• Thursday, 03/16/2023 ** 15:54 I've arrived at the conclusion that pretty much everyone else has after traveling a lot - every place you can be is pretty much the same. It's the people you know in the place that matters. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, Stockholm, Berlin, and so forth... - each has the 'cool' gritty area, the luxury shopping downtown, the suburb-y cafe-ridden neighborhood with the good restaurants, the weird banking district that has high-rise apartments, the awesome high-rise apartment area, the historical center, the center today, the bike-friendly new neighborhood, and so on...

People describe the 'energy' of places in different ways; San Francisco to many is still the gold rush, now silicon, a promise of a western futurism. New York's concrete jungle - though they have the first jungle gym - is less about the concrete and more about the people, still spending time in parks in the east village or performing citibike tricks off off of the curb or doing tricks on the subway. There are enough trees in Manhattan to keep people happy, but you can't say the same for Chicago, a city the world's fair was supposed to make the future but that still feels incomplete, lacking the proper transportation infrastructure and trees anywhere to complement the drab brutalist and modernist buildings. A city for people wouldn't block the city's core in with a series of highways. They'd build like DUMBO, using highways to isolate a community that can enjoy the best river walk available on the island. I still don't understand where Portland went wrong - the city feels like it has all of the infrastructure and natural beauty to be set up for success, but a walk around the city feels isolating. The Pioneer center feels sanitary, engineered, prescribed - nothing to do with what I've experienced the city to be. The Boston area feels a bit absurdist - downtown has nothing for anyone but bad food and rough buildings, and the brownstoned south end is far too uniform - and, honestly, boring - to be gentrified in the same ways that Bushwick has been.

Allston feels like a wild west where the towing company is worse than the cops, and Brookline - though it has the perfect infrastructure to form an idealistic, mixed-income community - is a city "built for senior citizens" rather than for all of its inhabitants, coated with rich taxpayers and mediocre restaurants and "live laugh love" and police presence and noise ordinances where nobody is allowed to have fun or ride a bike. Roxbury is half frat house hellhole and half impoverished, and feels as if Northeastern University and predatory realtors have colluded to slowly destroy the last haven of affordable housing in the city. Imagine coming back from your late night minimum-wage job to Svedka dripping through the ceiling of an apartment that your landlord has raised the rent on twice times in the past year. God.

Cambridge, like Somerville (Camberville?), is a bubble. Everyone's in tech or biotech or academia or a trust-fund bankrolled commune. The west is full of gated homes; the north and east chop up houses into the smallest apartments imaginable and somehow the rent is still unaffordable. I paid six dollars for some powdered, disgusting hot chocolate - but good thing I saw George Washington's military residence and T.S. Eliot's Harvard home on the way! You can meet some of the brightest and most passionate people in the world here if you're in the right room - but here, people hide their families and wealth behind closed doors, keeping the power structures invisible (Joe Kerwin's words, or someone else in Boston), so it's impossible to know how to get there until you've already made it. New York is so alluring because status is transparent - just like LA - but instead of getting the gated community to open for you, you only need to know the bartender at the club. ** 17:19 I often feel more interested in growing close to the people who will change the world than making that change happen myself. I love people but more than anything I love seeing the impact they make, the ideas they touch, the narratives they craft. I'm worried about not being remembered. I don't want to be mediocre. I don't want to be forgotten.