just fated to get a piece of window in the side of my head, without anyone to guide me through the protocol.

Then I fell back asleep.

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I've been working all day. Something about being here pulls it out of me--something about the stress that I refuse to join hands with. If I was in the suburbs, maybe I wouldn't be so immune. Maybe I'd take more of it upon myself. But such distaste lingers in me for anything to do with that way of life. I think about taking a walk and think better of it. Hurricane aside,

I'm in not a shitty mood exactly. Just feeling a certain contempt for being here. For the limitations of space and money endemic here. I've been marvelously productive while I'm here, but it doesn't make me want to stay, because if I stayed, I'd be sucked right back in.

I hope the hurricane doesn't muck up the roads too badly. I can't wait to get the fuck out of here.