[1] You bring out your notebook at the Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to begin chronicling, after a sort, some details of the quixotic journey you are undertaking. But more than that, this is one acceptable way for you to kill time waiting for the next plane in this transit lounge, where as that gadfly Tom Wolfe once trenchantly remarked half of America’s literary establishment lives and writes.

Indeed O’Hare is one of the caravanserais of the West, being one of the world’s largest and busiest airports. However what does it represent and mean – unheard ease of travel in alternative universes, when in some other universes getting a pot of drinkable water is a hard morning trek? Your mind goes back to last summer when you spent a week in this city, wandering in the tall shadows of skyscrapers, eyes always looking up, an architecture guide book open in your hand to the city that is said to have big shoulders, to the city that is called the womb of American, and perhaps even modern, architecture. Larry from Razor’s Edge also flits across the stage with his holy quest to free himself from the suffocation of breathing, eating and shitting dollar bills in what was then a superpower in the embryo.

Old Philosophy Question: Is life a transit lounge, where one is trapped between arriving from some place and waiting or wanting to go somewhere else? Another one: what is the ideal mind of a traveler?

You are seated at the window seat of the airplane wheeling towards New York City, some seven hundred odd miles away. Chicago spreads out its grids underneath a darkening sky; all its tall towers pool their lights and huddle underneath your plane’s wing. Lake Michigan stands in contrast, in opposition, with its pitch black waters next to the city, and you now are skimming over them, away, away to a more distant city of the mind, as you watch a woman sitting next to you thumb a paperback, and think how much beauty is concentrated in that section of the wrist, where the arm’s stub meets the palm. Goodbye Augie March, Goodbye Moses Herzog.

[2] You fly into New York City in the middle of the night, the plane descends towards the still unseen tarmac by appearing to fall out of the sky into the dazzling canyons of Manhattan underneath. You, for all your recently acquired worldliness, once again feel like a kid from some rural neck of the woods circa 19th century, who has accidentally wandered into some science fiction scene.

Your regular mask of ironic cynicism cracks, and you glue your face to that tiny square of the airplane’s window, and eagerly scan the lay of the land beneath you. The streets are frenzied rivers of light, even though it is approaching the midnight hour, and from the tops of the buildings you can identify some of the landmarks that you have heard on, seen in books and so forth, but never hovered over like this. You think Lucas after all didn’t really stretch the imagination too much in his Star Wars money making empire because what lies beneath you is not too far away from what you are supposed to imagine watching his moving images on a movie screen. New York City is then one of the edges of the human civilization. Beyond it, if you get that far, lies the unknown, where you may fall off into the void that surrounds the zillion-dimensioned earth.

[3] You land at a nearly deserted airport. It is after midnight. It is cool, and you pull on the rain jacket as you wait for the bus that will put you on a subway line, put you on the E train. You watch late night stragglers get into yellow cabs that scurry up antlike and drive away into the night. New York City air has a certain scent, and you can’t put your nose on it as yet. It is that of the wetlands, the sea, and the rivers, which intersect and surround it?

The transit bus pulls in, and along with the few travelers like you, few airport workers and airline stewardesses get on. Even though it has been a long day so far, your mind is curiously alert, not tired at all. Two sub continental chaps sit behind you and begin to talk. The first word you overhear is ‘behanchod’ (trans: sister-…..), followed by laughter.

Your face breaks into a smile, as some of your memories of a place of burning mind and jazzy thinking riffs, now distant both in time and distance, come back to you, where this word, along with many others similar in tone and content to it, were used as terms of endearment. The bus slowly winds its way through the borough of Queens, snatches of conversation behind you in Hindi – you can identify two distinct accents now, Bengali and Gujarati, a woman talking into a phone in Spanish, slumbering tenement houses, store signs in many tongues: Urdu, Spanish, Hindi, seedy dives, pool halls, dance clubs with toughs manning the doors, billboard selling phone cards to call distant cities of Latin America, of Eastern Asia, and even the strangest country, Uzbekistan, where a dictator is currently massacring his country men, where familiar voices await the ring of phones. The discussion behind you has now moved on to crazy New York City rents, and where can one still find a cheap place to stay, this is a standard immigrant obsession, to find a fortress that is at once comfortable and cheap, against strangeness of the outside world.

[4] The bus drops you off the subway station, you look around at the entrance, figure out the machine that will give you a seven day MetroPass, you will need it as you plan to wander around quite a bit, you feed it dollar bills and get a slender piece of paper with a magnetic stripe. “Open sesame” you say to the iron gates guarding the mouths of the tunnels, the veins, the intestines, as you slide your card in through the reader. It beeps and flashes ‘Go’ in green, right on your first try. A good omen you think. You feel things will go well.

You now have to figure out down which set of stairs you have to go down to catch that E train going uptown. You ask a lady who is walking slower than most of crowd how to do this, as you are too zapped to read all the color-coded signs hanging from the ceiling. She explains to you in Spanglish how to catch the express train. You say, “Gracias Senorita.” She smiles at your awkward attempt to speak Spanish in a strange city in the middle of the night.

You get into the belly. It is dirty, smelly and beautifully pulsing with life at 1 am in the morning. Janitor workers going to work or going home after work, a young Latino couple very much in love, kissing passionately, a stylish woman with tough hands, working hands, who has eyeliner on, all these folks get on the train with you. It rumbles on, skipping stations in between. Faces come into light and then the tunnel where it is always night. People get on and get off, construction workers with dust on their faces, hobos, a bunch of tourists among whom you notice a woman with stunning eyes, nay scimitars. And somewhere in between, your memories of other cities you have lived in, passed through, other bodies, both real and imaginary, in which you yourself were arriving, and then departing, also get on and off the train.

[5] It is around 2 am when the E train puts you at the West 34th Street station. After making a circle in that underground maze, you walk up the stairs and find yourself standing the corner of 7th Ave and 34th street, cars on the street, people walking some where in the night, and you reading your map, and walking with your bags a block west towards 8th Avenue, at whose end stand a building with the sign New Yorker boldly painted on the top. For a moment you think this is from where that arbiter of intellectual tastes and manners, The New Yorker magazine, is put out. When you get closer you see that this is not the case, it is a hotel. You walk two blocks south, cross the 8th Ave, and get to your hole-in-the-wall-hotel-dorm-shack on 32nd street in Chelsea.

You are lead to your bunk bed in a tiny room, which feels more like a largish closet. In the dark you quickly undress, put on your pajamas, and try to get on the top most bunk as soundlessly as possible, so as not to disturb others whose corpse like bodies you can see in the dark sprawled on the other bunk beds. It is beastly, the air is filled with exhalations, two of the sleepers in the room snore loudly, a girl in one of the bunks below yours can’t sleep, she is trying hard, she keeps turning round and round, sighing occasionally, sometimes she gets up and paces the arm wide alley between the beds, she drinks water, goddamn she is tormented by tiredness and yet she can’t sleep. This is Dante’s Inferno.

When she lays down next, you get up and feel for the AC’s switch and turn it on. You get back on the bunk, lay flat on your back, and start breathing deliberately to loosen the knots in your back, in your stomach, you soon drift off into fitful sleep.

[6] You are on the street, and the sun is yet to rise. A chill wind is blowing from the east. It smacks you right in the face. Soon the sun comes up, and the city wakes up. You watch a florist cutting and arranging roses at the corner of your hotel. You are thirsty. You need some water to drink. Your eyes meanwhile keep traveling up into the sky. This must be how the natives here identify the foreigners, the tourists: the ones looking up. It also occurs to you that this metaphor can also explain spiritual business: if you keep looking up for god, life will smack your face down on the sidewalk!

You drift into a deli on the corner, run by people who are from elsewhere, Greeks? But then al most everyone here is from Elsewhere country. You buy a breakfast of eggs, toast, and orange juice, and slowly eat it, sharing it with whirling pigeons, sitting on the steps of a classical looking building, on the top of which it says US Post Office.

First few pages from the trip log. Bruce Springsteen, the NYC working man's minstrel, provided accompaniment to the clicking keyboard.