Coordinated

The Jetta is exactly seventy-nine steps down from here.

Through the windows I have heard cars, trucks, bicycles (sort of), motorcycles, scooters, horses, cruise ships, airliners, helicopters, fighter planes, and people.

Many, many people.

I have already spent more than two hours looking for a reasonable parking spot once. I like to think I am quickly learning the moves of what I am rapidly starting to call the Idiot Dance - the regular shuffle-and-pray ritual that is alternate side parking - and I have gotten supremely lucky more than once so far, but I know it doesn't work in anyone's favor. Our bicycles are waiting in the storage room in the basement.

I can look almost due east into the windows of Road & Track's 8th Avenue office, where Bob Sorokanich is allegedly flipping me off. I am a ten-minute walk away from a ridiculous variety of auto dealerships, from Toyota to Bugatti. I have watched a camera crew document a fuel stop for a Lamborghini Centenario and been honked at by a balding slob in a Lincoln for simply crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the light.

I marvel at the sheer number and variety of motorcycles parked on my street. It both gives me hope that I can someday soon keep one here without undue fear or annoyance and provokes an ever greater frustration that, again, this summer is so far without significant work and my savings are going towards infinitely less life-fulfilling ends (and the lease and insurance on the Jetta, to be fair). The commute situation for fall may require drastic measures, though, because everything here seems to require drastic measures.

We're trying to sell the Passat, which has mostly been an exercise in parsing wording for Craigslist ads and attracting cashier's-check scammers. It's being kept in a relatively safe place for now. I hope we can find a good home for it soon.

We are back in New York - Manhattan, the collective consciousness's New York, not just one of the boroughs this time - and a few weeks in I remain completely overwhelmed by the unpredictable and unappreciated chain of events that brought us here and the omnipresent absurdity of this life.

No one ever said this would make sense, but no one ever said I'd have to keep waiting this long for a garage, either.