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.Though not a native New Yorker, I’ve been here long enough to act like one.I can’t drive a car; my license elapsed long ago.I can’t countenance waiting for anything; even my dry cleaning has to be delivered.I like my lattes with extra foam and 2% milk, but not skim, and I prefer Indian cuisine to Thai and Senegalese.In short, I’m an ass.But there are worse fates for mice and men.I don’t visit Wilton often.Its wide-open spaces exacerbate my agoraphobia.I’m unaccustomed to big blue skies and streets without numbers.Old family friends and neighbors, barely recognizable now, walk with canes and stumped gaits that remind me too much of the passage of time.I’m told that the Wilton I write about bears little resemblance to the genuine item.In my books, kids wear bell bottoms, movie ushers check identification to prevent fifteen-year-olds from entering R-rated movies, mothers stay at home to raise their children, and fathers commute on the 7:08 express to Grand Central Station to earn their families’ daily bread.It’s not an ideal place to live, but it’s predictable, and its values and taboos are clearly defined.Between my dream Wilton and the real thing are the embellishments of nostalgia.I cannot say which details are true any longer and which are suspect.Perhaps, retroactively, I’m constructing my ideal childhood and tacking it over the one that did not measure up.Together, they are a new fabric.Both visible.And like the boy on the rocking horse who wishes hard enough, both true.I’d go back to that dream place if I could, just to poke around.But it seems that’s impossible.And so, instead, I live on 113th Street in Manhattan.My nine-and eleven-year-old girls share a cramped bedroom, attend Columbia Prep, and quote the Reader’s Digest versions of Heidegger printed in their English textbooks.I doubt they understand it, but I’m assured by their teachers that comprehension is not the point.They don’t understand their favorite pop star’s mental breakdown either, do they? But they still discuss it, and her heroin tracks, as if she is one of their friends.I’m often astounded when I hear their dinner-table chatter about one boy’s father, who is in jail for tax evasion, the girl who removed her shirt in front of two male schoolmates for a fee of $5, and how they’ve given up butter, because it’s too fattening, even though, ringing wet, neither of them comes close to a buck.They are small adults in children’s bodies.Who would have guessed that the democratization of information would also democratize maturity? We’re not in Wilton, anymore, Toto.In my idealized family life, my wife and I would dress for dinner, discuss lofty intellectual quandaries with our children, and after tucking them into bed, would sit quietly while listening to Wagner and nursing a scotch.The scotch part being essential.Instead, I spend most evenings at the computer while my wife returns phone calls.She wears one of those phones that plugs into her ear, so when she talks, I sometimes forget, and wonder if she’s having a schizophrenic break.Who could blame her? She’s an event planner and answers at least two hundred e-mails a day.We don’t use our kitchen to cook.We reheat.Last night, after the kids went to sleep, we watched television.The program was not Masterpiece Theatre, but a reality celebrity drug rehabilitation show starring washed-up has-beens in all their drug-addled glory, their problems neatly resolved in one-half hour.We learned that the comedian from an 00’s sitcom enjoyed his crack from a pipe, while the child star from that same show preferred her self-destruction via sex trade.Was a love connection in the cards between these crazy kids? Would they live happily ever after and drug-free, or, more likely, when the camera faded, and the limelight to which they are addicted ceased to shine, would they crawl back to their former slop heaps, only to make the news once more, this time with the story of their overdoses.Who can resist such titillation!Bradbury and Debord alike admonished us not to spy on our neighbors, but to learn their names.And yet, we’ve installed cameras in practically every room of our homes, voluntarily.I cannot help but wonder if Warhol’s fifteen minutes, now truncated to fifteen seconds, signals the death knell of the human mind.Where once, it interpreted and recognized patterns, now it regurgitates without comprehension.The modern world is defined by absence.Religion, family, work, and even our American nationality have lost currency.Instead of finding suitable replacements for the vacuum their loss has created, we deny that they are ailing and cling to their rotting remains, quite aware of the paradox, the hypocrisy, the inevitable corruption.In 1966, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” Now the question is reassuringly quaint: it assumes God once existed.It is the nature of a vacuum to be filled.Our government drops more bombs on more countries every year.Our friends, undependable and temporary, make poor substitutes for our broken families [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]