Everyone was young, but they all looked old. Eyes wide open, wandering Manhattan it’s difficult not to ask: Is New York City falling apart? I suppose, technically, it is, perpetually, given the amount of scaffolding everywhere you look. Scaffolding as a permanent fixture of older buildings. ​ New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again. Maybe cities excel at this kind of erasure? When I walk cities I rarely feel that sense of past-people or rituals I feel in the mountains of Japan The old roads in Japan have their own tchotchekes, but for the most part contain something “like a scent,” which is, above all, fun, and is perhaps the thing most easily lost in the chaos and nowness, the inherent “nowhere,” of the big cities, and those dusty plains of the old west.

“But in the end we did my actual favorite thing, which is staying in the city over a major holiday weekend. Staying here over Thanksgiving or Christmas is the closest you will ever get to seeing a private New York, a New York as a small town, the bare, dead, and wonderful skeleton that remains when scrubbed of both transplants and tourists, when divested of anyone with anywhere else to go.” “We filled our apartment with loud, bright, sincere, concerned people being loud and bright and sincere and concerned at one another.”