(Listen to this if you please as you read. This was recorded live in a warehouse in Brooklyn. It, like the city, is raw, and the environment is ugly, but the products are vibrant and rich)

I come home to Long Island after living in the city for months, for spring break, and I reflect . I sit on my porch and am amazed by the silence. By the fresh air, by the birds singing. By grass. I drive a short drive to the beach and let the sounds of waves overwhelm me and the fresh, salty air cleanse my grimy, almost smoggy, sinuses. I love home.

But then I try to sleep. The silence is deafening. I became literally paranoid by how much nothing I was hearing. How few ambulances there were, how no one was walking the streets, how not a dog barked or a baby cried. Not a boom box being blasted. I couldn’t be calm when the world was this calm. One would think that the silence would make thought easier, but it was deafening. The hum, rumble and roar of the city invigorated my and provided a strong backdrop to my deepest thinking and most pensive moments.

So I awoke the next day, and the next day, and the next to help flush out my senses, and I went from “on edge” paranoia, to peace, to complete boredom. After I washed the city out of me, I recalled why I came. Though the city is full of sensory overload and practically concrete death, it is also full of life. It is the hub of my musical and cultural life. Now my entire social being is in the city, even though it kills me. It’s like a drug.

Where else can one walk the streets from midnight to 4am and still find a crowd. Where else can you be a short train ride from anyone you need to see or anywhere you need to go? Where else can you go to a jazz concert one day, mosh to metal the next, go to museum the third, and enjoy opera the fourth? Though the city kills me, it brings me life. It is a slice of heaven, and a slice of hell. When I went back to Penn Station at the end of the week, I found a deeper appreciation for both home and the concrete jungle.

-Joe S