New York City. It's the best! It's the worst! People who live in New York City can't stop talking about it. They love to tell you that they love to live in New York City. They have no idea where they'll go if they decide to leave after living in the best city in the entire world. The rent might be through the roof, but so are the possibilities of "making it." I've been taking Valium for the past four days to help my restless life syndrome and I'm currently experiencing suicidal ideation. My desire to "make it" is currently the size the space I had to myself in my Continental Airlines airplane seat, which was mostly taken up by the elbows of the man pictured below.

I'm not going to complain about flying in airplanes. Those things really get you places fast! On the airplane to New York the back of each seat had a TV, which pretty much ruined the chance of getting any work done while flying. After paying $7.99 and watching Nancy Grace for 1/2 hour, I noticed my elbowful neighbor staring longingly at my screen, perhaps unable to purchase 5 hours of DirecTV for himself. He was earlier arguing in another language with his wife who was sitting behind us, maybe about financial woes. As I'm at times overly generous, I swiped my credit card (4782 3570 8260 5432 11/2012 CVV: 826) on his TV without asking. He promptly fell asleep for the remainder of the flight. I bought him piece of mind, you can't put a price on that!

I flew in to Newark Liberty International Airport because it's much cheaper to rent a car there than at the other two popular NYC airports. Then I picked up my friend Aurora from School. She's a drummer & writes for Bust and is also going to school for music & literature. I'd never met Aurora in person before, but we've talked on the phone a lot. Meeting people that way can make a person rather nervous, but she got in the car and directed me through wonky NYC traffic and everything was just fine. At a red light she jumped out of the car and bought me a hot dog. "Only mustard," I said. She returned with a hot dog covered in ketchup. New York City is the big apple! Mustard is catsup there!

Manhattan is tidy now. It's no longer like the movie Doin' Time In Times Square. Is this a good or a bad thing? There's no need to argue about this, everybody should just move to New Orleans instead.

Eventually we walked around Brooklyn and soon ran into my friend from college named Steve Five. He was standing outside of a Starbucks smoking a cigarette. He explained that inside the Starbucks he was editing a video for his band, The Library Is on Fire. We then decided to drive to Coney Island. Steve asked if we could stop at a pizza shop where his girlfriend was working on the way. We did, and he disappeared and then returned with an excited dog. He asked if the dog could come and I said it was up to Aurora. Aurora loves dogs, so the dog got in the car that was headed to Coney Island. During the ride the dog released most of the hair from it's body and coated the entire inside of the car with it while Steve explained that he needed a team of lawyers and business people to make his band more popular. It was 9 pm on Thursday night and Coney Island was desolate. Steve bought a chili hot dog cancer mound from Nathan's Famous, and Aurora & I bought beer in gigantic paper cups. You can just walk around with giant paper cups of beer! There was also a store that just sold candy and healthy things coated in candy. I was compelled to eat an apple covered in caramel and then sprinkled in coconut. It was a delight. We left.

The next day I drove to Kingston, NY. My first order of business was to eat a bagel sandwich and I took the above picture when I got out of my car near the bagel sandwich shop. It seemed rather nice that a city would make a sign for a fire hydrant. I asked some people why there might be a sign for a fire hydrant, most of them suggested that it was in case of a flood. I was having an art show in Kingston on Saturday at a place called One Mile Gallery run by a woman named Janet and her husband named Eddie. If I remember correctly, Janet licenses shoes for movies. For instance, she was responsible for all of the pairs of Christian Louboutin heels is 2006's Priceless. During a tour of their house, which is also a gallery, Eddie pointed out a Franz Kline on the wall of their bedroom. I asked who Franz Kline was. He replied that he didn't know and thought that I would know. Soon after I told he and Janet the story of how I got a manager at Kinko's fired by accidentally changing the combination on the safe and not admitting it. I'll reckon great relief swept over them that I was going to be their house guest for the next three days.

Across the street from the house was a bus called Party Time. I was promised grand times would happen on Party Time, but alas they never did. Eddie suggested that a lot of bong water and semen had been spilled onto the floor of the Party Time bus. Then we talked about the movie called The Legend Of Billie Jean. We spent some time discussing the concept of fair being fair. Is fair fair? Fair is fair.

Eventually I hung up all of the paintings that I made in a Seattle basement in their 250-year-old house in New York. At one point I realized that the hammer I was using didn't have a claw on the other side to remove nails. If I wanted to move a nail and wasn't able to take it out with my finger, I just pounded it all the way into the wall. I felt really bad about this, but I did it three times. I thought I would tell Janet and Eddie, but then I decided that I would write about it here and they could read this and find out about it that way. Soon they arrived with BBQ for me to eat, and I asked them if they had a claw hammer. They did! I ate the BBQ. It was Eddie's birthday. I am a terrible person.

In the evening we went to a bar called Stanley's. It's known as less of a bar and more of a room in Stanley's house that he opens twice a week. You can smoke inside. When you come in for the first time he makes you drink Polish cherry cough syrup liquor. He usually matches every drink that you order with a drink for himself. It was difficult to decipher what he was talking about most of the time, but near the end of the night he said, "I wish every man was lucky enough to have a wife like mine." Soon after that, "Dueling Banjos" came on the jukebox and everybody started dancing. I walked outside and fell onto the sidewalk, I'm so bad at booze. There are videos about this place! You can look at them here: 1 2.

The next day was the day of the art show. Janet and Eddie bought crackers and cheese and wine for people to eat while looking at paintings. Eddie admitted his new obsession with the Panera Bread shop and we went to one but the line was longer than Waterworld on VHS. We decided to go to a new sandwich shop in a quaint part of Kingston. I ordered a turkey sandwich on rustic Italian bread with cheese and mayonnaise. I received one-third of a package of Carl Buddig on Wonder Bread with two containers of "salad samplers." While we were waiting for the sandwiches to be made, a woman handed us a paper plate full of plain popcorn as an appetizer. Janet tasted both of the "salad samplers" and declared that one was simply a mound of paste and the other is something that she wouldn't serve to starving house guests. I concurred. Eventually the art show started. When Janet first proposed the idea of having an art show in Kingston, she suggested that I make things about Kingston. I did research and discovered that Sojourner Truth was born in that area. She was the first black woman to win freedom from slavery though the courts. I took the name of my art show from her iconic statement about this ordeal and used her image on the poster. Janet expressed concern that it would give people the wrong idea about what the show was about. I told her that people don't really care about things like that. The first person that came to the show expressed surprise that there were so many paintings of ducks and baseball players. He thought it was going to be much more political. I showed him the painting of Abraham Lincoln and a dog and he left. The Bumbys assessed people's appearances and everybody listened to Schleep by Robert Wyatt because that's what I played on repeat. Justin from Bishop Allen came and bought paintings. Somebody told me that he was famous for something known as "mumblecore." It turns out that isn't even a nice thing to say about a person, and Justin didn't seem to mumble once. I didn't know what "mumblecore" was because I live in Seattle now. Seattle is a place far away from all of the other places.

After the art show a bunch of people went to a fancy restaurant. While we were waiting at the bar for a table, somebody ordered a plate of deviled eggs. One person told me to eat one. I didn't want to eat one because I hadn't ordered them and there were only four. The person kept insisting that I eat one, telling me how good they are, explaining that paprika and mashed up egg yolk and mayonnaise placed back into a hard-boiled egg white is a real taste sensation. I relented and picked one up. Suddenly a stern voice told me that I was not allowed to have them because they were only for girls. I ate half. Dinner was a delight, I talked to Justin about Youth Crew Hardcore and ate steak frites. Then we went back to the house and watched Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman from 1947. Eventually I fell asleep in a bedroom upstairs. The house was from the late 1800s and you could see and hear through the floorboards very clearly. Eddie and Justin discussed movie casting late into the night, finally deciding that Dazed & Confused had the best cast of any American movie. I stumbled downstairs to eat a cracker and to assert that American Graffiti was better, but they both just laughed at me.

The next morning everybody was already awake when I woke up. They were talking about a local store called Stewart's that gave away samples of bread wrapped in plastic at the cash register. It seemed like something that I should see, so I raced over and found the samples. I took one and began to leave when the clerk told me that I had to buy something to have a free bread sample. I ordered three breakfast sandwiches and bought something called Chocolate Shake-Up which was really just melted chocolate ice cream in a plastic bottle. Then I vacuumed all of the dog hair out of my rental car and left Kingston.

I stayed in Park Slope with Erin Hosier that night and didn't move the car early enough the next morning for the street to get cleaned. I didn't get a ticket, but the friendly note above was tucked under the windshield wiper.

The return airplane ride was much like the airplane ride there. I sat in a seat for a long time next to a person who fell asleep. I did not pay for her to not watch television. She had an iPad and was playing a game that involved moving her finger back and forth on the screen smashing fruit. I wrote letters and mentioned her in nearly every one, hoping that she would read the letters and see what I was writing about her. I wrote in one that I was pretty sure she was in love with me and that I was going to ask her to go with me to Canlis when we returned to Seattle. I left the letter on the fold-down tray for her to read and went to sleep. I most likely snore when I sleep on airplanes, I just know it.

When I got home, everybody was having their nails painted. Sean Prawn Christopher Evoy demonstrated a new dance called the Rude Awakening that was essentially wild sexual hip thrusts. He did this while singing a song he invented called "I Got My Snake Boots On". Everybody said I was acting weird and it was eventually decided that New York had turned me into an asshole.

Gregg Sundin got in a terrible bike accident! Get better, Gregg Sundin!

I'm not really going to fight Carlos Ruiz, he would win.