So I have returned to New York, making my first true, concerted attempt to actually live here, if only for several months. I will confess to having had an actual sense of dread, as in a Poe story. Considering that I lived at 255 West 84th St. in my childhood, and on that building is mounted a plaque now (and was only whispered of then) reading that on that site, when he wrote The Raven, lived Edgar Allen Poe, it seems fitting, if slightly re-located.
I always imagined that I had been consigned there by a capricious Destiny, though I probably didn't yet know the word 'capricious.' I am sure I knew 'Destiny,' as it was probably all that sustained me, believing I would be inspired by Poe's spirit, (coming from the same word base as inspiration.) That conviction oozed over the edges of memory, as I imagined, while my parents were beating each other up in the next room, and I tried writing songs as a balance, that I had been consigned there as part of my artistic heritage.
Today I actually wrote what could be the beginning of a novel, if novels still have a place in the world as it seems still to exist, in spite of your not being able to call up the musicals on/off Broadway or find them in the theatre listings if they are a hit, and don't give a shit, in which the word 'hit' is contained. Trying to go see 'HAMILTON', the enormous hip-hop-hit that is now on Broadway, I could not even call up its listing or find it in the listings of shows, which Isobel, my girlfriend from youth and the wife of my beloved lost lawyer Ron who supported and made my deals for me in beginninghood, explains to me they do not even bother to list because they are making so much money they do not care to or have to spend what it would cost to list them. Sigh. And it is the same world in which Donald Trump is actually being considered a serious(WHAT?) candidate for president. I am not sure what I am doing here, having gone to Bryn Mawr, growing up to believe the world was an actual place.
