Incorrect Blitz Input

One of the nicest things about living in New York City is having the chance to look at it with fresh eyes after a trip away.

It could be the exhaust fumes, but for me there’s really nothing like the few minutes after you emerge from the Lincoln tunnel, dead-tired from a day of travel and a couple hours’ sleep and what Jack Kerouac describes in On the Road as the “gray cloud” of the city washes over you.  There’s usually nothing pretty about this moment: honking taxis, gunky cement, some unfinished glass-box condos that never seem to get any higher.  Today, there was pouring rain after a week of sunny Hawaiian beaches.

But, dammit, it’s a great feeling.  There’s a kind of intense honesty about New York City streets.  Forget poise.  People walk fast because they’re busy.  Advertisements cling to just about every exposed surface and yell at you to buy something because, well, that’s what they’re for.  Taxis jostle for position and gun for yellow lights because they can squeeze out a few extra bucks from another fare.  It that wonderful, fluid, and uniquely New York=flavored chaos channeled into the city grid around the clock.  And all this wonderful mess went on as usual, in fifth gear, without you.  You’re home, and nobody notices but you.

Beautiful.

I lifted this sprawling sentence from an article on Robert Rubin, Citigroup’s long-time advisor with a mythological reputaion, in today’s Sunday Business section:

At the Treasury Department, Mr. Rubin threaded a moderate stance on the always-controversial issue of market regulation, navigating between conservative free marketeers like Mr. Greenspan who wanted to streamline regulation and more liberal advocates demanding tighter monitoring of the securities industry.

Would that happen to be the same kind of “streamlined regulation” that got us into this colossal credit crunch? And why do liberal advocates ‘demand’ tighter monitoring while Greenspan gets off by merely ‘wanting’ ’streamlining’?

Read carefully enough and you’ll find that any stereotype is untrue.

From a police officer off the Bedford L stop, talking into his cell phone:

“Let me ask you a question, Mom. Do you love me?”

From a girl in a coffee shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

“I’m so glad I’m back in New York.  I can’t stand anywhere else in America.”