NW:o - Panic NYC

2/24/13

Saturday Night in New York Fucking City and I am wet, shivering in the mist of a wimpy winter. The anxiety seizes my body and I suddenly can not do anything but run away, under the guise of seeking cigarettes, of which, in Chinatown & Soho, there is not a single late night option for nicotine. 

I'm trying not to throw up, letting the remnants of Aderall carry me as Robyn keeps me grounded to dance steps down sad sidewalks of a city I no longer know. I need alcohol to form some semblance of sanity here, so I follow the giant green arrow down Mulberry, peeking out from the side of the Puck Building. 

It leads me to Botanica, my last refuge in the neighborhood, a bar that became home when I lived with a psychopath on Thompson & Bleeker. She said she loved me, but we were the fiercest of contrasts. So similar that we were fighting fights with everyone in our life with one another. 

At least she broke my spirit. Or I broke it over her mental dysfunction and alcoholism. Split in twain that which once was my fractured heart. Always torn between self-sacrifice and world domination. I was broken an bloody in this bar, and they made of me a friend, or at least a regular. 

Nowadays I only hit this spot when lost and alone, wracked with panic attacks and at the end of my rope, and it's always the same. A mixed cocktail of douchey city hipster is consistent here, hence why it's my bar. Bartender Johnny wore an Invisibles t-shirt one night, we got to talking 2012, and I'd see his band Dead Stars. 

I also met Eduardo here, but that man deserves an entire chapter. 

I'm shitfaced an writing poetic prose on a digital handheld device, where my content is held in hard drives and clouds, twenty-first century self-starter, sending fiction into unknown territories. What if Yeats could have riffed out rhythms in keyboard touchscreen taps?

I'm withdrawing and the ladies feel it. They swing into orbit as I warble off key and solitary. I'm too afraid of people. I know how to let loose in public, but when I don't have some manner of buddy, I'm lost and awkward, or even awkward still. I'm socially flinching at every turn, terrified of the...