It’s raining really hard today and I started thinking about Travis Bickle. You know, from Taxi Driver. (By the way, if you live in New York and haven’t seen that movie, please go jump in the river.) Bickle’s oft quoted line is prescient in a way.
All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
Did I miss it? It might have happened while I was in college, or at least it’s final push. It wasn’t rain, it was money, and it turned New York from a middle and lower class cesspool of violence and art to this shimmery new city and now there’s all these nice people who live here. It’s easy to have a faux nostalgia about old New York, because we’ve spent the last 15 years glamorizing it. I sometimes wish that we could turn back the clocks, if only to return to a time that was far more honest and lacked the doublespeak we are currently spoonfed. I also think the real estate market will do that for us. But I also like walking home by myself at night, for which I sometimes dress inappropriately.
