[thenightwriterblog] The Night Writer: Short on sleep in the city that never bothers to

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Posted by The Night Writer:
Short on sleep in the city that never bothers to
http://thenightwriterblog.powerblogs.com/posts/1174013850.shtml


   Iâve always loved coming into Manhattan from the outlying boroughs.
   Approaching and crossing the bridges or coming through the tunnels
   always has a certain feel of anticipation as if traveling to a
   fantasyland. In the past Iâve always come to the island via the Newark
   or LaGuardia airports, but this trip I landed at JFK. In one of those
   oddities of air fare arcania, I had a choice between two Northwest
   flights, each leaving Minneapolis at the same time on the same day,
   one arriving at LaGuardia and the other at JFK, one minute apart. The
   LaGuardia flight was some $650 more than the one that landed at JFK.
   Thatâs math that even I can do. (Heck, I can even do it in
   story-problem form: if two planes leave at the same time for the same
   destination, arriving at almost the same time, and if the Night Writer
   selects the one that costs $650 more, how long before Corporate
   Accounting comes down on him like a herd of [1]flesh-eating frogs?
   Approaching Manhattan from Queens especially enhances the sensation of
   being backstage at a big show. Nearing the Queensboro Bridge I noticed
   a cemetery resolutely holding its ground while the highway, roads,
   brick warehouses and homes pressed round its perimeter like a river
   coursing past a boulder. It occured to me that cemeteries tend to be a
   reflection of their environs. When I drive through rural areas, for
   example, cemeteries have lots of empty space around them and seem to
   jut up from the empty fields suddenly, without transition, much like
   the communities they serve. Squat stones and tall stones break up the
   lines of the earth in the same way the houses, barns and silos do. In
   Queens the headstones â squat and tall â are compacted together, their
   straight, tidy rows and random heights and shapes looking like a
   modeler's panorama of Manhattanâs grid. I thought of these headstones
   again this morning as I had a bagel and coffee while looking out the
   window from the 44th floor of the Hilton in mid-town (yes, Corporate
   Accounting knows about this, too); the stone rectangles of differing
   heights and colors running row after row below in straight lines below
   my feet.
   Thatâs about all of Manhattan that I saw on this short trip. Yesterday
   I went directly from the airport shuttle to a 13th floor conference
   room overlooking an inner courtyard off of Park Avenue. From up there,
   though, I could hear the filtered sirens and honkings from the streets
   below and the miscellaneous crashings and bangings that are a constant
   part of the background noise of the city, much like bird song on a
   country morning. Six and a half hours later I followed our little
   group out of the conference room and across the street to a
   restaurant; three hours after that I walked the half-dozen blocks to
   my hotel.
   Though that was still âearlyâ â especially by New York standards â it
   was still 18 hours after I had woken up that morning, a sleep that
   itself had only lasted about 3 ½ hours. By the time I got up to my
   room last night the 20 oz. Caribou coffee in the Minneapolis airport,
   two cans of pop and one cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee (now
   thatâs what I call a conference room!) in the afternoon that had
   provided life-preserving stimulation earlier were exacting their
   payback in the form of palpitations and twitchy muscles in my forearms
   and fingers. When I was younger I might have thought, "I'll sleep when
   I'm dead." Last night I was more interested in sleeping like the dead.
   The neon lights may be bright on Broadway, but they were nothing
   compared to the ones going off inside my head -- and it was definitely
   time for lights out. I might as well have been in Des Moines or
   Owatonna except that way down below, the New York City serenade was a
   soothing backdrop.
   You really can find anything you want in New York, including a good
   night's sleep.

References

   1. http://thefarwright.blogspot.com/2007/03/oh-my-as-official-blog-site-warning-of.html