1. When I got out of the subway station at Amsterdam and 163rd, the sky was filled with pigeons. Perched on the tops of the surrounding buildings, they circled in waves over the intersection of Saint Nicholas and Amsterdam, which served as a kind of parade grounds for the birds.
2. Earlier that day, I had gone to my office, which is in the same neighborhood as one of the buildings regularly featured in Mr. Robot. I think one of the things that keeps people in New York City is the sense that your life isn't quite real because so often you pass buildings and streets that you've seen on television. As you walk around doing the same things as everyone else -- going back and forth to work, maybe going out for lunch or dinner or drinks -- this odd familiarity and dislocation gives you the feeling that somehow you're secretly on television, too, performing for an imaginary audience, which makes you feel important, maybe a little famous. One thing television never gets right, though, is how long it takes to get from one part of the city to another. In a recent episode of Mr. Robot, Elliot, running away from the 'Dark Army,' sprints into Central Park at 57th Street and two seconds later is running down the steps toward the Bethesda Fountain, and then a few seconds after that is escaping onto a bus on 110th Street. A real show about New York would spend most of every episode sitting on a subway in a tunnel waiting to pull into the next station, but I guess that wouldn't make for very compelling drama.
3. Back in the park, I found another kind of comforting illusion, the kind where the rest of world doesn't exist.
4. Looking at the red berries, my mind returned to the recent season of The Great British Bake Off, in which -- several times -- Prue Leith said something along the lines that blueberries have no flavor. It was a potentially alarming idea, given that I've long considered blueberries to be one of my favorite kinds of fruit. I guess they don't have a ton of flavor, but I think they fall on a very subtle line between sweet and tart, and that subtlety is part of the appeal. Maybe the problem is not blueberries, but that we live in unsubtle times.
5. I always forget how much I love this ancient birch tree until the leaves have fallen off.
6. If I were running the world, I would shut down every other block in the city to cars and instead have a series of narrow paths lined with garden plots.
7. The elm trees also look impressive without their leaves. Over the past 100 years, something like 50 million elm trees in North America have died from Dutch Elm Disease. You have to wonder if our country would still be falling apart if these trees were still around, entrancing people with their magical branches. If something vanishes without 'impacting the GDP' has it even existed?
8. It was time to leave the park, at least for now. I said goodbye to the heather garden, which looked like a tropical reef.
9. Like the pigeons, I continued my infinite circles around Washington Heights, always under the watch of the George Washington Bridge.
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