Let's not talk.

It'll never be a better time.

I think a lot about hanging out.

A stupid thing you wouldn’t know until you miss it. Me and my friends, getting dressed up just to sit around and share time. Rotary phone calls to remind yourself that somebody would answer. Scraping up change from the bottom of couches and cars to get cheeseburgers for 39 cents. If you were flush, you’d get an extra to eat in the parking lot while your friends try to land tricks on the parking barricades.

I keep thinking about how afraid I’ve gotten of unmonitored time. About this guard I’ve built against the chances I might accidentally breathe without music, a podcast. Matching blocks on my phone screen. How little of my time was curated by me back then, and how poorly I’ve managed it now when all of it is.

If you’re younger than a certain age your concept of radio DJs probably isn’t as epic. The bestowal of trust, gained through trial and error, whatever night your guy was spinning music that might make your forearm hair stand up. Marc Maron always talks about needing the older brother, who lends you records, lends you a better shirt. But that was the whole world then. The TV was going already when you turned it on, and you had 2 choices, sit down in front of it or change the channel. You didn’t choose what the movie was, just if you wanted to sit through it. And I was as latchkey as you get, not even wolves to raise me, I’d find a box of records and do my best to figure them out, because no one was around to teach me at home. I was a lonely kid, except for whatever was being broadcast to my house.

It didn’t occur to us that we could make decisions. Your taste was more about choosing the right arbiter. My greatest teacher growing up was Channel 11 NY, serving Kung Fu movies on the weekend and Gilligan’s Island if you stayed home sick. We had Marvel comics, but my mom picked the subscriptions. She liked X-Men, so that mostly worked. Once in a while I filled the gaps from the rack at the bodega.

My mom forbade white bread and sugar cereals so where possible I’d change the channel and sneak off to a girlfriend’s house where I could eat nestle quick out of the can like a mutant.

We had a VHS eventually, and if you could time it right you could record the movies off HBO and share them with your friends and for an afternoon be head of basement programming for whoever would sit for it. Like stealing fire from the gods. I can’t tell you how many times I watched the Karate Kid.

But what I really think about is how much time we’d just spend lying in grass, waiting for the crazy world to start up around us, some car to crash, some kid running for dear life from some knuckleheads trying to pants him in the street. How much we leaned into the quiet in between, olympic medalists in doing nothing.

Why am I afraid now to just be? To float on my back through time the way I used to, with my eyes closed?

My friend Jerome asked me yesterday if I wanted to go to see a band. He sent a link but I didn’t click it. I just said yes, and got squirmy inside about getting to stand there awkwardly with my friend and borrow his faith in the power of some weirdos to bewitch us with their instruments. What’s the worst that could happen?

Here are some random pictures I took wandering around.

-i.

Braving a NYC summer, June 2025.