I just want to roll this week around in my mouth for a while like a snooty wine snob in a white suit and an ascot to match who is swishing something something rich and complex between his teeth.

Like many wine snobs, I imagine, I am frantic to figure out what to write about the week because on the one hand there is so much to say, but on the other, it’s all so much that it could slip away into nothing but a bunch of tired old cliches.

My week has been oaky, with hints of chocolate and raspberry.

I did get possibly the most flattering e-mail ever this week. Here it is:

Hi,

I am presenting information about various nyc subway related blogs and websites for a graduate course on community. I am talking about your blog for a minute or so and wanted to tell the audience how you envision the purpose of your blog. I am specifically showing a screenshot from your photo of the marilyn monroe underground art.

If there is anything you would like the audience to know about your blog please let me know.

Well I’ll be damned. Here’s my answer, mulled over and blasted out before I think too much about it and get all self-conscious:

__________

Hi,

Hope this isn’t too late for you. I wanted to give this issue some thought, as this is really flattering for me, and I wanted to do it right. Then I went to the bar and got to jawing away and am sitting up past my bedtime actually doing the work, which is pretty much how this blog gets made in the first place — a fusion of passion, love, and laziness.

I’ve been working on this thing for four years or so. Four years of writing, cussing, feeling the tug when I take long breaks from posting. I don’t post daily, not by a damn sight, but not an hour goes by that I don’t think about this blog. As a result, I’m so close to it that I can’t see it.

I asked two of my good friends who happen to be fans what they thought of it. And bless the hell out of good friends that are fans, too. God knows so many great artists are such insufferable puckered assholes in person. I feel rally lucky to know people who love me for me and for what I do online.

Anyway, my friend Eric said, roughly:

“One time we were walking down the street in Brooklyn, and there was this piece of dog poop with a scoop taken out of it sitting there on the sidewalk. A little ways down the sidewalk, we saw this plastic spoon with some sort of dark substance in the little bowl, kind of on the edge.

I said ‘Oh my God, someone’s taken a spoonful of that dogshit and left it in the road!’

You said, ‘Wait, we don’t know that for a fact yet,’ and you picked it up and SNIFFED it, then said ‘yep. That’s a spoonful of dogshit alright.’

Whatever it is that made you pick that spoon up and check — that incessant, enormous curiousity — that’s your blog, right there.”

My man David chimed in:

It’s all these moments, big and small, that add up to an A-HA! Whether it’s something on the subway, something you see online, some development in robotics or the way music sounds, it’s this culmination of all the strange things that make up life on Earth.

Those two assessments work for me. I find them both pretty flattering, actually. What I might add is this:

I used to write a lot of original stuff, nearly every day, but it just killed me after a while. I was pouring my heart out, and I ran out of stories and ran out of energy at some point. It was simultaneously draining and fulfilling, like singing an entire opera in the shower every night before bed.

Then I got a few jobs blogging, got an eye for what gets traffic online in a major way. It’s got almost nothing to do with good writing, nothing to do with soul or the human condition — it’s just candy to feed people that are dicking around at work. When I first realized that I got really bitter for a while. Now I’ve picked up a toga and joined the Romans.

Sometimes I do posts that I think will be lightning rods for traffic to pick up users, posts about New York art and culture to attract ads (I love art and culture anyway, don’t get me wrong here), and then write my own stuff in the cracks.

I’m not trying to document every corner of New York in any concentrated sense, and I’d rather make something good than something popular. Nobody confuses a Big Mac for fine dining.

Life for me, especially in New York, is this constant river of sensations that usually make absolutely no sense at all. It just blasts past, washing over me like a giant garden hose squirting from the hand of an indifferent God. Sometimes it knocks me flat, sometimes it bends me backwards, but most of all when I can get my head up above this constant river I can see how it sparkles in the sun, feel how it’s helping me grow.

That squirting hose, the dirt, all the dandelions and blades of grass around me, they’re all stories. And as you well know, the best stories are fertilized with a pinch of some amazing shit that always starts with “And I am NOT lying.”

Now that I have been working in offices for a number of years, my raw material’s waned a bit. I miss it. I’m not sure I’m at peace with it. But that’s where I am, pretty much.
______________________

Input from you guys, people that read this and don’t know me in person or haven’t seen me in a long time is greatly appreciated. I know this is an act of narcissism, but whatever. The Internet is a nothing but voyeurism, capitalism, and narcissism and anyone who says anything different is just building an audience for a product they haven’t released yet.