I love Coney Island forever and ever and that is enough

When I landed in New York, it was barely morning and it was bitter cold, maybe 8 or 9 degrees in the sun. I took a deep breath and prepared to step out of the airport into the most frigid air I had experienced since moving to California over a year ago. Now matter how cold it felt, it wouldn't matter, couldn't matter. I was a girl on a mission. I wanted, no, needed to get to Coney Island that very day, even if it meant freezing my ass off.

You probably think I'm a total freak for this, but oddly enough I wasn't alone. My friends drove up from CT for the sole purpose of visiting Coney Island with me in the dead middle of freezing winter. Not because we thought it would be warm, not because we thought it would be fun, not even because we wanted an excuse to drink four loko on the subway (although we did do that, too.) We visited Coney Island because we needed to pay our respects.
To us, Coney Island is much, much more than a trashy amusement park set on the water on the outskirts of the world's most fabulous city, although even if it were just that, it would still be pretty spectacular. Our connection with Coney Island goes back to the summer of 2007, when it became the setting for a day, perhaps a moment, perhaps the moment of our young lives. I've tried to explain it and I've tried to retell it countless times, but I never quite succeed in conveying the immensity of what occurred that day and why it keeps pulling us back, even on the coldest day of winter. Still, I'll try again.
I can't tell you what was happening for anyone else at that time, but I can tell you what was happening for me, and me, I was heartbroken. And in that heartbreak, the world seemed intensified so that even the smallest everyday occurrences felt unbearable. Work was awful, going out was awful. Fuck, breathing was awful. I woke up in tears nearly every day, devastated to remember that the circumstances that had driven me to such heartbreak were still true. I would stumble downstairs hysterical and my roommates, utterly bewildered and alienated by the intensity of my grief, despite their best efforts to be supportive would look at me in total loss. What could they possibly do for me?
Still, I did not give up. I tried to go out and force myself to have fun on numerous occasions. I even came sort of close a few times, but usually, whatever substance I was using to forget about my grief would turn on me and end up reminding me how bad I wanted to call, wanted to beg, wanted to do all those things you're not supposed to do when nursing a broken heart. That is, until we went to Coney Island.
It was summer, so it was Siren Fest. We Are Scientists and M.I.A.- for free!!!! Seriously, though, that doesn't even matter, because it wasn't the music and it wasn't the crowd, it was just the day. We listened to all the right songs on the way to the train station, faced the exact correct number of calamities to make it feel like an adventure (including taking the subway in the wrong direction and ending up in Harlem), and somehow ended up dancing underneath a roller coaster while sipping Jack Daniels through a straw on the most gorgeous of gorgeous summer days. It was the type of perfect day that's just too perfect to even imagine or fantasize about.

Now, I had perfect days before that one and I've had perfect days since, but the way that particular day appeared, in the midst of crushing heartbreak, has always seemed like a small miracle to me. The friends I was with on that day were not recovering from a wounded heart as I was, but I know it felt miraculous to them, too. It was as if, for one moment whatever we were dealing with at the time, be it heartbreak or something else entirely, just faded in the shadow of an idea; that the world was a big and beautiful place, that it was possible for someplace like Coney Island to even exist and that it was possible for us to exist there along with it.

After that day, I began handling things differently. Instead of dwelling constantly in the heartbreak of my past, I thought instead of what I liked. I made mental lists, as I began to remember I like sushi, I like vintage dresses and soon I found myself fully recovered, planting gardens full of vegetables and getting shitfaced at paella parties. My freinds displayed similar behaviour. We all seemed to feel more in touch with our own preferences, who we were, what we liked, most importantly, what made us happy. It's an easy equation; no matter how down I feel, thinking about dancing with my friends underneath The Cyclone at Coney Island always makes me happy.
That day left an imprint on my heart. A map for how to get back there. Now, when I am feeling upset, I look back to that day. No matter how tumultuous and stormy my thoughts and feeling become, that day is the center that everything else swirls around, the eye of the storm. It's where I go when I'm lost. It's where I go when I need to remind myself who I am and what I love. I love dancing. I love being drunk in the sunshine. I love my friends more than anything in the world. And no matter how bad things get, no matter how cold it is outside, I still love Coney Island, and I always will.

i've been sleeping

I can't believe that I have somehow managed to not write about New York, yet. I've been home for a month, one whole month!, and somehow, not a word. While I was there, I imagined different ways to tell you about the perfect truffle fries I was eating or the flawless pair of boots I spotted on the subway and instantly coveted. In fact, I wouldn't even have to write in order to tell you about New York. I would simply have to type. The tough part has already been done and then filed away in the back of my mind to pull out whenever I have a second., which of course, I haven't.
I could blame it on my job. My schedule recently shifted and while it is now infinitely more manageable, it is taking me a bit of getting used to. I could blame it on my boyfriend, too. Since his return to Oakland he has insisted on usurping every last particle of energy I may have possessed at one point or another in my life, by forcing me to lay around in bed with him and have perfect weekends and be blissfully in love and such. That shit is draining, I tell you! Really though, I think it's better if I blame it on a book. The one I mentioned in my last post: Just Kids by Patti Smith. You know, the book that made me forget I was on a six-hour flight from the East to West Coast?
Just Kids was written by Patti Smith as an ode to her friend and sometime lover, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but it's actually a name-dropping, self-glorifying, masturbatory description of what it's like to be the coolest chick in New York in 1970, (which in case you aren't cool enough to know this is way cooler than being the coolest chick in New York today...) and holy fuck, it is a masterpiece.
I don't know, it's totally possible that Patti Smith could write a three hundred page treatise on what it feels like to take a shit and I'd eat it like candy. There's something about her style of writing that feels instantly heart-wrenching, and at the same time, so familiar as to be almost familial. Maybe this is because my first exposures to her particular brand of intensity all occurred through my parents who were both on-and-off fans of hers. Who the fuck knows.

In any case, I think the whole thing is beautifully written. It veers occasionally into the realm of the unbelievable, portraying the author as nothing less than a saint, abstaining from drinks, drugs and everything fun, and stumbling, completely accidentally of course, into glorious social situations with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix whilst she was simply trying to focus on her art and be noble. But really, who cares? We all do that. We all remember things in a way that allows us to view ourselves favorably, and I think we all also know that Patti Smith did as many drugs as anyone else who lived at the Chelsea Hotel in the 70s. But truthfully, it just doesn't even matter. I mean, she's writing about living in the Chelsea Hotel for fucksake, and getting coffee with Allan Ginsberg and it's all just so enviably romantic.
Actually, my favorite part of the entire book is in the very beginning, when she's talking about living in Jersey or Pittsburgh or some similarly god-awful place and being dirt poor and getting knocked up by accident. She mentions something about going to some diner once a week to get a donut and listen to their jukebox and how that was like, the bright spot in her life at that time. For some reason, the idea of Patti Smith self-soothing by eating a shitty donut at some shitty diner in shithole Jersey, all by her lonesome, was just so, so touching to me. Maybe it's because when I get depressed, I too have a tendency to eat shitty food in solitude. It just seemed like such a vulnerable, human thing to share, and the fact that it happens in the beginning sort of sets the tone for the entire book. So, even though her remaining attempts to portray herself as a real person with real struggles fall sort of flat in light of the fact that she doesn't actually have a real job besides being photographed all day and kicking it with celebs, you kind of forgive her for it, because you know, at one point in her life, she ate shitty donuts like the rest of us.
And I know, I know, everything I have to say about this book is just reeking of jealousy. I'll admit it freely. Stories like this make me jealous. I've said it here before, but goddamn, I want to be an artist!!! I want to quit my day job and be a fucking artist! I'm positive that this is part of the reason this book is so appealing to me. I have differing opinions on Patti Smith's merit as a musician. I find a lot of her music whiny and self-indulgent, but Dancing Barefoot resonates with me more strongly than almost any other piece of music I've ever heard. But regardless of her talent, or her skill, she set out to be an artist. She had some sort of blind, almost naive, but nonetheless fierce faith that she would be able to support herself through means other than the conventional, and whether she got lucky, or worked her ass off for it, she succeeded. Things could have fallen apart for her at any given moment, as easily as they could have for any one else, but they didn't, and in that, there is magic.
There is magic, too in the way that she describes the city. The mood she creates is just so, so New York. After a week of trudging through blizzards, getting snowed in, and remembering why I moved to the West Coast in the first place, I needed that. Before I tried to tell you about my vacation, before I even tried to digest it myself, I needed to remember that New York is magic, too. So, on the plane ride home, I read about New York and I re-lived my vacation. I re-lived every moment I've ever spent in New York surrounded by that particular type of magic, and in re-living, it all became tied together. This book, my vacation, every moment I've spent in New York city from the day I was born. I think that after one month, I'm finally ready to tell you about all of it.