Hello, Goodbye...

One more year past in New York City and I’m writing this from New Orleans.
Five years gone in the big apple two days down in the Big Easy.
I remember every single moment of my first week in New York. I remember being awe filled and dumbstruck by absolutely everything.

I walked through the streets of Manhattan with a reverence. The energy of the city moved through me like a breeze. The possibilities, the new horizons, the stories of wayward dreamers that came before me were all palatable. And then five years went by. Grifters that look like John Lovett, warehouses built by well meaning mad men and shown to the normies of NYU. I’ve heard bar stool confessions and watched the people that go bump in the night hang themselves up by the skin of their back and cackle in revelry. I’ve had my heart broken more than once by women, by industry, by art.

New York will always be the place I mourned my mother. It will always be the place I found my wings. It will always be the place that taught me how to struggle and how to win and it helped me to define what a win was.

The narcism of New York City is not to be denied or ignored. But if you can escape the feeling that you have to beat out 10 million people for your voice to be relevant and instead enjoy the complex living organism that it is, take pride in your part in moving even a few cells of that organism, you can find yourself.

This isn’t a “good bye to all of that here is why New York blows” blog. I love New York and I always will. It is hard and it should be, it is mean sometimes and it needs to be, it is inconvenient  sometimes and that’s good for you. I see people leave the city forever with malice for the place that tolerated their transplant asses for YEARS. We are a sick society and if we take our poison with the grit god gave us some of us can find a cure, they can come out clean.

New York is traumatizing for a lot of people, and I wont say it wasn’t traumatizing for me. But it also gave me decades of living in half the time. I’ll write all of those stories down soon but for now I want to thank New York.

This all might be a little pre-mature, I’m not sure I’m staying in New Orleans yet. But I’ve done a lot of considering it and what I’ve decided is that if I don’t move back to New York it wont be because I am not forever in love with the city. It will be because the city was my mother while I was absent my own, and she let me go to spread the wings she helped me craft. I built my life with blood on my lips, fire on my tongue, and mud in my teeth and New York saw me.

Now I get to take this weathered heart and these practiced eyes to a place that knows how to say C’est La Vie with a smile. I’ve done my due diligence, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone, and I think it is time I got to raise a glass in a city that will pay me for my art and my company.

I can hear my mother laughing as I walk down magazine street looking in the antique shops and the clothing stores. I can see her head thrown back, her silver hair tossing as she celebrates life with me. I can hear beyond the veil here and for the first time in a long time I don’t feel my mother’s hand on my back, or hear her voice shhhhing me calm...I feel her hand in my hand and I hear her effortless laughter accenting the background of my walk down the Mighty Miss.

Goodbye New York, I’ll catch you later.

Hello New Orleans, you’ve been waiting for me.