Empire of 22nd Kind

    Sitting at a bar name Lucky Jacks, my mind is on vacation, I am in New York City, the lower eastside to be exact.  This trip is full of emotions around the evolution of my parenting.  I will no longer be parenting children and I will now be parenting adults.  This trip is loaded for me.  I brought my daughter to help her settle in for her first week of a dance program.  The big apple is where this famous dance school brings young adult dancers with bright dreams, cultivating their skills.  In my eyes, they are aspiring spirits believing that New York City is where all the greats go to learn. 

 I wonder how much value this experience will provide for my daughter.  How much it will draw her out of what she understands as home.  The process reminds me of the same hope I had while attending baseball camps.  I can remember how I'd think this camp or coach could provide me the chance I needed to make a statement. Looking back I see that it turned into another thousand dollar contribution to University of Arizona's baseball program.  I appreciate being able to see New York in a practical way.  I no longer see the way my daughter appears to see.  The dogmatic romance around this icon of gangsters of the economic kind.  I lost my aspiration and replaced it with stewardship.  I see she still has an aspiring vision for it and what it can do for her.  I have evolved to worry that New York is what it attracts, hoards of seduced adolescent hearts caching in on free market liberties, with all except a tiny slice depositing more money into their reservoir of capital.

This is New York City, so many young minds gravitating to this icon.  The infrastructure changes slowly and these legal and illegal immigrants stir its economics by contributing their admiration and possibly romance for the big city life.  The interesting part of New York is how so many people bring their newness and vibrancy to add their uniqueness in micro doses, making it not so much what they thought it was going to be, but in many ways contaminating it with what they hoped it would be.  New York isn't a destination or checkbox.  It is a complex participation in a living pinnacle.  It might be the consequence of their wonderment about finding themselves over their, instead of believing their greatness is always at hand.  I don't want to be cliché to call New York a Mecca for arts, but it is surely a vacuum for the existential need to be seen.  There is a paradigm of polarities, driving and fueling the city's economics, culture, and maturation.  There is maturation and I can recognize the tragedy behind the romance.  What makes New York newer might be the economic luster.  What makes New York an empire might be its cultural pollution.