There’s an old political cartoon I can’t find a picture of right now, that was a timeline from WW1 to WW2, side by side comparison over the decades of apartment buildings and battleships. The joke was the battleships got bigger and bigger as the needs for them did but the apartment buildings stayed the same size.

Every time I see someone lament an “unaffordable” New York – which is most people – as often than not what they complain about is the fact that they’re okay because they bought years ago and the maintenance is lower than median rent but their neighbors are more monocultural and transient nowadays. Their “ideal” is exactly where they are, but backwards in time.

Sometimes it’s because they’re locked into a regulated lease which is likened to a pair of golden handcuffs, where they’re hanging on for dear life because they can’t, say, move into a larger apartment in the same neighborhood when a child is born. Their ideal is exactly where they are, with more freedom to move about as life’s requirements change.

Some manage to get that by literally winning a lottery and being placed in a housing complex where they can transfer their ownership to a larger or smaller unit in the same complex, and those lucky few themselves hang onto for dear life so much they’re known in the city planning world as “naturally occurring retirement communities,” and thus also die a spiritual death.

All envision a New York with the same infrastructure as before but… “more affordable,” which can only happen with fewer people demanding housing. But with fewer people comes fewer tax proceeds comes fewer public programs comes fewer people, i.e. the death spiral of a city.

To me there is only one way to go, and that way is up. When the dominant housing units of New York City are literally century-old rowhouses and tenements, it’s the infrastructure that needs to be updated. Living in the husk of yesteryear does not maintain the culture one expects of the city, which is and should be constantly renewing.

New York, being a New World industrial city, has been somewhat unique among cities in that it has never suffered a major fire, nor suffered bombing, but instead has renewed itself through demolition and real estate speculation. Most Old World cities’ business districts are on the periphery. New York just put them square in the center, bulldozing whatever came before. New York has demolished more monuments than most cities ever built, and yet still remained quintessentially New York. That is the New York that should be followed.

It’s probably saying something about this day and age that so many top grossing movies that aspire to true drama are based on popular comic book IPs: A medium that aspires to parable but mostly just relegates itself to bombastic navel-gazing, forever worried about gaining relevance with a mass audience without losing relevance to its hard core of aging fans.

It’s in this stead that I’ve mulled over Joker, the new movie that takes on the usual Batman/Joker duality by making its iteration a supervillain origin story. It doesn’t exactly work, either as a drama or as a comic book movie, tho the reasons for each are similar as not. It works, perhaps, as a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix to contend with Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson for Most Compelling Joker, but sadly he will have to take a distant third, not for his acting – he’s amazing – but for the writing.

The story of Joker remains largely the same throughout all iterations: Gotham, the comic book stand-in for New York (at times described as “New York below 14th Street at night in February,”) is dirty, crime ridden, inhospitable and always dark and cold. Batman is a billionaire industrialist and owner of the largest corporation in the city, who moonlights as a vigilante beating up what he sees as dregs of society. Joker is his foil: Obviously an extremist and psychotically insane but also with compelling arguments as to Batman’s effect on society – not just as a vigilante but as an capitalist. Wayne Enterprises, Batman’s business, is usually shown as a major employer with deep ties to the police and local government. Joker’s argument in most films is that civilization is a thin patina on base human instincts, largely governed by compulsion as anything else – a Hobbesian or Augustinian point of view, perhaps, though not strongly held – and Batman and his ilk are just as responsible if not more so for the sad state of existence as terrorists like Joker. In some cases, the argument is Batman creates Joker.

This is a political argument.

In the narrative of the comic book world, this works because Joker’s origin is deliberately mysterious – because he is nobody, he is everyman. His story as told by himself shifts to fit whatever narrative he hopes to achieve at the time, thereby always positioning himself in the perfect societal counter-argument to Batman’s attempts at what he sees as order. In effect Joker’s not unlike the chameleon nature of the internet forum troll: Arguments invented primarily to confound rather than based on lived sincerity, yet with the insistence and confrontational nature of having lived such lives. This lies at the heart of Nicholson’s Joker throwing away millions in cash during a parade right before releasing nerve gas or Ledger’s Joker pitting a ferry full of convicts against a ferry full of the bourgeois.

Phoenix’s Joker doesn’t really have that consciousness. And yet, it’s painfully clear that the producers of this movie really wanted him to. A version of “Bad Old Days” late 70s/early 80s New York is so lovingly crafted on the screen that the references are clear as day to any resident of the city; the grime and the graffiti are honed to a tee. It’s meant to evoke the New York of Bernie Goetz and Kitty Genovese and indeed this Joker even has a Goetz moment, shooting three finance bros in the subway (…all of whom are white, thereby avoiding any complicated message on race). It remarks on the cutting back of needed social services and indeed all civil servants have a harried, wane look to them, evoking the “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” fiscal crisis. It also references Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy so much one would think this movie is inviting comparison. If so, sadly, the comparison starts and ends with, “…but worse.” Travis Bickle is a disaffected loner who struggles with what he feels is his proper self-sacrifice to save the world. This Joker, named Arthur Fleck, is also a disaffected loner but harbors no such aspirations.

In fact, because in this iteration we know his real name and how he became the Joker, we can see that there is no statement to be made about society at all. Phoenix’s Joker is angry and aggrieved, but all his grievances are personal, not political. His mother is a delusional narcissist and he was abused as a child. He’s jumped by hoods and fired from his job. He pines for people who don’t know he exists or hold him in disdain. From that alone he might be considered a prime candidate for an incel hero, but that’s not entirely accurate. He’s more a character from the social texts of the 50s: An Angry Young Man, a Rebel Without a Cause. He lashes out violently and (somehow) ends up being the clown face of a violent, ostensibly populist movement but doesn’t care about any of that except to soak in the attention towards himself. The fact that the city is being beset by riots and protests is not really drawn on at all as a plot point, nor are the protesters or rioters afforded a communicated message, existing only as backdrop for the Joker’s own emotions. He is not feeding on the city’s energies; the city is feeding on his.

This is the opposite of a political argument.

That this movie is then produced during a time of great urban turmoil worldwide – from the self-dealing corruption threatening to tear our democracy apart, to the populist anti-foreigner rifts forming in the European Union, to extended protests in Hong Kong under China’s increasingly authoritarian thumb – makes it seem like it wants to say something about all that. It certainly carries itself with all the weight of such a dramatic role, and festoons every minute with the iconography of political tumult. That it doesn’t isn’t just odd, it’s at best an opportunity lost. At worst it’s an opportunity deliberately missed. This is likely for fear of offending any of the powers that be – from the corporations that produce this schlock to the governments art is supposed to critique – but a lack of a political statement is itself a political statement: One for the status quo. Indeed, since in this iteration Joker creates Batman and then completely omits a denouement, it must be assumed that the last word of the unease created by this film is intended in a sequel to be a re-establishment of order by… a billionaire industrialist with ties to the police. That’s a fun thought for this day and age.

A personal narrative I thought was more or less substantively true, one that was promoted by the last three mayors or so of the phoenix-like resurrection of New York City from a den of sin and depravity to a modern, crisp, attractive destination, is the effective reversal of decades of White Flight – the domestic emigration of middle-class white families and their tax base due to racism, from federal subsidies for home ownership in newly-constructed yet segregated suburban townships to overt red-lining covering entire districts straight on from the LaGuardia administration in the 30s and 40s. The narrative, it goes, is that once violent crime started going down in the Dinkins administration straight on to historic lows in the Bloomberg administration in the new millennium, domestic immigration of the white, taxpaying types started up again, revitalizing – and gentrifying – neighborhoods en masse, such as Williamsburg and Park Slope. Indeed, Amanda Burden the former commissioner for the Department of City Planning under former mayor Bloomberg was an avowed cheerleader of gentrification, and indeed volunteered her rather contemptuous opinions of current mayor de Blasio’s emphasis on affordable housing – after all, her doctrine was more on real estate values, which meant getting the ‘right people’ into those houses, not getting the right houses for the existing people.

I say “thought” and not “think” because, despite this narrative, White Flight never ended. According to the US census, the non-Hispanic white population of New York peaked in 1940 – the first year the city differentiated between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white people – at 6.8 million out of a total New York population of 7.4 million. It’s at this time that the red-lining efforts were mostly discussing an “infiltration” – the actual term on analytic documents of the time – of undesirable Greeks, Jews, Italians and Irish, as there were only half a million Black residents and only 150,000 people of Hispanic descent. For the narrative to be completely true, one would imagine that the white population would have bottomed out in the 1990 or 2000 census, and then seen an uptick since then. However, between 1990 and 2010, a further loss of 450,000 white residents of New York was still tallied – the last census has the lowest number of white residents in 70 years of unbroken decline at 2.7 million out of a total of 8.1 million, meaning that while the city on the whole only gained ~700,000 people between 1940 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white proportion of the city went from being 92% of the total to 33% of the total… and is still falling, both in ratio and in raw numbers, though perhaps not as fast as it once was.

There is some weight to the narrative of yuppies moving into certain gentrified neighborhoods – aside from Manhattan, Brooklyn is the only borough that saw an increase in the white population between 2000 and 2010, gaining about 40,000 (for an equal loss in the Black population of Brooklyn, which statisticians have argued represents a trend in which they’re leaving the area entirely due to high cost of living and relatively low employment rates and remuneration, rather than a white population that simply relocates to the suburbs) which lends support for a narrative of population replacement, though the city itself noted that domestic emigration, not immigration, remained paramount, and that population numbers were buoyed by childbirth, longevity and international immigration, so those broad statistics can be interpreted in part by the relatively high childbirth rates of orthodox Jewish communities in South Williamsburg and Borough Park as much as homesteading by white yuppies in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens.

There is also a more holistic interpretation in that the city is and has always been an entrepot of international humanity, which it then disseminated to the rest of the nation, in which case the truth hidden in the statistical data of a declining white population is that in the first half of the century the largest batch of immigrants were white though of Catholic and southern European heritage, who then flocked to Yonkers and New Jersey and Long Island, and that nowadays the largest batch of immigrants come from Asia and Latin America, who will in turn homestead in the suburbs. Of course, this other narrative somewhat glosses over that so-called ‘white ethnics’ can also be racist and bound by tribalism – the character Archie Bunker was, after all, modeled after creator Norman Lear’s Jewish father and played by Irish Catholic Carroll O’Connor – and so too can new Asian immigrants.

It’s also true that our now-President started his career in racist exclusion in New York real estate, and whose son-in-law carries the torch of a current real estate business model of aggressively harassing New York tenants in order to flip their housing for more ‘desirable’ clients. How to reconcile the prevalence of this practice with current demographic data requires a more in-depth set of interpretations about who exactly is benefiting from such, what the numbers are – what people are moving in and how many, what people are moving out and how many – and where they’re doing these sorts of practices, but a cursory conclusion is that there are still great swaths of the city avoided by capital investment, the people benefiting from such rapacious activities are not very numerous and the people moving out under duress are far greater in number, but not so many as to offset those filling in every bedroom in Bronx and Queens – still areas that are ‘terra incognita’ for the sorts who left half a century ago and never returned.

Hell, cities have entire personas. Paris is a beautiful woman in her late 40s, once divorced and too smart and self-assured to enter another marriage, but is not against having relations with men on her own terms. New York is a barrel-chested Black transvestite in his early 40s, bombastic and highly theatrical, who doesn’t take shit from anybody. New York and Paris are friends, because of fucking course they are. Paris says some offensive shit sometimes, but New York is used to it and brushes it off as from a person who doesn’t change and can’t harm by it, and while New York openly steals Paris’ fashion choices, so too does Paris from New York, though she would never admit it.

London, eldest of the three and perhaps the most stodgy, yet often invites New York to inject life to his parties. They are business partners, after all, and while the witticisms of New York are almost ad verbatim borrowed by London in other settings, it is indeed London who set New York up in business in the first place. The relationship is far more mutual than that of, say, Chicago, who obsesses over all things New York minus, notably, the “Black” and “transvestite” part. London doesn’t care about such things, so long as the money flows, and indeed they have fruitful dealings and amicably compete over other London proteges, the brothers Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

It is an absolutely subjective observation to ascribe personalities to cities, but it shouldn’t and indeed can’t possibly be controversial to suggest that cities exude a form of cultural zeitgeist that defines and differentiates them – from the banal “standing in line” versus “standing on line” to far more deep-seated issues concerning acceptable norms and tolerances pertaining to them – and with that it’s less a form of accurate depiction as it is a narrative that penetrates to the core. How, after all, does a city where the gay rights movement was launched with a street fight between cops and minority transsexuals (a circumstance that Los Angeles attempted to whitewash, but Los Angeles always was a hater), that founded a musical genre and cultural movement named after submissive male prostitution and oozes gender and sexual fluidity (a distinction London completely missed when copying it, natch), whose most famous mayor’s sexual orientation was left intentionally vague, end up producing our current Commander in Chief, who is almost diametrically opposed to all of that: A crude, incurious, insecure, jealous womanizer?

It’s no surprise Trump hates New York – he seems hell-bent on destroying everything about it, in whole and in detail – but it is a surprise that people are surprised that New York hates Trump, a native son. That’s where the personality comes in: New York is well-adjusted and confident, but that doesn’t mean New York is secure in his position. New York is a savvy businessman, a ruthless pirate, a firebrand intellectual, sometimes broke and often lonely. New York is in love with himself because nobody else is, but New York also brokers straight deals with aplomb and has affairs everywhere. New York is always of two faces, between two realities, where even doctrinaire Marxists learn to hustle; where Know-Nothings share neighborhoods with new migrants who then become Know-Nothings; the only city in America where women have a harder time in the dating scene than men because men are intimidated by aggressive, professional women.

That duality pervades everywhere: Where a law and order mayor can show up in drag one day on a lark (and be promptly molested by Donald Trump), where hoodrat nightclubs that are responsible for fully half the murders in the area have at least one gay night a week, despite a self-reporting localized gay population of less than two percent, and it’s by far the most lucrative night. Where doctors working for the CDC have to ask very specific questions to macho, ultra-masculine alphas who don’t think they’re homosexual so long as they’re giving, not receiving. Where a meat market specializing in one gender by night lends its street frontage by day for butt-augmenting lingerie for the other gender, right on the main strip in a heavily-Catholic sleepy residential neighborhood. New York encompasses all types, and does it in full stride while heading to the office, laughing along with the stupid, misogynistic jokes just so the deal can be struck. New York needs to make that face in order to conduct his business with the world, has made peace with that understanding – London taught him well – but carries on without giving a fuck with the rest of his life.

Trump is at times that face, and that face is what some see New York as, but New York is not that face. New York has many faces for business: Among equals, New York had Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bloomberg. New York invented Trump to fleece the rubes, the schmucks – after all, New York wants an empire, and you don’t get an empire by playing nice or fair – but Trump was never meant for New York. A city whose arguably best mayor was called Little Flower, who accepts all and embodies all, who is more than a little dirty and likes it that way, while still emanating class and rarified distinction: This city understands the use of masks because it has to, it always had to; even those of arrogant bullies, but that arrogance drawn inwards simply cannot be. It can be sloughed off and discarded when it has lost its use.

Allison Arieff, pundit of the Think Tank SPUR, lamented on the New York Times why we don’t build, in her words, “great urban design projects,” the foremost example of which she gives as the Golden Gate Bridge. To this end, she criticized America’s pattern of deferred maintenance and presented Atlanta’s BeltLine as a creative, visionary model we should aspire to.

I would like to know how Ms Arieff got published in the Times without actually defining what she means by great projects, explaining why there is a strong community-oriented NIMBYism against major projects, or even why major projects like the BeltLine deserve praise. In short, I would like to unpack the assumptions in her article.

What is a Great Project?

To me in the City of New York, home of many grand infrastructural projects, such is not only patently obvious but absolutely necessary to our continued existence. First and foremost among them is how we get our water. The aqueducts and water tunnels that feed New York City are perhaps our greatest urban design project to date and the largest such infrastructural complex of its type in the world, solving once and for all a necessity that has most of the West Coast in dire straits. It’s taken for granted in every home in the city and is lauded as the reason for our famous bagels and pizza.

An infrastructural gem in an understated form

Furthermore, it’s not one we’ve ignored. We have added a third water tunnel under the tutelage of our last mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a project he sank billions of dollars into and is perhaps one of his most uncontroversial positive legacies and certainly one with the potential to be the most long-lasting. It perhaps isn’t sexy, but the benefits are clear as the water in our taps.

We have our bridges – including the George Washington Bridge, still to date the busiest car bridge in the world – and our subways, one of the most comprehensive systems in the world and still the most extensive by station count, and they indeed define us. However, they are also our limitation: We haven’t had a major addition to the subway since the Second World War, and our Hudson River crossings are truly what are limiting our growth as a city and as a region.

Why, then, is there pushback on Great Projects?

This, much to my dismay, is an aspect of the article I found sorely lacking in an article by someone who lives in San Francisco, and thus must have heard of the Freeway Revolts. How can a mention of the Golden Gate Bridge as part of the proactive force of visionary authorities not then mention the Embarcadero Freeway project to link it to the Bay Bridge?

A mention of NIMBYism is incomplete without mention of the force of Robert Moses – by far the single most powerful city planner in America – and of the community revolts under the auspices of writer Jane Jacobs. Moses, who racism and unprecedented unelected power was made infamous thanks to reporter and writer Robert Caro, had great plans in a unitary vision that have defined New York for generations to come, and it is nothing short of a miracle that he was not able to enact more of them. From the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, a project that took the power of FDR to finally kill, to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which elevated Jane Jacobs to fame and international regard as the face of its opposition, the Bushwick Expressway and more, “great” does not automatically confer “good.”

What he did build ensured the destruction of great swaths of the Bronx, the segregation of Long Island, the displacement of the poor and minorities, and major infrastructural hurdles for decades if not centuries to come. It is no wonder that the unitary authority of visionary planners isn’t more regarded.

The legacy of Robert Moses

The issue of what should be built now has a significant community backlash, for better or for worse: In the fear of great ills – highways blasting through poorer neighborhoods, the very terms “urban renewal” and “housing project” being stigmatized as pejorative – almost all new projects are viewed with a jaundiced eye. The only things that seem to get past the Community Boards are projects that propose a lot of green space, which brings us to the BeltLine.

What projects should we be promoting?

It is no secret how the Second Avenue Subway line has become a running joke in New York politics as to how grand public works projects almost inevitably wind up as giant albatrosses without end in sight, but it wasn’t so long ago in America that a Great Project was built, and that was the Transbay Tube in San Francisco, the lynchpin of the BART system. Insufficient as it is – it’s not exactly a subway and it’s not exactly commuter rail – it’s been an important part in the development of the Bay Area since its opening in 1972, a reverse of the decision to turn the Bay Bridge into a highway-only bridge (similar to the opportunity lost to turn the lower level of the George Washington Bridge over to rail) and a boon for the whole region. Its continued expansion will allow needed growth and define the Bay Area for generations to come.

New York desperately needs subway extensions. New York desperately needs Hudson River crossings, especially since our current fare are reaching the end of their lifespan, but greenways seem to get the most attention and support. Governor Chris Christie, governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio all like to make plans for projects based on their political expediency – an airtrain that nobody wants, another airtrain that goes nowhere and a streetcar that goes nowhere, respectively – and this can be viewed as a necessary reaction to the heightened cynicism of local citizens, but the major needs go unfulfilled for fear of stirring up the hornet’s nest.

Meanwhile, greenways such as the current High Line project or the proposed QueensWay project get green lights and easy funding, even if they contribute little to nothing towards the long-term prospects of the city or the region. They are indeed like the BeltLine in that they are parks built on railroad Rights-of-Way, which present a low-investment return on unused space at the cost of potential growth in the future. That, to me, is not a Great Project, but the tacit admission that no more great projects are feasible.

They are the opposite of visionary plans, and instead mark the craven chopping up of future generations for an easy fix today; a Boomer solution to what was ultimately a Boomer problem to begin with: Deferred maintenance and lack of investment in municipal infrastructure, something Ms Arieff complained about in the first place. If anything, what is needed is a new paradigm, and unfortunately, as with the fad of New Urbanism, if the current think tanks are any indication, one is not forthcoming.

3:15PM. Saturday. 57th Street and Broadway. Light rain, stepped over a sleeping homeless man, less than forty feet from the hole in the ground that’s soon to be Robert Stern’s contribution to Billionaire’s Row, a super-tall super-luxury affordable to perhaps sixty people in the world. Thirty more feet, stepped over another homeless man. Another homeless man another thirty feet later, outside the subway entrance. Two more inside before seeing a uniformed policeman, protecting two bank men in body armor emptying a Metrocard vending machine of its cash reserves.

The nation has just had a heady day, watching Obama sing Amazing Grace at a funeral and laud the Supreme Court verdict on Gay Marriage back-to-back; emotional and surprisingly emotive moments from our president to hang atop our collective consciousness while we continue on our daily toils, though not without inevitable backlash. Obama himself remarked, with little rancor but with deep candor,

“I know change for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters must have seemed so slow for so long, but compared to so many other issues, America’s shift has been so quick.”

A subtle reminder of recent events, highlighting the endlessly re-opened scar tissue of the American fabric, yet still not immune to base punditry, where some ask “what must the African Methodist Episcopal preachers behind Obama during his eulogy have thought about the confirmation of Gay Marriage?” (Quick answer: They are too busy reeling from a Good Ole’ Boy’s salvo towards the last generation’s cultural war – or is it? – to concern themselves with this one.) But such issues can’t help but feel muted in the face of what still needs to be done.

3:30PM, standing on the Uptown IND platform at Columbus Circle, coming home from work installing the equipment of some sixty peons who have been relocated from Connecticut as the vanguard of some six hundred more, holdouts moved against their will to balance some department spreadsheet. Working under a foreman whose wages were cut more than half in the past year, lost his mortgage and stands to lose his job altogether – though even at half his wages he’s still making more than I am. Working above perma-temps who know not to work too fast because these are all the hours they’re going to get, working because any of them would not hesitate to leap and grab my job, even as they remark pityingly about how tenuous and underpaid it appears to be. The corporation posted an 80% boost in profits last year. The corporation also laid off half my department. They’re going to keep waiting. Can I come in early on Monday? Of course I can.

It’s a new experience, to say the least. I’ve been under bosses who would attempt to move heaven and earth so as not to cut staff. “Oh, can you forego raises this year? Oh, can you take a 10% wage cut? Oh, can we have a Friday furlough? Please, I’m trying.” I’ve been under bosses who would rationalize and justify, if to nobody but themselves, the necessity of layoffs. “Oh, she had a bad attitude anyway. Oh, she really didn’t fit in here. Oh, she didn’t act like she really wanted the job.” I’m now under bosses for whom there is no emotive reaction to impending layoffs. They are cheerful coming in, they are cheerful coming out, they do not need excuses, they do not offer any.

In order to feel empathy for other people, first you must recognize them as people. There is a pure, raw, untempered amorality at play here, one which the armies of lowly peons find it hard to adjust to. A tall, lanky young man in a bowtie, a rare white elevator operator, asks me on Friday about my hair. He asks if I ever cut it. I don’t. He admires being able to hold that stance; toying with his bowtie uncomfortably, remarks that he’s sick of the uniform he’s made to wear, admires my freedom. That same day, a security guard remarks that he used to have a mohawk until he interviewed for this job. He can be dismissed at any moment, and many often are, but that hair doesn’t come back so quick.

These are the first overt remarks made about my hair since I started working here, but everybody on all floors recognizes me by sight – the one with the hair. It is, indeed, not de rigueur in the corporate sector, and it has been noted. I am not wearing the uniform. No matter; I’m just as disposable as the rest. Hell, my boss’s boss is the only true non-contractor in our section, and he’s as desperately trying to prove his relevancy as anybody else.

The security guard asks me what I’m doing this weekend. Drinking, I reply. That’s what he does every weekend. A chuckle. There is no future, few talk of the past. There is the grindstone and we put our noses to it; the cultural wars raging on seem so pi in the sky. A place where nobody has careers, we all just have jobs. “You’ll know when my plans come to fruition because I just won’t come in anymore,” explains the field boss, repeatedly. In the meanwhile, the holding pattern.

3:40PM, a D train rolls in, a petite young Muslim motorwoman at the helm, swaddled in a hijab in official MTA blue. The new blue collar working class, coming into a previously black jobs enclave, thanks to the EEOC, the city’s civil service exams and racism in the private sector. The next generation. Progress. Visible progress. As one issue gets addressed, another comes, and another; the admixture being what we call society.

Our illustrious mayor is reduced to applying palliative care with our ongoing job prospects and housing problems thanks to the callous indifference of the governor and the inability for the president to intervene in any meaningful way, but we all yet try to make do, and there is movement here and there, around the edges. Last month Muslim holidays got put on public calendars. Last week Chinese holidays got the same. Two days ago the Supreme Court confirmed the Affordable Care Act. Yesterday, Gay Marriage. I go home to shower and change and prepare for the night’s drinking. I drink to commiserate. I drink to celebrate. I drink.