V Bar

I've been working to migrate my old website over to Word Press for about 6 months, but the amount of time to migrate the individual pages over has been a bear. The more I live via my smart phone rather than actually sitting down, plugging in a laptop and connecting to wireless has made things even harder and harder. So, I feel a bit like I'm giving in to the easy solution, but Blogger, here I am...

Pardon any typos you see in this - chances are the posts are being submitted via a Palm Centro with my enormous sausage fingers on wee tiny keys.

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I'm sitting here in V Bar in the Village, after a meeting at a client's offices nearby. Greenwich Village provokes all sorts of lost memories and scorn on my misspent youth. All those Summer days I took the Long Island Rail Road in from my parents' home, or later my apartment in New Jersey, for a specific purpose - taking a summer class at SVA or NYU, working at overrated and understaffed dot.com's - all without ever taking the opportunity to stop and sit and take it all in.

And now here I am, 30 years old, and stopping to sit for just a moment at an internet cafe after a business meeting, keeping track of the things I have yet to do today - errands and obligations, follow up emails to customers, and so on. My wife just texted me that she got me an awesome anniversary gift, and I realized I hadn't gotten her anything yet. It had crossed my mind as I browsed a vendor's stall on Bleecker Street, but I hadn't found anything to fit. "Don't get me anything. Wait, get me a cheesecake from Junior's. That'd be nice." read the text. Score. One more subway stop away from Penn Station and I'm good...

Before the client meeting, I sat in Caffe Reggio on MacDougall Street, in the seat by the door, next to the mirror, facing towards the door. The mirror made the place look so much bigger, and gave me a better vantage point of many of the old paintings. The Caravaggio - ahem, "School of Caravaggio" - was to my back, but how many times had I sat and stared at that painting as a 21-year-old working at a dot.com a few doors down from the Cafe, located over the "Off the Wagon" bar. Funny that - that internet start-up that was going to change the world is now long gone, but "Off the Wagon" is still there. Dad was right - I should have married into some famous liquor-producing family.

With the harpsichord music tinkling in the cheap sound system of Reggio's, I stopped for a moment, put my Centro handheld in my suit jacket pocket, and sat and stared at the table, or the lesser non-Caravaggio works on the walls. For a moment I was 21-years-old again, just excited to be in the Village, the haunts of Kerouac and Ginsberg, and this was some focal point of Feng Shui to being countercultural.

Then my smart phone buzzed to remind me that I had only 30 minutes to go before my meeting.

Jack and Allen, where are you?