New Paltz
I got out of the city this weekend and made it up to New Paltz, which is a nice upstate town with a kind of hippyish undercurrent. (And a giant hunting lodge thing out of the 20’s called the Mohunk, but never mind about that…)
I’m increasingly concerned about how I’m seeing New York stereotypes play out on my own psyche: the neuroses, the aggression, the crazy, fast-talking, Starbucks-slamming, multi-tasking, ADD inflicted consumer from the pseudo-hipster factory on a fast track to burnout. In other words, I’ve bought into the bullshit.
Like an addict, it takes more and more for me to get my fix. A thousand dollars of studio gear barely moves my needle now, whereas once I spent hours and hours slathering over gear I hopelessly couldn’t afford. And yet it’s been a year since I’ve written a new song.
So what is the solution? I don’t know, other than to say that I probably can’t sustain the New York lifestyle forever. That raises the question of “what else would I do?”. And once you’ve lived in New York that can be a problem: the rest of the world feels like a suburb.
