My first blog

Sooooo, this is my first blog! ever. i am sitting here waiting for the rush of excitement to overcome me, like the first time i took a tag when i started writing graffitti at the age of 14. it doesn't seem to have the same amount of weight, like the moment i hit the button on the spray can and watched the wet dark line suddenly appear on the concrete of the bridge i was under. that line defied everything that seemed permanent and everything about that bridge that felt like it was so much better then i was. so much older and grander then me, that in all my years of biking under it, lighting fireworks at it, and throwing ninja stars at it for the sparks, none of it had seemed to make the bridge aware of ME. well there it was, my horribly amateurish and unevolved signature suddenly lept from my hands and settled very dark and wet against the 100 year-old stone. WHAT UP BITCHES!! I am ZEN2. I am a part of this crazy island, or maybe now, it is just a part of me.

I start this blog for a lot of reasons, mostly that it seems like it could be therapeutic and a great outlet for my daily craziness, starting with current events (that i commonly rail on my poor innocent fellow animators at work about, regardless of how much i like them, or even how much they care, or know, about the latest article i have read and subsequently started howling about). i also think its about time i put to pen some of the crazy episodes and experiences my lucky life has given me. so i guess i am planning on having a blog that ranges around, a lot like my thoughts do when i drive to work these days. my body takes over the motor skills of the commute and my thoughts start flying around my life, my family, my friends, my memories, my regrets, my goals. sometimes i wish i could organize everything in files, like a Trapper Keeper folder used to do for me in junior high. but considering that my sock drawer is a Jackson Pollack painting and my important papers are scattered, this seems like a waste of energy. instead the Blog seems to need no order to its words, i am not trying to make a point or reach a catharsis (i won't rule this possiblity out, but i won't hold my breath either). no, the blog doesn't demand anything of me. just that i speak my mind.

a super brief description of my life might be in order as i begin. i was born in uptown manhattan to two very different, but equally interesting and intelligent people. i was lucky to have had a childhood surrounded by very smart, very progressive, and i stress the "different" adults in a time in manhattan's history that was something of a miraculous rebirth from rubble. it was a time of food co-ops, leather tassles on sleeves, and banana seat bicycles. it was a time when jewish grandparents were finally facing the reality that their children might not marry jews and that would be okay. my father is a "secular" jew who's business of owning buildings that were aqcuired before WW2 during very shady days in very shady ways by my tough-as-nails immigrant great grandfather, grew from just making enough for that hand-me-down huge american sedan from the 50's and a very cheap rent on one of the buildings, to being a very large sum of money that was squabbled over to the point that it was recently liquifide by my family(but thats a long story i will get to). the UWS was a neighborhood that was very dangerous, but obviously on the verge of returning to a once gentrified state, before west side story was a musical.

my mother is probably the smartest, most down to earth mom ever, while simultaneously being capable of making the queen of england seem like a podunk. she guided me through a lot of my rougher transitions and also packed a delicious bagged lunch. my life is nowhere near a rags to riches story, but economics improved drastically as the neighborhood came up, and the rents followed. i went from earning a star wars figure only if i didn't pee in my bed for a whole week and wearing the generic brand of sneakers from Fayva Shoes (very ghetto store that disappeared in the 90's and one of my biggest childhood embarrasements), to getting a nice car in college simply because i chose a cheap state school in the midwest over a private school in vermont. so the gifts in life have just gotten bigger and better with time. i now struggle to hold on to any kind of street credit i can. its pretty pathetic at this point because i can best be generalized as a relatively well to do Yuppy. a film professional who lives in the most expensive neighborhood in the most expensive city in the country. but it wasn't always like that. and this city wasn't always the place it is now. i guess i plan to make that a large part of what i write about.

the name of the blog is "write on, my man". It's actually a phrase that a cop wrote on my friend's back with his own spray paint. they caught him tagging on Broadway one night and they did it in front of a lot of people. Then, they made him do push ups right in the middle of the sidewalk and let him go after a few laughs. it was all in the name of good times. probably for both parties. i thought it captures a different era in the city, the era that i feel i am really more a part of, then the era that is now.