Money And Manhattan

This town is full of people who went to good schools, work good jobs, make good money, are never going to become millionaires.

Money is in the air, you can feel it. There are the outer boroughs, and there is Manhattan. Like there was this one guy, he used to come to some of the same progressive meetings I used to. Then he gave up. "It is all yuppies," he complained.

Most of them must have worked very hard to get where they are at. Most of them continue to work very hard just to stay where they are at. More than the per capita income, it is the density. There are so many of them. Midtown Manhattan has the greatest concentration of office space per square foot than any place on earth. Each cubicle is someone in a decent income bracket.

Politicians come from all across the country to raise money here. This is supposed to be their all-weather ATM. There are people who specialize in doing fundraisers. It is socializing, it is entertainment, it is I-did-my-good-deed-for-the-day the Manhattan way.

Where do you live? Upper East Side. What do you ride? A cab. Those are status symbols.

My car died on me recently. What is it about cars? Too many fluids to keep a tab on. But I was kind of rediscovering the joys of the four-wheeler. But when I came into the city last summer, I was just so happy not to have to need a car. Everywhere else in America, you need a car for everything. Grocery shopping? Car. Haircut? Car. I relished the subway. I still feel that is the only place New Yorkers meet, it is just that I don't understand why those walls have not been painted in a hundred years. There have been some late night sojourns when I have slept through my station. Once I went all the way to the very last stop. The sky was already early blue.

The drink. The cab. The dress code.

At Drinking Liberally, the drinks are free, but I have mostly rather talked. I don't think I have ever enjoyed beer in my life. And who wants a beer belly? I think I am going to show up much less often. It is the same 10 faces week after week.

I have experimented with the dress code. It used to be utterly casual. Then I started dressing up, minus the tie, say no to Jesus. Then it has been dress up bottom, casual warm top, going for the Matrix look.

I have a healthy feeling about money. Money is like a good conversation. Money, like words, is a vehicle of expression. Wealth creation is like writing poetry. There's art and science involved.

This is more commercial than most cities. What do you do? That can be a pointed question. What does your cellphone look like? What color is your parachute? Mine is the one I got when I first got a cellphone. I am not a big fan. I am a laptop fan, not a cell fan. But the thing about mine is, you connect it to a laptop, and the laptop goes online, for free, on the same free nights and weekends deal. I have a few different cameras. I don't need a camera phone. I hardly ever need a phone. Mostly it gets used when you are near some place you have agreed to meet somebody, and they are not there on time, or it is a tussle locating the other person.

Otherwise the phone stays in the pocket, turned off. Try voice mail. And if you really intend to communicate, nothing works like email, Gmail to be precise.

Sam Walton had plastic chairs at his headquarters. I am listening.

The thing is, it gets said, you meet someone at some event for three minutes, and you never see them again. So at events, the air is electric. People make all this effort to show up, and they end up spending most of their time with these three people they already knew. When you step outside that familiarity zone, there are sharks out there. You don't want to be seen like you don't have friends. Standing alone for a few minutes is not meditation, it is something else.

Good thing I get a kick out of conversation. I don't care two whits about baseball, etc. But talk politics, and I am on. And business. Impressive salaries are not that impressive, they are still just salaries. But it is really something to get someone to talk about their work that they are really into. Oh, the craft of it. I don't care if it is pottery. It could be lawyering, it could be banking. Better still if its is entrepreneurship. But those are few and far between.

What do you do? How do you do?

It gets said New York City is the most diverse city on the planet. It gets said New York City is the most segregated city on the planet. Attitudes don't go away just like that. But then it is easy. If you don't connect, you don't connect. The city is a civil war in motion. Only bloodletting has been outlawed.

"We don't like minorities up there in Connecticut."

"We are the same here in New York." Whites are minority.

Playful talk with the funnyman at MYD, Aaron Short.

Organized chaos that the city is.

But most of the jitters are just plain awkwardness. It is hard for all people to go to a party and say hello to strangers. Mostly it is that. Going to political events eases that. You go often enough, you end up knowing all the movers and shakers, all the top people. You get that insider feeling. There are only so many of them. And they go to each other's events. A lot of cross pollination.

The city is the Amazon forest. All sorts of human life forms can be found. I think that is what people are talking about when they say either you love New York or you hate New York.

Rent is steep. Cabs charge money. There is the occasional racist comment. But mostly people are just running. Catch me if you can. In the subway, people are mostly withdrawn. Remember what mama said, don't talk to strangers.

Cabbies stream in from the outer boroughs. Many of my fanciest comrades from the April Revolution are cabbies in the city. I don't know of Manhattan progressives who have done anything fancier, or are likely. Nothing like that has ever happened in world history.

There are 40,000 Nepalis in the city, three of them lawyers. They get rockstar treatment.

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