I wish I was a fucking poet

Because approximately one month ago I moved from what passes for an idyllic suburb (Prospect Heights) to what is a verifiable urban shit-hole. That's the Lower East Side. Yeah, yeah, I know - the Lower East Side used to be a literal shit-hole, back when the Mosholu brought tankards of immigrants from Minsk and Latvia and Italy who filled in the newly built rat-traps south of Houston, and I know the Lower East Side REMAINED a literal shit-hole all the way through the 1980's, home to every drug epidemic imaginable: smack, crack, meth, and all the other illegal substances I've never even seen, let alone tried. When I say the Lower East Side is still a shit-hole, I include all the improvements. I throw in the rock venues, the bars, and the specialty foods. The Chinese, the Latinos, and the white or honorary white hipsters. The V-necks and Ray Bans. The limos and the porn shops. The piles of garbage that crowd the sidewalk (not just Long Islanders, but often real bags of half-open trash). And the smell. The smell below Delancey Street is something out of a previous century. From the intersection of Broome and Allen, to the corner of Hester and Essex, it smells like one part Industrial Revolution, two parts 1970's sanitation strike, three parts dead Chinese gangster odor. Fuzhouan gangsters buried under Grandma Ying's bake shop. It smells like the opposite of society.

And so I wish I was a poet. This is the perfect setting to awaken one's inner Kerouac. This is the urban disgrace from which only a Ginsberg can rise. (Now ask me if I've read either one of them.) I wished I was Jack Kerouac while out on my walk tonight at 11pm. No longer in fear of my life at the hands of a thug, but in fear of my relevance at the sight of ten bachelorettes in a Belgian Frites bar. At the sight of two sixteen year old sisters in skirts playing to a packed crowd at the Sidewalk Cafe, strumming ultra-twee bullshit on a pair of ukuleles. And I decided to hate them at first sight. And to the small crowd of T-shirted dough-faced goat boys smoking outside the Sidewalk tonight - the place where I've played my last ten solo concerts - I couldn't even bring myself to say hi. I know them, though not well. The guy who runs the place, and one of the acoustic crown princes of the place - I saw them, and could have ambled over to say, "hey." But I didn't, because I am not one of them. I belong to no movement. I lack all motivation. I lack any semblance of testicle, I feel no feeling but fear, I mock them incessantly but they do not know it. They do not know that I am not only just as talented a songwriter as they are, I am better. I am better because I am me. I am I. I was born this fucking good. I have been great longer than they have been tenacious. But they laugh at me, they scorn me, they chide me, they dismiss me, because I am a silent Kerouac making mental note of downtown Manhattan's abuses of me, its bullying of me, its smelling, its puking night - because I am making mental note of the poet I deserve to be, and don't have the guts to actually get on stage and scream.

Why bother? The same four people will show up. Or the same new twelve. Some girl I fancy and her brother. That's the way I see it. Why play at all when you're playing below your pay grade?

I wish I was a real poet. A real downtowner. I still could be, because downtown is still real and still here. Drugs and coffee are still here. Beer and cognac are still here. Garbage and pollution and I guarantee you dead bodies are still here. They may have made a museum out of the tenements (the ones right across the street from my building), but the rat-traps are still here. It's just that the rats are bigger now. And they wear dirty yarmulkes and smoke Pall Malls. I wish I smoked cigarettes. I could have used one while drinking a tiny glass of cognac for nine dollars at an Austrian specialty bar, 11:45 pm. Instead I pressed my fingers to my lips between sips AS IF I was smoking. I picked up that habit a long time ago. Whenever I want to feel urban and distressed and poetic, I make a pretend smoking gesture, one that I hope no one else notices. I pretend to smoke.

I also pretend to drink. Don't get me wrong, I really drink what I'm drinking, I really put the whole thing back, and usually pretty quickly - I just mean: I pretend to drink like a poet, like someone who's helped by the stuff. Someone who benefits from the shit he breathes.

Like someone who deserves to drink.