kerouac says

before i moved here, i figured people who were afraid of new york were full of crap. bigger city, more shit; maybe the hordes of people crammed into the urban warren provoke more badness than befalls a random sample of 8 million americans in a given year, but i was sure new york as Big Bad Crimehole was a thing of prior decades and moms' imaginations. plus, and this is awful: so much of the bad stuff goes down in crummy neighborhoods that if you stick to the yuppie and the gentrified, chances are you'll be fine.

someone was murdered in heather's apartment building. and, since the horrific actress murders around here always seems to have a sub-plot that makes the unimagineable even worse: someone's reporting that she worked as a stripper while pretending to her parents that she was in an off-broadway show.

that hurts my heart. the monkey told me he thought i was more upset about the charade than the murder. i don't like to think that's true, but it is true that the combination of circumstances just pinches everywhere at once. it's both of the new york stories that make me saddest rolled into one.

violence is sort of constant background noise here. most days i'm not scared, but some days i am, and there are more of them the longer i stay here.