[playlist] 202306.5P@<E
spotify playlist #105 for June 2023
I spent most of June 2023 in Florida with my parents. Spotify playlist #105 reflects movements in space, internal and external:
listening to jazz with my father on the lanai
stories of my parents’ meeting in 1969
my mother’s covid while recovering from a broken hand
my father’s pneumonia while recovering from covid
the WGA strike and potential SAG-AFTRA walkout suspending Cat’s latest gig, extending our trip by 3+ weeks
finding peace between the days of Luna’s now kinda-regular bi-weekly epileptic seizures
the kinetic calmness in the chaos of a tennis court
weekly quests for the perfect mango
the road from Florida back to NYC
Not bummed to be back in NYC, but I don’t return home after being away with unbridled excitement anymore, either. Everything here is a fight – from finding a parking space to finding non-politicized conversation to finding 5 effin’ minutes in a day for affirmations or, heck, just breathing.
The worst is how Luna shuts down here. The relentless visual and aural stimuli of the City’s frictional state overloads her senses almost to the point of paralysis. For all I know, raising her here exacerbated her epilepsy, if not outright caused it.
Her happiest place is my parents’ lanai 1200 miles way. It’s long-been christened the “Lunai”…
There’s little mercy for Luna in NYC, and she’s not the type to become a tougher creature in the face of coldness. It’s all I can do to shield her from the city’s crushing din, but at the same time, as we walk together down the street, I also end up seeing this place as she does. Most dogs we pass start licking their lips – sensing her fear and her beauty, such that they all want either to fuck her or eat her.
In any event, this month's playlist is pretty much a window into the external and internal space I found this time away from The Land of the $5 Fennel Bulb. That I’m not always trapped here like millions of other folks is a saving grace. When I am here, however, I feel walled-in by millions of captives with no reference point on life beyond these oil-slicked streets, many of who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome in a place so mismanaged and wasted as to seem an absurdist’s dream.
The energy and joy here can be endless, yet it’s all in the face of a rough lifestyle, everyone on top of each other in constant abrasion, with no silence and very little quietude. Giant metropolises are nothing more than beautiful monuments to man, self-reflexive self-fulfilling proof of our modern desire to live above nature, due to our increasing inability to live within nature. In many ways, cities cause their own destitution and hunger because concrete is a terrible medium for growing crops or raising livestock.
New York City will never be a self-sustaining ecosystem. Self-perpetuation is its true goal. People are trapped here by design. Would that it didn’t cost so much to stay and that there were no tolls to leave.