Jiving on the connections between us

There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.

I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.

I was feeling kind of antsy.

Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.

The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.

And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.

Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.

When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..

The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.

I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.

And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.

Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.

I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.

The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.