Today someone shot someone else near the Empire State Building. Even though "only" two people were killed (including the shooter) and eight or nine injured (by stray police bullets), everyone in the area felt very jittery, as if we could have just as easily been hit. The city is still skittish from that other disaster day, even though we like to pretend we're not. Or maybe it's also that there's an election on, and everyone is about to snap under the weight of so much inane rhetoric. The media went berserk, predictably. I could see people watching the streets from the rooftops. Helicopters buzzed across the sky all day, even though there was nothing new to see.
"I'm like two blocks away and I've been standing here for eight hours...oh well, text me later and we'll get drinks." Elsewhere, a jazz band played Broadway.
The buildings looked beautiful in the late-afternoon sun. "Why can't these idiotic politicians pass some gun-control laws?"
"Quit staring at me, lady." "I think Hegel is a horrible philosopher and couldn't write his way out of a paper bag, don't you?" "Oh god, I can't believe they're playing 'Sounds of Silence' again."
Aloof and ambivalent, like a Christian god, the city reassured us that life will go on, with or without us.
People poured into and out of the subway, grateful to be heading home, or leaving it behind.