n April I was supposed to be in New York for the American launch of my new book, whose subject, you may be amused to learn, is apocalyptic anxiety. Obviously I didn’t go to New York.
I opened another beer, and as the night deepened into early morning I found myself returning to places I remembered from previous trips to New York, places I would have revisited had I been there now. I wandered around the Meatpacking District, trying to find the spot where, on my first trip to the city 20 years ago, a friend and I, after leaving a party, happened across an abandoned sofa on a pier, which we sat on while smoking a joint and looking out over the Hudson river as the sun came up.
You are not visiting a place you remember from your past; you are visiting the past itself and a younger incarnation of yourself But there is a sense in which I have, in fact, been able to travel. Within the five-kilometre radius around my home, to which I was confined for a number of weeks, I began consciously to explore an area I have lived in for most of my life. Taking advantage of the reduced traffic on Dublin’s roads, I cycled around the quietened landscape of the city.
1843mag This some depressing shit
1843mag say no more, gotcha!
1843mag Then why is googlemaps deliberately disappearing ancient Palestine and calling it Israel?