Let's Get This Train Wrecked

Last Year I started a blog about living in Jakarta and called it Just Off the Jet. It was supposed to be a funny and kind of wide-eyed account of living in the enormous, sweaty kampung that is the capital of Indonesia.

But, as so many of these things go, I wrote like three entries and then spent the rest of the year getting drunk, riding my Vespa around and playing in a hardcore band, documenting none of it except through the occasional fuzzy snapshot.
Now that I'm back in New York and unemployed, it's time to get some stories down. But there's plenty to cover here in the big crapple, and this place is perhaps just as ridiculous as Jakarta. Maybe more, even.

At least in Jakarta everyone knows each other and it's kind of just a bunch of small towns full of primarily modest self-described "simple" people squished together. Here in New York people revel in their big-city snobbery, their weirdness, their effete tastes (and yes, crabby Brooklyn good ol' boy, I'm including you in that last group, you ornery ass).

But both groups have some kind of communal energy, some greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts magic that makes both cities nothing less than a miracle. And I think that's true for most places where people live in cramped, messy, imperfect quarters with millions of others for their whole lives.

So let's get on with the business of tickling the testicles of Jakarta and New York. And hell, if either of my readers wants to share a funny big-city story, from anywhere really, please don't hesitate to write.