2001-08-15 - 3:23 p.m.
Great. My trip to New York City is still five weeks away and the anxiety dreams have already started. The other night I dreamt that I arrived in Newark to find my chair missing a wheel, and that everyone responded to my increasingly loud and frantic questions about it with a shrug and a big, "Hell if I know."
I don�t usually get nervous about traveling. I�ve been to Europe twice and to other East Coast cities numerous times. I�ve driven the entire length of the West Coast, from San Diego to Seattle and back--in October, which means lots of fog, frost and rain. I�ve dealt with asshole Canadian customs officials. I�ve spent the night in a roach-infested motel room in Providence, Rhode Island, coughing up chunks of lung because I�ve been sick with pneumonia for a month. I�ve had diarrhea in East Berlin with not a single accessible bathroom in sight. Hell, I've been to DALLAS. But plan a trip to New York and I have nightmares. What the fuck?
I�m guessing the main reason is that, well, it�s New York. Freaky Californians like me get ground up there and eaten for breakfast just because we�re high in fiber--that�s the image you get when you grow up here, anyway. You might as well be journeying to Mordor. Of course, I grew up in L.A., which is just as much of a pit of evil in many people�s eyes--talk to someone who�s visiting L.A. for the first time and you�ll no doubt hear a lot of anxiety about earthquakes, riots, carjackings, forced colonics at gunpoint, et cetera. And a friend of mine once told me that in small-town Iowa, where he grew up, no one ever goes to Des Moines for fear of losing their virtue there. I can just hear Ben Kenobi telling Luke, "Des Moines, Iowa--you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."
(Wow. I just referenced both Tolkien and Star Wars in a single paragraph. My status as a Great Big Geek remains secure.)
Mind you, I�m really looking forward to this trip. I know lots of cool people there and I�m sure I�ll get to meet lots of their cool friends and do all sorts of cool things--I expect my coolness quotient will have gone up a hundredfold by the time I get back. But still, a tiny little neurotic part of my brain is afraid that people will look at my wheelchair, think I�m a homeless person and either throw spare change at me or call Rudy Giuliani and have his goon squad carry me off to be sodomized with a broom handle. Um, go Yankees?
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Tonight the Ken Theater is showing a double feature: Best in Show and This Is Spinal Tap. I am so there I can taste it. My parents did the dog-show thing for a while, so trust me, Best in Show is truer than any of you can possibly know. And everyone I know who�s ever been in a band, or is friends with someone in a band, thinks Spinal Tap is the funniest movie ever made. You�re a loser if you haven�t seen it yet. Not only that, but at least a third of my clever pop-culture references come from that movie, so if you haven�t seen it, that means you�ve just been pretending to laugh at my jokes all this time and I�m going to be very insulted when I find out. And I will find out.
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