In plain sight

It's a spectacular autumn night, cool, crisp air suffusing the city's glow and that old cover of blue beyond. A sliver of moon holds court over a steady run of lit-up aircraft. Venus and Mars are somewhere, but nary a star outshines the ambient light.

I've written 3 entries now and I hate filling out "profile" forms, so I suppose it's time I write a little about myself in plain sight. I'm a lifelong New Yorker and Mets fan, born in Kew Gardens, Queens, and raised, "Leave It to Beaver" style, in the leafy-green suburbs of Floral Park and Garden City, Long Island. I graduated from SUNY-Binghamton in 1983 with a BA in journalism (a self-designed major), and bicycled across the US (New York to Oregon) when I was 23. After 9 semi- chaotic years on my own back in Long Island, I packed up and left for Manhattan in 1992, the single greatest move of my life. I've lived on the Upper West Side, near the Central Park Reservoir, where I logged many runs; and in the West Village, in a great old tenement on Macdougal Street. I've been in Hell's Kitchen for 7 years. A village snob when I first moved here, I've grown to love "the kitchen," political differences with my neighbors notwithstanding (if you dish it out you can take it, as I have, mates).

My occupation is writer and editor, and nowadays my specialty is health care communications. I used to be a songwriter, and today compose the occasional ditty on a 1928 Martin koa uke, real bright sound. I still like several of my songs, and if you buy me a beer and hand me a guitar I've been known to play a few. I can guarantee most of you haven't heard them before.

Politically, you could say I'm a conservative Democrat, if such a beast exists these days. Like Bill Bradley, who I campaigned for in 2000, I believe in the "party of the little guy," but my party has lost its way. It's time to retool. I was a fairly active liberal for many years. I protested the building of the Shoreham nuclear power plant (which never opened, obsolete behemoth it was), volunteered for the homeless, belonged to the Sierra Club. I served with the American Red Cross at the 1-year anniversary observance at Ground Zero, and hung wreaths, dolls, poetry, crayon drawings and other items on a fence by the South Tower site on behalf of families of victims there. I collected rocks for an Asian couple who lost a daughter; they were going to use them to build her a backyard garden.

People more eloquent than I have said it many times before, but 9/11 changed me completely and irrevocably. I will never cheapen that day with rhetoric along the lines of "I'm so over 9/11," a woefully pathetic statement uttered, ostensibly for ironic effect, in the Sunday New York Times Magazine last summer. And, oh yeah, I voted Bush 2004, along with 544,359 other New York City folk, an increase of 145,633 over the president's 2000 total here. So more than a few of us dissenters reside in the land of "anyone but Bush."

That's about all I'll let on for now. If you hate or like what you're reading, keep reading and leave a post; if you're blog shy, e-mail me (you can do it via my profile link). I enjoy correspondence.

PS: Props to nausikaa for the kind referral at: theconscientiousobject.blogspot.com
Politically curious readers will want to check out her posts and links. She's good-looking, too (back off blograts, she's taken).