insight

Sitting at a lay berth in Brooklyn, I've been looking out over the water and land around me for much of the evening, watching a series of thundersqualls go by. In that time, the airports have diverted traffic from one side of us to the other; at sunset, I watched the planes running up my port side about 5 miles off... now they're running athwart the stern, lined up in the darkness as no more than a series of lights, each one representing hundreds of lives... but those people I can't see, and around me, here at a bend in the Gowanus basin, surrounded by Brooklyn on 3 sides and Staten Island in the distance closing the box, I get an inkling of how New Yorkers survive the closed in spaces- their anonymity comes from being one of many in the crowds, but in places like this, despite being surrounded by millions of people at close quarters, I can't see a single body... at this moment, I am alone, or, as alone as I can be, anyhow, considering where I am. I guess this is solitude, New York style. It's pretty solitary out there, surprisingly enough. I prefer the country kind of solitude, for it's wholeness- here, the buzz of humanity fades into a background noise that I can't hear except when I focus and pick out the hum of vehicles and machines in the distance. My mind interprets this as a solitary sense, yet I know that this is an amalgam of the tides of humanity, an artifact of my coping mechanism for being surrounded by about 7 million too many warm bodies at close quarters.