New York is Forever

One day, you will wake up, and you will miss all of this.

Whatever the “this” is, that’s for you to learn.

It could be anything.

It may be your joint health, it may be your mother’s voice, it may be your talent, it may be strange enough, your problems.

13 years ago I was announcing on Facebook I was playing my last gig at Tjili Pop in Copenhagen, before my schedule move back to America.

13 years later I find myself sitting in Astoria Park, listening to a country band that my fiancé and I stumbled across as we plan yet another move, this time back to Charleston.

I have done a lot of thinking about my life in New York. 

Why I came, why I am leaving.

I came to New York to get away, to disappear, to become something else.

I also came because of comedy.

NYC represents the height of the upstream that a little salmon can swim to, braving all the waterfalls, bears and bringer shows.

When I look back at the texture of New York, it has punctuated my life at 4 different times, like 4 gospels.

 When I was 15, my mom lived up here. I would come visit it. I hated it.

Not her, just the city. I didn’t get it. It was confusing to get around, no one looked you in the eye, it made me feel like nothing.

Then at 27 I ended up back in New York briefly where I fell in love. I remember riding around the subway with this girl, I remember the fabric of her thrifted blouse, I remember feeling foolish because she had an iPhone and I didn’t and was useless with the directions. I remember feeling connected and significant, and strong even though the odds were bad.

I remember coming at 37, older wiser, heavier in all ways. The city was freezing. It was still covid. Masks on, people sitting on benches in 17 degree weather outside of Blue Bottle because it wasn’t safe to drink it in a café.

I remember going to a series of dog shit open mics. I remember being late to everything. I remember running my business remotely for the first time. I remember finding one of the best parts of my time in NYC at the judo gym KBI with all my friends there.

I remember writing a lot, trying very hard, volumes of failure. Little fireflies of success.

New York City is an amplifier. Everything you do is not made better or worse, it is made louder.

One time I got booked on a coffee shop show and the whole show sucked, I then proceeded to suck, and I was so depressed I laid in bed all day.

A year later, I did a set at a club I was working my way into, had a good set, after the show a couple pulled me aside and asked to follow me so they could see me again. It felt big. Walking home the buildings themselves made the moment feel even more important.

I’m now 41, and the last cycle of my NYC life truly started about 2 years ago when my then gf now fiancé moved up. It was a big, big, big deal. I had not lived with a woman in 14 years.

What’s more, we saved and scrimped and sold everything to afford to move into a gorgeous “I’m doing good” apartment. No more manic roommates, no more shit bird landlords.

It was a huge change. My life started to take on a new shape, one built around other people’s rhythms and delights.  Some of it felt like a sacrifice. The math of being an artist makes less sense when you are not alone. If I have no one to come home to, of course I will come support your 11 p.m. Brooklyn show. If I do have someone to come home to, I’m not reading your text.

But even though parts of me fell off, new parts grew in their place.

I feel like this is the chapter where I became a man.

Besides all the things I think I did well here, and the things I feel deep cringe for because I didn’t live up to my own ideal, what I am thinking about most today on my last day in NYC is this:

I think about all the people that have been nice to me.

Judy let me crash in her house for like a month. Heather took me to a cool Mediterranean breakfast, Shintaro gave me countless opportunities to get better and make money, Derek fixed one of my jokes, Michael and Tanner let me cry about mics, Greg showed me how to dominate the sleeve, Cam and Jam came out for a show when I needed them, Boris and a flood of other New Yorkers came and did my show in Charleston and encouraged me, there’s a full deck of cards in my mind of the people that made my life sweeter here.

To all those people mentioned and not mentioned, thank you thank you thank you.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to live somewhere different, what matters and what doesn’t matter, and I think I have distilled it down to one aim:

The goal is to collect good memories for the long winter of the future, and to be a good memory for others.

I hope in some small way I have done just that.