two days for the price of one

New York is like the kid who cleans his room by stuffing all the clothes and toys under the bed. I keep on thinking that it’s quite neat, but everything’s just been shuffled under benches or moved into areas with less traffic, and if people do litter, they do it neatly – like folding up their trash and planting it lovingly in the garden like bulbs, or putting cigarettes on the edge of the sidewalk instead of the main thoroughfare. It’s funny, but it’s also dirty.

The first thing I did today was go back to Wall Street to join a protest group– we fight everything from corporate greed to climate change. I stayed with my brothers for 15 minutes and then it was time for me to take to the streets on my own. First global giant to feel the heat of my wrath was McDonalds – I used their toilets, and then their wifi without ordering anything – (it’s these small acts of defiance that bring about real change.) Ben Lee was at the protest too, filming a video clip because he’s so cool, and he is so against everything. I kept shadowing him in a casual, oh, am I in every frame kind of way while he was walking along strumming, which probably means it’s not gonna make the final cut.

In the arvo I decided to exert some physical energy since all my mental energy was depleted, so I went riding through Central Park with a girl I met from the hire place. We saw squirrels!!! I LOVE squirrels and I don’t care if they love me back. I don’t know why these guys were haters – I swear we used to be able to feed them in Canada when I was a kid. Maybe Americans ones are cooler, or just the American ones in Central Park, because you had to be really stealthy, and even then you couldn’t get very close to them.

My new friend and I managed to sneak up behind one and watched him storing
something in the root of a tree, then he heard us, swivelled round, twitched his
nose and scampered off. We were like, how cuuuuuute and did variations on this
theme for about thirty seconds. Cuuuute, cutie, how cute, so cute, awwww, oooo,
eeeee til it sounded like we were busking, and then we continued on, bond strengthened by our mutual love of squirrels.

lots of fun stuff etc etc…

I just asked a guy rifling through the bin if he wanted money for food and he got really annoyed and said I’m ok, I’m ok, a bit like that bird yesterday. Then I saw
him a few minutes later asking for money further up the street. What’s
wrong with my money? Maybe he heard the accent and thought I was going to give
him Australian dollars – he didn’t get currency of any kind when I passed him again.

Hey, remember that movie Autumn in New York with Richard Gere and
Winona Ryder?

Me neither.