1. Home?

Two weeks ago, I returned to Australia after a three-month writing sojourn in Mexico, which turned into a year-long sabbatical across three continents, including a non-continuous period of seven months spent in New York. This first experience of living, in a manner of speaking, in the city of my dreams was significantly colored by my migration status while in the United States, which was the same as that of notorious Russian-German con artist Anna Sorokin for the similarly non-continuous period of three years she spent in the US prior to staging a suicide attempt to stop the clock on her most recent tourist visa from running down. In other words, not technically illegal but also far from ideal. 

At the time of our respective troubles, both Anna and I had a two-year ESTA waiver that permitted entry to the United States for 90 days at a time as a tourist. We both pushed the limits of the ESTA system by accumulating a number of entry stamps in our passports in a short period of time by leaving North America before the expiry of each one and then re-entering the US to acquire a fresh 90-day tourist visa (since just crossing a land border and coming back is insufficient to earn a new stamp). Both of us engaged in intercontinental visa runs that were more extravagant than strictly necessary. But the good news is that unlike Anna, I could pay for these trips myself and never had to defraud my friends for the sake of covering a hotel bill in Morocco, and so no authorities ever had a reason to arrest me or throw me in prison. And so I was able to leave the US three days before the expiry of the last of my five shortly-spaced visas and may one day be able to reside in the country in a context other than being under house arrest while awaiting the trial date for an appeal against a deportation order.

The less good news is that four months after leaving the US for the last time (at least, for now) and an ill-fated attempt to try to make a temporary home for myself in the more visa-generous and generally hospitable country of Canada, I have now returned to the country of my birth and citizenship - a hotter, more remote, less globally relevant and personally useful version of Canada - and have mixed feelings about it. I spent much of the past year desperately trying to avoid this outcome, although I never had an actual plan for how I was going to make my escape a lasting and sustainable one, or at least no plan that was in any convincing way grounded in reality. And as a result of rolling the dice a few too many times and finally losing all my chips, my worst-case scenario has come to pass, which is having to live with my Jewish mother in suburban Sydney for the foreseeable future. I am aware that now that I have crash-landed where I began, if I am going to be able to chart a way forward I am first going to have to accept what has happened and where I am situated, geographically and in every other sense, and not get caught in reminiscences of an irretrievable time and place, one that possibly never even existed.  But despite my attempts to resist romanitcizing the past and the farwaway, every almost identical, every equally underwhelming summer morning that I pass through in this quiet colonial outpost cannot help but bring to mind the string of summer mornings I spent in the center of the center such a short time ago, when having a morning to pass seemed like a profoundly different prospect. 

Back then, I was waking up almost every day in the rear bedroom of a ground-floor apartment in a walk-up building on West 15th Street in Lower Manhattan, on the block between the subway station on 8th Avenue and the Chelsea Market on 9th Ave. During my time there, this corner looked dramatically different to what it would have the year the older gay couple I was subletting from moved in, when the Port Authority Union Inland Terminal #1 that takes up the entire block immediately north of the apartment would have been derelict and almost empty. Today, it is the New York campus of Google and, with 50 percent more floor space than the Empire State Building over its fifteen sprawling stories, is the largest Google-owned property in the world. On the corner directly opposite was a lumber yard, whereas now there is a sleek Tetris-like office building with the flagship “Starbucks Roastery'' taking up the first three floors. Next door, what was a warehouse with blown-out windows and a seafood wholesaler on the ground floor is now an Apple Store. And whereas the sidewalks of this single block of West 15th were the outdoor showroom of New York’s revered population of transexual street prostitutes, today they serve as a thoroughfare for tech workers and a space for tourists to queue up for coffee that tastes exactly the same as that which can be procured instantaneously from any other of the 35,711 thousand Starbucks outlets that exist globally, including the one a single block further down 9th Ave. I would have preferred to share the block with glamorous and sassy street prostitutes, but alas arrived with my suitcase, puppy dog and notebook thirty years too late. 

The building that housed my apartment was a 1930s walk-up tenement block, identical to thousands of others across Lower Manhattan and built to house the workers who built the rest of the city. My neighbors were a rougly even split of middle-aged queens, youngish corporate types, and even younger Carrie Bradshaw imitators. I managed to somehow fit into all three categories and also into none of them. Owing to the location of the apartment on the lowest floor and at the rear of the building, one of the bedroom windows framed a view of a lovely brick wall 10 feet away, while the other led onto a rusted fire escape landing. This landing was the piece de resistance of my little home and a perfect location from which to sing “Moon River” to Jude, my extremely fluffy, luminously white canine companion. 

The fire escape was also my means of re-entry when I locked myself out of the apartment. On such occasions, I would wait for one of my neighbors to enter or leave the building, sneak in behind them, walk up the six flights of stairs to the roof and then climb down the fire escape ladders connecting all the landings in line with that of apartment number 2, hoping that none of the residents of the apartments attached to these landings would be home to see me clambering past their bedroom windows. Then I would open the always closed but never locked left-hand window of my bedroom to the surprise and bemusement of Jude, who would watch the unfolding piece of physical comedy from the comfort of our shared bed, his head remaining nestled on the edge of one of the pillows.

A typical Manhattan midsummer morning for Sam and Jude, one on which I had neither forgotten to take keys the night before nor slept in someone else’s bed, would begin with the sound of my involuntary alarm clock, which was the symphony of drills and angle grinders furiously getting to work on the luxury high-rise going up on the other side of the brick wall that commenced at precisely 7am, a cruel hour to allow building works in a city that encourages its residents and visitors to stay out as late as possible. What also seemed cruel was how excruciatingly hot and humid it would be outside even at this early hour in a city that was seemingly designed as if it only ever experienced winter. I was at first surprised and then horrified to discover that this crush of subways, dive bars, small apartments with small windows and other cramped, not well-ventilated indoor spaces was at the height of summer, on average, a full four degrees hotter and 12 percent more humid than the equivalent month in the lightly urbanized expanse of coastline in which I grew up. And whereas in Sydney, a cool ocean breeze arrives every evening to wash away even the hottest of days, New York’s summer heat hangs on it like a filthy, wet blanket, and in the mornings one only gets couple of hours of ‘unpleasant’ before the barometer ticks over to ‘unbearable’. 

For this reason, even on my most hungover of mornings, I would have to tear myself away from the air conditioning and the ambient construction noises no later than 8am, otherwise my extremely fluffy dog would be liable to combust the second his little paws would hit the sidewalk. Even at this early hour, there would always come a point on our walk that the heat would become too much for his fluffiness, so I would always be sure to take with his backpack carrier whenever we left the apartment. He loved his carrier, despite it clearly not being designed for a 30 pound dog and requiring him to sit curled up with his feet tucked up against his tummy and his head and voluminous mane of snow-white fur sticking out the top. Before heading out the door, I would tuck in one side-pocket of the carrier my journal and a pen and in the other Jude’s water dispenser, which was blue and had a twenty ounce reservoir that would trickle water into a small built-in bowl at the push of a button. And then we would be ready to face whatever New York had in store for us.

If this typical midsummer morning was a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, then the first smell that would invade my nostrils upon stepping out the foyer would be that of the stewing garbage juices flowing out from several of the dozens of trash bags that had been piled up on the sidewalk the night before by the building’s Polish superintendent, whose favorite pastimes included finding reasons to bash his fist against my door and yell “you don’t know anything!” at me. New York’s tradition of stacking naked, vulnerable trash bags on the sidewalks, so shocking to visitors and new residents from other parts of the developed world, is the result of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century approving the construction of over 100,000 examples of the now-iconic tenement building and letting them be built side to side and back to front, without any space for service alleyways. This was allowed because the town planners of a highly space-limited and population-heavy island took into account the service requirements of forty working-class immigrant families per building, who each generated only a tiny fraction of the waste that would be produced by a single tech bro ordering on average five Amazon packages and eight UberEats deliveries a week who would come to live in the exact same apartment a century later. This means that short of demolishing New York’s beloved fire escape-adorned red and brown brick walk-ups and replacing them with soulless high-rises whose waste facilities and access routes are designed for the twenty-first-century culture of mass-consumption and mass-disposal, there is no way to get all the trash from the original tenement buildings’ tiny garbage rooms and onto the sidewalks (a journey that invariably involves going through the front foyer and down a set of stairs) and to fit all the trash on the sidewalks while still allowing a slither of space for pedestrians other than by forcing grumpy superintendents to pile up black trash bags and turn the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan into literal rivers of trash three mornings a week, providing a lovely buffet breakfast for the city’s infamous rat population. 

But let’s say that this particular summer morning is not a trash day and the smell of the city is just mildly bad rather than putrid. To avoid the hubbub of the Meatpacking District (a location that is now known for packing in tourists rather than meat), Jude and I would turn right, first passing another double-width tenement building and then a solitary grand townhouse that reminded me of a modern version of Stuart Little’s family home and always had a gunmetal gray BMW X7 SUV parked out the front (which seemed vulgar against the backdrop of Chelsea, but I figured that Chelsea is ultimately still in the United States). Then we’d pass the entrance to the Mount Sinai Medical Centre on the other side of the street, which often had an ambulance parked outside, and then a tenement building that was narrower than ours with two fewer floors and in the 1890s red brick railroad style that is more commonly found in the Lower East Side, which had two tiny shops on its ground floor: a hip barber on the right and on the left a chic coffee shop that was always our first pit stop of the day. 

Inside the coffee shop, the sound of slow-moving motor vehicles and AirPod wearers talking to invisible interlocutors would be replaced with contemporary jazz emanating from ceiling-mounted speakers. The sight of the motley collection of buildings leaning against each other in the shadow of the Google monolith would be replaced by an exposed brick wall on one side of the small room adorned with framed photographs and artworks for sale and on the other a split-flap display in the style of an old train departure board setting out an extensive menu that included “lavender purple rain” and “rose space oddity” lattes. Behind the till was another such display which every two minutes changed to reveal a different quote that was trying to be both clever and funny. One example was “and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those that could not hear the music”, which is from Nietzsche, who I would have expected more from. 

The usual barista was called Alp, like one of the famous mountains. Yet he was not from anywhere alpine in the center of Europe, but rather from Istanbul, Turkey and lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights, taking the 2 subway every morning to get to our little corner of what the flags that the city flew in the street claim is already the Meatpacking District but is really the edge of Chelsea and the West Village. He was 5”8’, boyishly handsome, had a short beard that was always perfectly trimmed and every day wore a black t-shirt that looked like it had been ironed and fit his chest and arms wonderfully. Before running through my order, Alp would always retrieve an organic dog biscuit from an aluminum canister kept below the register, wait for Jude to sit like a good boy and then toss it into his mouth. The total for my cold brew with oat milk would come to 7.84 USD, which as of July 2022 was about 12 Australian Dollars. This included 1 USD for the oat milk, which seemed a lot for a literal splash of something that costs five dollars for an entire carton, but I have always found coffee without any milk too harsh on an empty stomach and was not about to cause an innocent cow to be raped and the milk intended for her babies stolen in order to save myself a single dollar.

The total would also include a tip of 1.20 USD. Coming from a country with virtually no tipping culture, tipping for the act of pouring a pre-prepared caffeinated beverage into a plastic cup initially seemed preposterous to me, but the presence of a large touchscreen between consumers of caffeinated beverages in the United States and their baristas, who stare expectantly at them while the customer decides which gratuity option to select, renders only the most heartless of creatures capable of selecting ‘no tip’, especially when the eyes of the barista on the other side of the screen are as big and brown as those belonging to Alp from Istanbul.

Emerging from the coffee shop with cold brew and dog lead in hand, I would proceed past what looked like another red-brick apartment building but was actually the beginning of the Corlears Elementary School, which took up most of the rest of the block before 8th Ave. Corlears’ Google Maps entry describes it as a “progressive, inclusive non-profit school for toddlers through to fifth grade” but, as informed to me by Alp, it costs 60,000 USD per student per year to attend. There would always be dozens of expensive-looking strollers left unattended outside the entrance, which did not constantly get stolen for reasons I could not quite understand, given that I never saw a security guard. It would likely be at this early point in the day’s journey that we would get stopped by one of the many fans we had in New York and by “we”, I of course mean “Jude”.

For better or for worse, New Yorkers do not know how to keep anything in. Although Jude was the most beautiful dog (both on the inside and out) in Sydney in the same way as he was in Manhattan, we hardly ever got stopped on the street here, whereas in New York it could happen several times in a given day. Sometimes the admirer would be an office worker marching to a meeting, who would not slow down whatsoever but would say sufficiently loudly and enunciate sufficiently clearly “that is a beautiful dog” (or “that is a be-AUTIFUL DAWG”) to be sure he got the message across. Sometimes it would be a mother out for the day with her family, who would start gushing to her husband, “honey, honey, look at this dog. Wow. I’ve never seen a dog like that. Sir, can I pet your dog? He’s so white! How do you keep him so white?” while her teenage son would back further and further down the sidewalk. But almost every morning, his first callers would be small human children on their way into or out of their very inclusive $ 60,000-a-year school.

After Jude had finished receiving his cuddles, we would walk past the food truck that served the same bagels and cups of filter coffee in waxed, non-biodegradable cups as the hundreds of other identical food trucks in the city and reach the corner of 8th Ave. This extremely useful intersection had a Chase bank on one side next to stairs that led to the 14th and 8th Ave subway interchange, from which one could catch uptown and downtown express A and local C trains, as well as the L train to Brooklyn and the E train to Queens and the Airport. On the other side was a free Covid-testing tent, that was next to the entrance to the best CVS pharmacy in the entire world.

This is not the largest CVS and it’s certainly not the cheapest. But to me, it was the best. It was the best because it was so close to the apartment on West 15th, not requiring the crossing of even a single street to reach it. It was the best because it was open 24 hours. It was the best because it was not just a pharmacy but contained both an alcoholic beverage section (a novelty and a boon to someone from a country where alcohol is not sold at pharmacies, which I believe would be the case in most countries) and a large grocery section, which contained a range of essentials including Sharpie markers and Tyrell potato chips. It was the best because it had a Santander ATM that did not require a US card to access, which was particularly useful for emergency cash withdrawals that were required to be made at odd hours. But what truly set it apart was that it was captivatingly beautiful, in a monumental yet slightly tacky way that all other pharmacies should be and yet virtually none are. The building is a Romanesque temple constructed of white Vermont marble that has two Corinthian columns flanking its three-story entrance. Originally built in 1897 to serve as the main branch of the New York Savings Bank, it was topped by a copper dome that was inlaid with twenty gorgeously detailed stained glass windows that filter soft natural light into the cool, cavernous interior, which has buttercream-colored walls, a barrel-vaulted ceiling and three extravagant copper chandeliers, including one hanging from the central dome. All of these features combine to make purchasing a 12 USD box of bran cereal a transcendent experience, at any time of day.

But CVS was a pitstop we’d usually make on our way back from somewhere (so as to not have to carry the purchases around with us on the rest of our journey), and so after taking a moment to bathe in its glory, we would cross over the mighty vehicular river of 8th Avenue, with its three traffic lanes and one magnificently wide, fully separated bicycle lane (with a bank of Citibikes exactly where you'd want them to be), towards the corner deli, which had a display of house plants and fresh flowers facing the side street. I would go into the deli to pick up a copy of the New York Times and while I was waiting to pay, Jude would sit as close as possible to the owner Ahmed, who would always be wearing his little white hat while standing behind the register. This could be one of the mornings where we would come at the same time as another regular customer who always smelt mildly of pot and would stay behind long after he had completed his purchase to air whatever grievances he was having with the city and its residents that day, in which case Ahmed might point to Jude and exclaim to the customer, “look at how well-behaved is this dog! Look how quiet and respectful! Can’t you learn to be more like this dog?” And then while I paid for the paper Ahmed would retrieve a long, sloppy piece of ham from the sandwich bar and toss it into Jude’s salivating mouth, I would thank Ahmed and once again we would go out into the bustle of Lower Manhattan.

Continuing down 8th Avenue, Jude and I would cross over the two bus lanes and four car lanes of West 14th Street, the first of the canyons that appear among the otherwise narrow east-west streets at intervals of between seven and 15 blocks all the way up to 155th Street, and then pass the Museum of Illusions (that I did not enter even a single time) and the West Village Animal Hospital (that Jude and I entered a total of two times), cross over Greenwich Ave (down which was located the Equinox gym at which I was a frequent visitor and the Lenox Health Hospital at which I was a one-time visitor), and then pass the tiered Victorian fountain surrounded by the circle of benches that makes up Jackson Square Park, which dates to 1845 and is one of the oldest and smallest parks in the city. Crossing over Horatio, we’d then pass the Acne Studios store and what was once my dry cleaner before a forlorn-looking sign was put on its door informing its customers of a temporary closure due to a fire. And then we’d make our second and final turn of the outbound journey, a left onto West 4th, which is undoubtedly New York’s most confusingly named street, seeing as it is the only “Street” to run north-west to south-east, thus diagonally bisecting its West 13th, 12th, 11th and 10th east-west cousins instead of running parallel to and between six and nine streets further down from them, and is also possibly its most charming, depending on one’s sensibilities.

To walk among the brownstones, cafes, dining huts and flower-stocked window boxes of West 4th, between walls of ivy and under the shade of centuries-old trees that overhang a single lane of slow-moving traffic rumbling over cobblestones, and not to have one’s heart sing at least a couple bars of a melody that involves both flute and clarinet would be quite difficult for someone like me. And to walk along the same sidewalks once graced by Edward Hopper, Eugene O’Neill, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and not feel at least a little prick of inspiration would also mean that I was in a particularly bad mood that day. But it is equally true that one cannot help but be reminded when approaching Perry Street of a particular curly-haired figure from contemporary popular culture whining about how difficult it is being white, privileged and single, while sitting at the third-floor window of a gorgeous brownstone building and typing her thoughts on a black MacBook. And it would always be exactly at this corner that Jude would pull on his lead with the degree of insistence that would signify it was poopie-time. He would then crouch down and make a face of deep concentration before shifting the axis of his body about a dozen times, each adjustment becoming slighter in degree, until he was certain that he would be shitting in precisely the direction of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment before letting his bowels release. Jude is a particularly clever and talented dog.

He is also a great communicator. Having performed as much business as needed to be performed, it would then usually be at the next corner, directly across from where the first brick was thrown at the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 and with One World Trade coming into view at the end of Seventh Avenue, that Jude would find a shady spot to sit himself down and refuse to budge until I had shifted his carrier around to my front (since he liked to see where we were going) and placed him inside. The next point of interest we would pass would be the spa where I received the third best of the many happy endings I received over the course of my career as a massage recipient in New York, a city where I discovered it is impossible to access a professional massage service without it deviating into an unsolicited sexual advance from the service provider, even at the world’s premier luxury fitness establishment, causing me to eventually just give up on that particular aim. And then we would reach the corner of Cornelia Street and, since underneath the intellectual hatred of capitalism and whiteness I am also a very basic, very homosexual and somewhat caucasian consumer of popular culture, I would often not be able to prevent myself from asking Siri to play the song that is that street’s namesake, a sepia-toned ode by Taylor Swift to the 6,000 square foot townhouse she rented in 2016 about 100 yards from where I would be standing as the first bars began to play, a song that also immortalizes the neighborhood in which that house is situated and the love affair that blossomed against such a beguiling urban backdrop.

But then after crossing Sixth Avenue, the white girl fantasy Greenwich Village of Taylor’s imagination would collide unhappily with the Greenwich Village of reality, or at least the part that exists beyond the Cornelia Street that Taylor supposedly once “walk[ed]”, which stretches for only a single block between West 4th and Bleecker. While Taylor sings about the streets metaphorically “screaming” the name of her floppy-haired, blue-eyed British lover, Jude and I found that these streets, or at least some of them, do contain plenty of literal screaming, with the content of such screams not being “Joseph Matthew Alwyn, Joseph Matthew Alwyn” but rather “do you have a dollar” or sometimes more plainly, “hey, fuck you man, and your fucking white dog”, pronouncements which would make for the lyrics of a very different song.

For anyone visiting or moving from a country that values the health and welfare of all members of its population, the scale and severity of the homelessness in New York can be both confronting and heartbreaking, with walking the streets of the city being as much an assault to the nervous system as a delight to the senses. The city’s homeless are the key aspect of its visual landscape that has been tactically omitted from recent pieces of New York-themed capitalist propaganda masquerading as popular culture, which makes sense given how the plight of the city’s informal residents serves as a conspicuous indictment of the rank individualism and consumerist values glorified in such portrayals. Perhaps if when she lost her completely undeserved rent-controlled apartment, instead of stealing her best friend’s engagement ring to use as a down-payment, Carrie had received her just desserts and been forced into a life of street prostitution, then we would have had a more accurate representation of what New York is all about, and fewer idiots like me would flock there and exacerbate the existing pressures on the rental market. That being said, becoming a beautiful but tragic prostitute like Anthony Malone in Dancer from the Dance has always been a secret fantasy of mine, so I probably would have done it in any case.

The rise in the number of the city’s homeless exemplifies how New York’s existing malaises have been magnified and entrenched by the seismic geopolitical events of recent years. There has been a 39% increase in the population that have spent at least one night in a shelter in New York in a given year over the past decade, with this number reaching 102,000 in 2022. But there has also been a noticeable shift in the prevailing mood among many of those who have nowhere to sleep since the last time I spent a substantial period of time in the city, back in 2015. New York’s most vulnerable residents were among those who were most acutely affected by the pandemic because they were totally without the ability to shield themselves from its worst impacts and now the signs of their enduring trauma serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the various failures of the public response to COVID in America to the many Lower Manhattan residents who were working from home in their ivory towers and are now trying to pretend that none of it even happened. The number and desperation of the homeless also seems to hint at the imminent and total failure of the American project itself. But hopefully that’s just my inner catastrophizer talking. No one wants America to fail less than I do, except perhaps Captain America. And Joe Biden.

It is also not a coincidence that walking the stretch of West 4th between 8th and 6th Avenue, the section on which Taylor Swift once lived and Sarah Jessica Parker still resides and has been gentrified to within an inch of its life, I was unlikely to collide with any scenes of trauma or human devastation, whereas the next block, which has yet to be invaded by bistros and boutiques, feels like stepping into downtown Gotham. And so at this point of the walk, if I had any one dollar bills in my pocket (usually the left-overs from tipping drag performers), then I would give them to one of the informal residents of the block, a guilt tax for drinking an $8 iced coffee while the more legitimate residents of the city in which I was a guest could not afford to feed themselves. 

Crossing over MacDougal Street to Washington Square South would then feel like stepping back into Manhattan the fairy tale, with the grimy dive bars and thrift stores that linger from a different time replaced by the imposing and handsome main building of the NYU School of Law. Built in the neo-Georgian style, the Vanderbilt Hall takes up an entire block to the southwest of the park and has a colonnade separating its interior courtyard from the street, its double-height rounded archways being somewhat reminiscent of the perimeter aqueduct of the Alhambra. Crossing the street and entering Washington Square Park, the set would change again, just as Jude would be dismounting from the carriage strapped to my chest to relieve the pressure off my not exactly Herculean back and shoulders, since the shade provided by the elm trees of the park made the walkway cool enough for his paws. We would then walk past the circular plaza with the 16 stone chess board tables where famed prodigy Joshua Waitzkin was first inspired to play (both in Searching for Bobby Fischer and in real life) and where chess hustlers, some of whom have been playing here since Waitzkin walked through with his mother in 1982, still spend their days fleecing tourists under a sign that reads, “no gambling, no smoking, no use of illegal drugs”.

Jude and I would then veer to the right, passing the vegan Indian food truck that would have a line stretching out of the park by the time we left, and then the playground, where the smell of marijuana from the smokers in various states of repose on park benches would start to become pungent. Even though the park’s crack smokers and heroin injectors would usually stick to the northwestern corner (away from the dogs and the children), I would still scan the pathway assiduously for needles and pick Jude up again if I saw any. Then, as soon as the wrought iron perimeter fence of the dog run would come into view and the sound of happy dogs at play could be heard, Jude would start to pull excitedly on his lead just a little but not so much as to piss me off (because that would result in us stopping in our tracks until he resumed behaving to an acceptable standard). I would then unlatch the first of two heavy gates to enter the interstitial vestibule, unfasten his leash from his collar and drape it around my neck like some sort of S&M-esque fashion accessory (it’s a very pretty leash), before opening the second gate to let him run inside.

The first time I encountered the term “dog run” was in February 2022, when I typed “dog park near 352 W 15th Street” into the Google Maps application on my phone and the Chelsea Waterside Park Dog Run (closed until late 2022 for renovation) popped up as well as the ones in Washington Square Park and Union Square. “Why don’t they just call it a dog park?” I thought to myself, a question that was answered when Jude and I completed our maiden odyssey across the West Village and discovered the uniquely New York phenomenon that is the dog run. 

Lower Manhattan does not have enough space for parks for people, much less for parks for dogs. The public space for recreation and leisure that was created inside Washington Square in 1850 is the closest thing to a park below 59th Street, but even that is really more of a series of interconnected plazas separated by landscaped garden beds. It has a couple of small lawns but not a single proper field, which for me is a prerequisite for an interval of an urban landscape that happens not to have buildings in it to actually deserve the title “park”. So in the absence of space for dog parks, Manhattan invented the “dog run”, which is essentially a dog playground, surrounded by a high fence and accessed by a dual-gate security system to prevent the dogs from running off into nearby streets. 

Dog runs have evolved over the decades to include amenities like water fountains, artificial hills, benches and poo bag dispensers, and depending on the age of the dog run, have a floor of either concrete, AstroTurf or, as is the case with Washington Square Park, fine pieces of dusty gravel. The uniqueness of dog runs as a social environment stems from the fact that Manhattan is the only place in America where an extremely large number of wealthy people, including a not inconsiderable number of wealthy people who are also to some degree famous, live in very close physical proximity to each other in properties that mostly do not have outdoor spaces. And since wealthy people are known to enjoy keeping dogs as pets, and some of those people even enjoy taking their own dogs out, what you end up with is a lot of rich, entitled, mostly white Americans and their designer pooches squashed into a fenced-in dustbowl. And put that many highly-strung New Yorkers together in a confined space on a hot day and dramatic scenes are sure to ensue, especially if a dog or dog owner breaks one of the dog run rules clearly displayed on the plaque by the gate.

Despite its dustiness and not being the best dog run for either celebrity sightings or inter-owner drama (which would be the TriBeCa Dog Run on the Hudson Riverfront on both counts), Washington Square was Jude and my preferred dog run because we found it to be large in size and we also liked the way it looked. Its shape is that of a long bisected ellipse, with an octagon of bench-seating constructed around a large elm tree that predated the dog run’s construction at its western end. There was a Grecian pavilion that hugged the space’s curved boundary wall along its northern edge that had single-person seats built onto the side facing the dogs and on the side facing the “park” there were public restrooms (that I always had to use when we left as a result of the iced coffee) as well as the office of the park rangers, who could be easily accessed in the event of any extreme dog run antics. At the eastern end of the space was a circular doggy fountain with three individual jets as well as three park benches to the right of the fountain, which benefited from the shade of a nearby elm, proximity to the button that restarted the fountain’s jets and a view to their right of the eighty-foot Tuckahoe marble arch built in 1895 in honor of the well-regarded former American president after which the square and its lovely attempt at a park were named.

It was usually somewhere around 9.30am when I took my place at the middle bench and there would almost always be the same elderly couple sitting at the bench to its right, which was slightly shadier. They had a comparably senior beagle who would usually be sat on the bench beside them, and the couple and I would give each other a nod of greeting as I sat down. While Jude was doing his rounds of the other owners seated around the perimeter of the space, I would put his carrier on the bench beside me and withdraw my journal and a black Mitsubishi Uniball pen from the side pocket. I would then write the day’s date at the top of a fresh page and list the six things that I was most grateful that day for, a list which invariably included “Jude”, “having escaped Australia”, “the New York Times” and “New York” itself. Then, as per creativity guru Julia Cameron’s prescription, I would write at least three pages of unfiltered, stream-of-conscious writing on whatever my mind was inclined to offer up on that particular morning. Despite my best efforts to do this exercise properly and best intentions for these thoughts to be as honest and heartfelt as possible, somehow the hundreds of pages written over the course of seven months of mornings spent on that particular park bench and others like it contain almost no reference to the reality of my situation or the question that if it was not at the top of my mind then it really should have been, which was “what the fuck am I actually doing?” Perhaps things could have worked out differently for both Jude and me if they had.

After returning my journal to its pocket, I would start making my way through the day’s Times, starting with the Ukraine content, then moving on to the midterms coverage and then reading one or two more articles that struck me as engaging but not too dark in content (on something like the Penn Station redevelopment) before moving on to the crossword. A brief window of serenity would sometimes arise at some point during my flicking over of the paper’s pages, which would then often be interrupted almost as soon as it arose by a woman from somewhere in Central Europe, who had overly straightened brown hair and would regularly wear a button-up shirt and cream trousers tucked into tall black leather riding boots, screeching at my dog. This woman would insist on referring to Jude as “mister marshmallow” as many times as she could in a given morning and loudly enough for the whole of Washington Square Park to hear (“oh look, it’s mister marshmallow…come over here, mister marshmallow...oh you’re so white mister marshmallow”). I would always want to shout back at her, “your voice sounds like a blender and stop patronizing my son, he is not a plaything that exists solely for your amusement.” I never did though, since I always saw her talking to other owners and suspected she might hold some capital in the context of the dog run’s social ecosystem and, seeing as I held none, I did not want to risk Jude and me slipping into the status of persona et canis non grata as I had witnessed happen to other dogs and their humans. Tired both of being degraded by comparisons to confectionary and of chasing other dogs around circles, Jude would then come over to the fountain to place his entire body over one of the jets, as he is shown doing in the photograph below, pictured next to some sort of poodle variation with a moo cow-patterned coat that happened to be wearing a high ponytail that day.

I would take my cue to leave from the appearance of a man who always entered the dog run in breach of rule number 1 (“no dogs without people, no people without dogs”). The first time I saw him he was wearing a green t-shirt with the logo of the multinational law firm “Hogan Lovells” printed on it. My last job in Sydney was as a professional recruiter. In fact, I briefly owned a small but highly successful recruitment agency, and Hogan Lovells was one of the law firms I used to headhunt lawyers from for my clients, who consisted of different top-tier international law firms. Every time I would see this older gentleman in his green Hogan Lovells t-shirt, ripped pyjama pants and bare feet, muttering to himself as he raked the leaves in the fountain, I would think to myself, “Hogan Lovells must have very inclusive hiring policies for their US offices, good for them”. Some days, his feet were pink and swollen. On others, he had a hospital bracelet on and a couple of times I saw a clear plastic tube dangling out of one of his trouser legs. While other informal residents of Washington Square Park who entered the dog run were usually escorted out by the rangers (or, in one instance that I witnessed, arrested by a pair of police officers), this man was left to rake the leaves for fifteen minutes or so and then leave on his own accord, since he never approached any of the dogs or their owners and was really performing a voluntary public service. And although his presence didn’t bother me in any way, his arrival would prompt me to check the time on my phone, and it would usually by this point already be after 11, which would make me feel like I should try to do something productive with the rest of my day, starting with taking a still wet Jude home in his carrier.

Fast forward six months, two changes in country, one change in continent and one comprehensive and total personal breakdown, and my mornings look very different. I now wake up significantly earlier, before the sun’s morning rays have even begun peeking through the blinds, to the morning calls of the fairy-wrens, honeyeaters, finches and lorikeets fluttering about my window. But it is neither an alarm nor the birds that will prompt my early rising. It is a deeply felt intuition that if I manage to leave the apartment before my mother wakes up, the rest of my day will be significantly better for it.

My mother’s apartment is in a suburb of Sydney called Randwick, which lies approximately four miles southeast of the city center and one mile from the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. It shares some of the character of a San Francisco streetcar suburb, with no fewer than four tram lines passing through Randwick when Sydney was at the height of its tram glory and had the largest network in the southern hemisphere. The suburb is architecturally blessed with a small number of nineteenth-century manors, a large number of freestanding federation houses and clusters of interwar shops and cafes along the former tram routes. After the tramlines were ripped up in an egregious act of urbicide in the 1950s, the gaps between the lovely examples of pre-war and interwar shops, homes and small blocks of flats were filled in, like much of Sydney, with medium-density trash designed to house the waves of migrants that moved to Australia in the post-war years, who were mostly Southern and Eastern European, as dictated by the official “White Australia Policy” that governed immigration to the country until 1973. 

My mother’s building is one block from what was once the intersection of the 15 tram from Central Station to Clovelly and the 19 tram from Bondi Junction to Coogee, which forms the heart of the area that real estate agents and resident yuppies can often be heard referring to as “Randwick North”. I did not grow up in this area but did go to high school around the corner, and although its bones are virtually unchanged from when I started Year 7 twenty years ago, there have been significant changes both on and beneath the surface. The stop from which my peers and I used to catch the bus after school to get to the Westfield mall in Bondi Junction, like the rats that we were, is the same, although I learned when I returned from North America that the bus is now called the 390X rather than 400 and it follows a slightly different route, a discovery that induced a short period of mourning. The gas station next to the bus stop is still there but it has been painted a bold shade of red. The fish and chip shop that used to be on the corner has been replaced by a restaurant that boasts of making its own pasta. The video rental store has become a cafe that is equal parts trendy and grunge. The mini grocer on the third corner of the intersection has been replaced by a “skin clinic” that has a display in its window that details the broad range of injectable products and other cosmetic treatments it offers. A posh grocer has opened up in what used to be a large but mediocre Greek restaurant just up the street. The small goods store has been replaced by a florist. The chicken shop has become a posher chicken shop. And what used to be a horse race betting shop and a dingy Chinese restaurant have been combined into the still very proud winner of Time Out Sydney’s Bakery of the Year, despite that award having come to Randwick back in 2017. The Bunnings hardware store is the same, as is the Georgian exterior of the neighborhood pub, although since being purchased by a luxury hospitality conglomerate, its interior and its patronage have lost both their distinctive smell and any trace of personality.

In terms of the suburb’s architectural binary of pre-war loveliness and post-war trash, my mother’s building falls into the latter category. It is part of a complex of six identical eight-story blocks that were Jerry-built on land taken from an adjacent natural reserve in the 1960s to house 300 mostly Hungarian and Russian immigrant families. Sometimes I wonder whether the architect deliberately channeled Soviet aesthetic principles into the design to make these new migrants feel more at home in the Antipodes. My mother first moved here after my parents divorced and sold the townhouse in which I grew up (which was in a neighborhood closer to downtown that is populated only by heritage-listed Victorian-era homes and not a single gas station). She bought the Randwick apartment because it was the best she could do while still just about remaining in the Eastern Suburbs, where it is acceptable for Jewish people like us to live, and it has a sunny northerly aspect (with the sun arcing around the north in the southern hemisphere) and overlooks a colossal weeping fig tree that grows at the edge of what’s left of the nature reserve. The reserve and the tree are in fact the source of each morning’s avian soundtrack and it is from this tree that a family of rainbow lorikeets will sometimes fly onto the balustrade if I go onto the balcony and start singing Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”. These lorikeets will eat straight from my hand, but only if I feed them vegan superfood granola and I refrain from putting on my trousers before going outside.

In the period between my mother purchasing the apartment in 2010 and my return to Australia to temporarily reside with her in December 2022, the building underwent a comprehensive renovation that included the installation of new balconies, with glass balustrades and large sliding glass doors, by which time the babushkas that had moved in forty years earlier had largely been replaced by Irish and English thirty-somethings, many of whom have small human children, who make noise and take up space in the elevator, and some of whom have little dogs whose presence is less obtrusive and bothersome. There is only one residual babushka, who looks to be over ninety years of age and she herself has a puppy, which inferably serves as a husband replacement. Just as she does with every other resident of the building, she speaks to the dog exclusively in Russian. Its name is something along the lines of “Potski” and the sight of them moving excruciatingly slowly through the gardens, the owner looking like she could be blown over should a moderate gust of wind arrive unexpectedly, is both adorable and concerning.

But there is no risk of being held up by human children or babushkas when I leave the apartment no later than 5.45am, 15 minutes before my mother’s alarm goes off. Upon exiting the aggressively bright and utilitarian foyer and making my way up the concrete driveway towards the end of the cul-de-sac, I will make a right into the nature reserve, which is named after the late benevolent Australian ophthalmologist Fred Hollows, who resided in North Randwick but spent most of his life restoring sight to people with operable blindness in indigenous communities and developing countries. The reserve that honours Professor Hollows’ legacy is made up of a five acre slither of parkland centred on a gully with a creek running through it, which has its own tropical microclimate that has fostered the growth of a small urban rainforest. It takes ten minutes to traverse its length along a wooden boardwalk that zigzags between the tree trunks, but it takes only a few steps for the canopy of gristle ferns and brackens to block out the surrounding apartment buildings and allow you to forget that such a thing as a city even exists.

Aside from the birdlife, all that can be heard at 6am is the trickle of water, with just enough pre-dawn light filtering in through the leaves to illuminate the waterfall that spills over a stack of large boulders to form the mouth of the creek. After 500 feet, the gently descending boardwalk veers to the right and merges onto a narrow footbridge that crosses the creek and then leads onto a small platform with a single slightly mossy bench that, when there is enough light to see the pages and on the strict proviso that the application of insect repellent has been remembered, is an ideal spot for reading pieces of literature set in New York. The platform connects to a set of stairs that descend to meet a small pool at the creek’s base. At the edge of this pool is a plaque with the title “Gully Skink '' that contains an illustration and description of the species of lizard-like reptile that was discovered in this very gully in the 1980s and from which it derives its name. The Gully Skink is said to feed on ground-dwelling insects and be most active during the mornings and afternoons, which explains why I have never seen one. I did, however, once see a little turtle in the creek and it made my day.

Emerging from the reserve at its southern end, I will turn left on Alison Road, which is straight but undulating and leads almost all the way to the Pacific coast and along a route that is lined with Federation Homes and Banksia trees. Banksias, named after eighteenth-century botanist Joseph Banks, are distinctively Australian pieces of flora with rough, grey bark on their thick trunks, serrated leaves and large red hairbrush-like flowers while Federation homes are iconically Australian houses, the equivalent of a Californian bungalow, named after the year in which seven English colonies came together to form the Commonwealth of Australia, which was 1901. They are differentiated from their American cousins by larger porches and ornate Queen Anne-style detailing on their columns, windows and gabled roofs, and are mostly constructed from red or brown brick rather than wooden shingles. Many examples of such Federation Homes on Alison Road have fragrant frangipani trees growing out of their front gardens. The sidewalks, like those of almost all streets in Sydney, are so clean I would feel comfortable eating a sandwich that had dropped and rested on one of them for a full ten seconds. In addition to the general tendency of Australians to follow the rules that are set for them, the high standard of cleanliness in public spaces here is partly a result of the decade-long (and still ongoing) multimedia public advertising campaign centered on the slogan “don’t be a tosser”, with “tosser” being Australian slang for “masturbator”. While this successful campaign in my view fairly stigmatised the act of littering, I feel that it has also unfairly stigmatised the act of masturbating, which for some people is not only their only option but also a medical necessity.

As Alison Road gets closer to the beach, the number of luxury SUVs parked on the curb and in driveways increases, with as of January 2023 not a single battery electrical vehicle being among them. On some mornings, I will have the urge to stick a one-page summary of the current humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, where two million children are experiencing severe malnourishment as a direct result of a climate change-induced mega-drought (with the most significant source of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions being the excessive means of transport used by a minority of the world’s population, including luxury SUVs in Australia) under the windscreen wiper of any luxury non-electric vehicle I see that is larger than an Audi Q5 and a 2020 model year or later, before writing “CHILD KILLER” in red lipstick across each of their windshields. But I’ve never actually done it.

When the road culminates at Beach Street, I will dogleg into an almost secret passageway between two nondescript houses called Kilder Lane, which at first slopes gently upward before descending to dramatically reveal the epic infinitude of the ocean being illuminated by the first glimmers of daylight. At the end of the lane, I will turn left onto the coastal path that after a dozen uneven concrete steps veers to the left to reveal the full visual drama of Gordons Bay and the cliffs that frame it. If Fred Hollows feels like it could almost be a piece of Borneo and Alison Road feels like it could not be a piece of anywhere other than Australia, then Gordons Bay could almost be part of the Adriatic coastline in Croatia. The cliffs are similarly jagged. The water is similarly turquoise. And little fishing boats are similarly tied up in rows to latticed racks installed on the slope at the end of a pebbly little beach.

But the people are of course very different. By the time I have followed the path all the way around the bay, I will have passed up to a dozen Australians, half being cheerful old ladies, a couple with little dogs, who will make eye contact and say “good morning” as they pass, and the rest being men or women in their 20s or 30s who will look sullen as they jog past, staring straight ahead, listening to a podcast or music through AirPods and not saying anything at all. I will stop for a moment at the lookout between Gordon’s Bay and Clovelly to admire the view of the bays and the cliffs that are visible all the way south to Malabar and then continue along the path to Tom Caddy Point, where a large coastal shelf juts out over the ocean. And it is here, among seagulls playing in water-filled crevices, that I will take my seat to watch Mother Nature’s first grand performance of the day.

The first eight days after I returned to Australia, I left the four walls of my mother’s apartment exactly twice. The first time was to see my psychiatrist and to the pharmacy to fill the script he wrote me. The second time was to see my father, for the first time in five years, as a result of an ill-advised decision made during the downward spiral that brought me back to Sydney. The rest of the time I remained motionless and horizontal on the sofa in my mother’s living room, compulsively watching videos on YouTube on topics such as railway systems and urban planning presented by remarkably uncharismatic and relatably misanthropic dorks ,while eating loaves of bread with peanut butter. My mother at no point tried to pressure me to do anything else, which I appreciated. 

It was on the ninth day that I woke up from a highly medicated slumber and was surprised to feel something other than existential dread or terror for the first time in at least a month. It was a tentative sensation that felt like it was coming from a bodily location near to my pancreas. At first I thought I might be dying, but then I realized I was just having a sort of existential craving, or what is often referred to as a “gut feeling”. I decided to let this gut feeling lead me, and followed it right out the flat and into the lift, out the building and through the reserve, down Alison Road, around the bay and then onto a big wet rock, where I sat with it while waiting for the sun to rise. At that point in time, I was still highly distrustful of my own thoughts, especially in conditions of silence and stillness, and so I had brought my own AirPods with me and was able to put on my “Sunrise 2” playlist, which begins with “the Power of Love” by Celine Dion, to soundtrack the occasion of a blazing orb dancing through skeins of grey cloud and beginning to reactivate the parts of me that had gone into a state of protective shut-down.

But after a week of soundtracked sunrises, my distrust of my own unconscious subsided and I began to allow this to be a time for meditative contemplation with a backdrop of natural majesty. And after another week, I started taking a backpack with me and putting my Moleskine in it. Once I get to the big rock, I will take out the journal and black Uniball pen and once again start by trying to get my neurotransmitters firing in the right direction with a gratitude list, which usually includes “that I’m still alive”, “Jude”, “the New York Times'', “my mother” and “being an Australian citizen”. I will then move on to the three free-flowing “morning pages'', hoping that what comes out while sitting on an oceanic rock shaped over millions of years by the forces of the winds and the tides will be more grounded and real than what I wrote sitting on a park bench in the middle of a dusty dog playground. Sometimes, I will just write “fuck” over and over again until the quota of pages has been reached. Perhaps that’s a good sign, a reflection that I’m at least in touch with the reality of my situation. I suppose only time will tell.

Once I’ve reached the bottom of the third page, I will hoist myself up, put my journal back in my backpack and continue walking along the coastal path to Clovelly Beach. As far as Sydney beaches go, Clovelly is unique in that in addition to a narrow, sandy beach at the end of its long, narrow bay it has twenty-foot-wide, Amalfi-style concrete slabs running along the full length of each of the banks of the bay, which have stairs that lead directly into the ocean just like those at the edge of a swimming pool. While originally built during the Great Depression to give the area’s many unemployed laborers something to do, it now serves to allow visitors to sunbathe and swim without having to deal with the many evils of sand. By the time I reach the path that runs above the edge of the southern concrete bank, there will usually be three men in the ocean: a single man and two male friends. It is always the same man: old, fat, bald and doing butterfly strokes back and forth across the breadth of the bay. It is always a different pair of friends. If I’m lucky, one of them will be fit. 

So uplifted was I by the Céline-led soundtrack to the sunrise on my first morning out of the Randwick cave that I decided at this point to strip down to my underwear and give myself a spontaneous mikvah. Although I scraped my knee on a rock in the shallows, the water was pleasantly warm and the experience rejuvenating. For the next week, I continued having an ocean swim every morning. But then, I gave up on trying to fool myself that I was the kind of person who enjoys morning ocean swims when it is any less than 70 degrees in the water and 80 degrees outside (which it very rarely is at 6.30 am in Sydney), and so now I will just stand against the railing of the promenade for a few moments, creepily watching the real men in the ocean, before moving on.

During my first week back in the land of the living, I would walk up Clovelly Road back to Randwick. But this hill is very long and very steep and, aside from an art deco cinema that has been converted into a daycare center, there are not enough points of visual interest to justify the physical exertion required. And so I started taking one of the buses that departs from the beach terminus every ten minutes in the morning (every 20 minutes during the day) and, if followed to its route’s conclusion, would take 25 minutes to reach Central Station in downtown. I am usually the only passenger when I get on and so will greet the driver with “Good Morning” and he will reply with something along the lines of “G’day mate” (because that is a phrase that many Australians actually do use to greet each other). I will get off at the eighth stop and say “thank you” to the driver and he will say something along the lines of “thanks mate” back to me, occasionally even giving a little wave. Greeting and thanking a bus driver are both customary in Australia, particularly for almost empty buses and for passengers exiting from the front door, but it also often happens on full buses and by passengers disembarking from the rear door. I have on several occasions even witnessed an Australian passenger screaming their thanks to the driver from the very rear door of a double-length articulated bus, past thirty full rows of seats. Australians are an exceptionally polite bunch.

And the politeness and fundamental decency demonstrated by most Australians to service providers, both public and private, extends even to the drivers of taxis and rideshare cars. It is customary in Australia if travelling alone in a taxi or rideshare to sit in the front seat and engage in conversation with the driver. I learned this was not the case in the US when I got in the front seat of a taxi at the rank outside JFK the first time I visited New York (in 2010, at age 20) only for the startled driver to yell “yo man, what the hell are you doing?” and escort me to the back seat. But I didn’t appreciate just how bad Americans were at being motor vehicle passengers until this past August, when I was forced to catch a Lyft from the Hamptons back to Chelsea because I missed my train on account of the magic mushrooms I took earlier that afternoon causing me to lose track of time and the extremely infrequent schedule of the Long Island Railroad ensuring that the next train would have caused me to be late for Jude. 

The silver lining of having wasted both my return train ticket and $300 on a rideshare was that even though I only ordered a Lyft Standard, I got picked up by a Lyft Lux, a Tesla Model 3, which meant there were not any direct emissions from an internal combustion engine burning gasoline only for my sake for me to feel guilty about. My driver Hidayat was from Pakistan, and over the course of our three-hour journey he and I spoke about the joys and perils of being a member of a family (he had eight siblings), international migration and some key cultural differences between Australian, Pakistani and American society. He told me that in eight years of driving, I was only the fifth customer in New York that had ever engaged him in actual conversation. He told me, “you are a very civilized and educated man, not like these Americans” who he declared to be on the whole “dirty, rude and stupid”. Driving down the 495, we saw a car completely engulfed in flames, a totally new sight for me, which according to the jaded Hidayat was without doubt the result of an insurance scam. As we crossed into Nassau County, a visible shudder went through Hidayat’s whole body, as he told me that passengers from this part of Long Island were the worst in the tri-state area, and so bad was their behavior that he refused to pick up any passengers if a ride happened to take him there, even if it meant driving all the way back to Suffolk County or into Queens alone. Hidayat’s observations of the typical Nassau County resident helped make this county’s subsequent election of George Santos make better sense to me.

What also made sense to me when I first started leaving my mother’s flat in Sydney, around the time that US Congressman Santos’s fabrications were making headlines, was getting my first coffee of the day not at the cafe that was closest to either the beach or the apartment, but rather at the one with the most genial and attractive baristas. And that particular cafe is the one located two bus stops away from my mother’s building, when coming up from the beach, near the corner of Clovelly and Carrington Road. By virtue of the 1920s building that houses it, this particular cafe has a generous twelve foot ceiling with art deco plaster cornices at the edges and circular moldings around the mount of a teardrop-shaped pendant chandelier. The furniture is mid-century, with repurposed school desks and small round tables with marble tops and copper edges, as well as a couple of larger 1950s circular kitchen tables on the sidewalk. Aside from the baristas, a couple of nice potted philodendrons and an extravagant mural of Clovelly covering one of the walls, my favorite thing about the cafe is that they use Oatly oat milk, which is my favorite brand because I like the shape (tall, slim and elegant) and color (overcast gray) of the carton. The rest of the cafes in the area use an oat milk by an Australian brand that is squat in shape and red in color, and I find looking at it anxiety-inducing.

By the time I get off the bus and cross the street the cafe will have already been open for 90 minutes and there will be at least three people outside waiting for their coffees to be made at an hour at which it would still be 30 minutes before Alp would open the door to the cafe on West 15th. This is both the result of Sydney yuppies, particularly those who live in beachside suburbs, being much earlier risers than their New York counterparts and the fact an Australian yuppy would never, ever drink either a coffee that they had made for themselves or one mass-produced by a soulless commercial chain. Why would they, when the coffee here is so good and so cheap and there is a lovingly accoutred and expertly staffed independent cafe on every corner in every suburb (and sometimes two or three)?

Australia is the spiritual home of what Americans call “specialty coffee” and Australians just call “coffee”. Australians invented the flat white, with the first documented reference to the influential concoction of espresso and steamed milk dating back to a May 1983 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was Australians who first educated New Yorkers on how coffee should taste by opening establishments like Bluestone Lane, Toby’s Estate, Two Hands, Ruby’s and St Kilda Coffee, which functioned like beacons of light in an otherwise bleakly American coffee landscape, inspiring the opening of Australian-calibre outlets like Joe, Stumptown, Blank Street and 787 that have come to dominate the coffee landscape of Brooklyn, Manhattan and any other part of the United States populated by Americans who like to think of themselves as not being like other Americans. The sophistication of Australian coffee culture is such that there are only a handful of Starbucks that have been able to survive here, and they are concentrated in the tourist-friendly city center, where anyone seen walking around with an actual Starbucks cup is still glared at like the mindless consumer hack that they are apparently perfectly content to openly identify as. There have been only a few occasions over my time in Australia where I’ve had to personally interact with one of the “Starbucks lovers” Taylor Swift sang about in 2014. I once had a law professor who was American and regularly came into class with some sort of flavored frozen abomination in a plastic Starbucks cup (that I recall possibly even somehow involving whipped cream). This was a grown man, old enough to have teenage children. At the start of each class I would ridicule his choice of caffeinated beverage in a way that I felt was playfully mocking but affectionate, until there came a point when he just stopped bringing his “coffee” in with him. At the end of the semester, I received a 65, the lowest subject mark of my entire academic career, which would indicate that he did not find my jokes about both his general love of Starbucks and his particular Starbucks order as funny as my fellow students did. I’ve since learned that it is not kind or a “good look” to openly mock people for their terrible taste in coffee or their terrible taste in anything else, because you never know when they might be grading one of your university papers.  

Someone who has even stronger views than I do on Starbucks lovers is Jimmy, my favorite barista at the cafe on the corner of Carrington Road. Jimmy lives in Campbeltown, which is 35 miles southwest of Randwick, and so wakes up at 3am every day to get to the cafe by train and bus. Jimmy loves the footy and his team is the West Tigers. His favorite player is Benji Marshall. Jimmy used to get on the piss every night but now is a teetotaller and does not even drink caffeinated beverages. He is also a vegan, like me. Jimmy has a dog called Oscar, who used to belong to a neighbor that Jimmy does not like. Oscar looks like a rat and is walked around the streets of Campbelltown on Jimmy’s days off while Jimmy listens to Slipknot. Jimmy has some interesting views on a range of subjects, including 80s music, relationship psychology and the strategic uses of chemtrails by national governments, and he makes extremely good coffee.

My flat white with oat milk will always come to 4.90 AUD, or 3.64 USD, which is the same price that is quoted on the menu board, a result of the law in Australia requiring advertised prices of goods and services include all taxes, which means that unlike in the US ordinary people do not need a degree in advanced accounting to work out how much they are going to actually be paying for something before ordering. The machine that I tap my card on does not even give me an option to tip because in Australia tipping is meant to come from the heart and in exchange for exceptional service, as opposed to the customer being bullied into it by an obnoxious touch screen, even when they’re just trying to buy a single vegan chocolate chip cookie.

Australia’s non-tipping culture is possible in part because service industry workers (like all workers) are paid properly and benefit from extensive labor market regulations as well as a strong social safety net, which means they are not dependent on tips to ensure their and their family’s survival and welfare. Here, there is free universal access to what has been ranked as the sixth-best healthcare system in the world. The federal minimum wage in Australia is $21.38, fifty percent more than the state minimum wage in New York, which itself is double the federal minimum wage in the US. Workers who do not have regular hours, like hospitality workers, must receive a 25% loading on top of that. There are also laws stipulating that all workers must receive 1.25 of their usual hourly rate for working Saturdays, 1.5 for Sundays and 2.5 for public holidays. Not only is tipping not required, the absence of obnoxious touchscreens actually makes it quite practically difficult. If I want to tip Jimmy, I have to remember to withdraw cash so I can pay with a twenty dollar note and leave $5 or $10 from my change in the mostly neglected tip jar. Despite my aversion to handling disease-carrying symbols of colonialism and consumerism, I will still occasionally do this because the oat flattie is always velvety and never burnt and Jimmy is a good bloke who has a rat-like dog to look after.

My regular table is in the front left-hand corner, where I can sit at the end of the old church pew that takes up most of the wall and intermittently spectate over both the interior world of the cafe and the wider world beyond the glass window. After my coffee arrives, I will open my iPad and flick to the New York Times app, starting as I have every day for the past year with Ukraine, which has now surpassed the 2020 US election, Brexit and Covid to become the single news story on which I have cumulatively consumed the most content in my lifetime. But now I try to make the rest of the stories I read as diverse as possible, spending about an hour with the paper, over the course of which time I will periodically take small sips of my coffee. I will then spend some time gazing at all the pretty people coming in and out of the cafe and at the lovely reddish brown bricks of the “Eden Flats” across the street and the Federation Home next door, which like 32.3% of free-standing homes in Australia, has a gorgeous row of solar panels on its roof, and I will feel pretty good about things. But then, I will look at the front page of the copy of that day’s Sydney Morning Herald, which someone has left on the table next to me, and compare it to what I have just read in the Times, and then other feelings will begin to be stirred, uncomfortable feelings, and I will return to the piece of reflective nonfiction writing I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks in an effort to try to make sense of them.

When I first started coming to this cafe in the weeks after I crash-landed back in Australia, it was refreshing to sit here and read the Herald and let the relatively benign discourse of Australian politics wash over me like a cool breeze after absorbing myself in the flaming cauldron of US politics for the previous year. It was nice to be back in a country where a conservative head of government could lose an election and unreservedly concede defeat as soon as the result became clear, and then three days later the new prime minister, a fresh-faced 58-year-old with a little white dog with floppy ears, could be sworn in at a totally uneventful ceremony. It was heart-warming to discover that most of Australia had gotten behind Albo, as he is affectionately referred to by the public and news media, even those who didn’t vote for him (with Albo’s approval rating as of December 2022 standing at 63 points, a full 21 points higher than Biden’s). It was a relief to be in a country where the opposition leader, although Voldemort-like in appearance, is not quite Voldemort-like in his politics.

It was a relief to be back in a country where normie voters are motivated by rational self-interest, where they generally believe in science and trust experts, and where government agencies are consequently able to appropriately respond to health emergencies, reflected in the fact that 98% of Australian adults are fully vaccinated against Covid and as at December 2022 there had been only 17,000 Covid-related deaths in the country (less than one fifth of the number in the US on a per capita basis). It had a calming effect to be back in a country that after a single mass shooting in 1996 enacted some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and as a result in the past 26 years has had only three shootings that have killed more than five people and zero that have killed more than eight. It was faith-restoring to be back in a country where rather than figuring out how to restore rights that have just been taken away and protect what is left, the biggest current national conversation is around enshrining additional rights in the Constitution, specifically the right for indigenous Australians to have permanent representation in the parliament through a parliamentary advisory body. It was also reassuring with respect to what liberal democracies are capable of to be in a city where homelessness has actually halved in the past five years and where only 269 people per night have to sleep in shelters, a figure that is less than one-hundredth of the equivalent number in New York on a per capita basis. It was a relief to make it through a whole week without taking any Xanax pills after taking at least one half-milligram square every day for the previous year and to discover that I’m not actually addicted to benzos. It was just the city I was living in and the demands it was placing on my soul and nervous system.

It was so refreshing, reassuring, faith-restoring, calming and such a relief to be back in Sydney. But then all of these unfamiliar, mildly pleasant emotions faded away, leaving a vacuum. And then the vacuum was filled by boredom, and then by despair. Because as much as I know I shouldn’t miss New York, I still do.

There are things that I unequivocally do not miss about New York. I do not miss waking past Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment every day and feeling the urge to kidnap Darren Star and feed him to the homeless population of Washington Square Park. But I do miss seeing the Ukrainian flag in the window of the flat below Carrie’s, the one where the sexy, noisy neighbor lived. And I miss the other fifty or so Ukrainian flags I’d see just in the windows of apartments and businesses in the West Village alone, and every time I looked up 8th Ave seeing the top of the Channel 3 building lit up in the colors of Ukraine (even a year on from the start of the war). Because I miss living in a city where people, even some rich white people, seem to care about things.   

Last year the world was able to watch the greatest story of our lifetimes unfolding in real time. But it does not seem like many of the easy-breezy folk in Australia were even tuning in or, if they were, then they quickly tuned out. I have not seen a single Ukrainian flag flying in the window of an Australian residence or commercial property since I returned. I appreciate that the extent to which a public cares about an issue cannot be gauged by the number of flags hanging in windows alone (and Australians are generally not a flag-flying bunch) but I’d say a fairer gauge is the nature of the stories that dominate the news media, the purpose of which is to sell content and thus is naturally responsive to what makes the population tick. The question of what the population of Sydney cares about was answered on Christmas Day when almost the entire front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, also a national paper of record, was taken up by the story of a QF 1 flight (Qantas, Sydney to London) having to make an emergency landing after experiencing a minor engine fault in Azerbaijan, causing 300 perfectly safe and uninjured passengers to nearly miss Christmas (before another flight came to pick them up). Contrast this with the same day’s Times, which devoted a full fifty percent of its front page to Ukraine-related coverage (“Central African State as a Vassal State of the Kremlin” above “Defying the Darkness of War with the Lightness of Hope”) and a divergence between the interests and values of the two target audiences becomes apparent.

Even the Australian edition of the international liberal news media juggernaut The Guardian had the story concerning unharmed Qantas passengers almost missing Christmas at the top the Australian edition of its website. And it was not the only time in the past month that a Qantas plane experiencing a minor mechanical issue was given such high billing, with a January 18th headline reading, “Qantas plane from Auckland lands safely in Sydney after issuing mayday call”. Perhaps these stories hit such a nerve with the Australian public because of how central the values of safety and leisure are to the Australian identity, with both of these qualities being symbolized by the airline marketed as the “Spirit of Australia”. As highlighted by Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, “Qantas never crashed”, being the only major airline to be able to claim this and also having been consistently awarded as the world’s safest airline. And so perhaps on a symbolic level, the national airline’s semblance of invincibility explains the reason why any minor risk to the safe landing of a Qantas flight is received by even the most progressive of Australian newsreaders as a direct threat to the imperviousness of their safe, perfect little bubble to the hardships and dangers that affect the rest of the world, and their own sense of untouchable seclusion. But it does not justify the preponderance of uninspired Australia-centric content across the full spectrum of Australian news media, which I found so upsetting that I had to toggle the version of The Guardian on all my devices from “Australia'' back to “International” so I would not have to urge to book another one-way ticket out of here every time I mindlessly flicked onto the app, and now I once again know virtually nothing about what is happening in this country.

Yet based on education statistics alone, you wouldn’t expect the average Australian to be unworldly or unintellectual. Approximately 60 percent of the population here over the age of 25 are university graduates, as opposed to 34.3 percent in the United States. This disparity is likely related to the lower socio-economic barriers to gaining a university degree in Australia, since the government pays the majority of the fees for your first degree (or, if like me, you are fortunate enough to achieve a place in a double-degree program, they pay for most of your first two degrees). Additionally, the government pays a ‘study assistance’ allowance of $300 per week for full-time students and gives loans to students for the fees that are payable on an interest-free basis with repayments automatically taken out of a debtor’s salary once it reaches a certain level through the taxation system. While Australia is a generally well-educated nation, this is particularly true for Randwick North, where the percentage of degree holders rises to over 70%. And yet, try to talk to most people from even this sample about anything outside of the topics of property prices, property renovations, coffee orders, holiday plans, the weather, their boring jobs and the details of their interchangeable children’s inconsequential lives, and eyes will glaze over like the frozen screen of a computer that has received an input fundamentally incompatible with its OS. This is a problem when your own personal repertoire of conversation topics only extends to Ukraine, global warming, American politics, veganism and animal rights, Dostoevsky, New York, Jude the fluffy white dog and personal trauma, which leaves little common ground on which to connect and results in a lot of conversations about New York and Jude the dog. 

My self-admittedly bratty dissatisfaction with being back in a safe, warm paradise filled with people that are less than exciting to be around was validated by a visit on my mother’s recent birthday to Sydney’s main art gallery, which has just had a new wing open that was trumpeted by The Guardian as “the city’s most significant arts venue since the Opera House”. I tried to enjoy the museum for what it is and did genuinely love the vast and slightly creepy exhibition hall that was originally a World War Two-era oil storage facility and has now been rechristened as “the Tank ''. But I still couldn’t help but shed a tear for the many aesthetically-catalyzed moments of spiritual transcendence I experienced at the Met and the MOMA and the Guggenheim and the Whitney and the Frick… and the New and the Neue and the Noguchi. There are no moments of spiritual transcendence to be had at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

At the birthday lunch, I got to talking with one of my mother’s eccentric friends who is Polish and had just returned from an extended trip to Europe. I asked him how it felt to be back in Australia and he responded that it felt like stepping through a portal and entering a parallel universe where the past three years just didn’t happen and everything was totally fine. “Like being on an episode of The X-Files?” I asked him. “Totally” he responded. I felt seen.

Jumping to another 90s reference, the Pleasantville-like existence led by many in Australia (and particularly in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney) might sound idyllic, and if you are the type of person who wants the limited interval of time you have between birth and death to be as bland and unchallenging as possible, then it is. But if you’re more like me or my mother’s Polish friend, sometimes you just want to shake people on the street while yelling at them, “don’t you realize that this happy-go-lucky thing you think is life is just not it? Don't you ever wonder what it must be like to feel something?”  But then you realize that idea would involve actually touching those people, and so you quickly drop it and return to your state of quiet contemptuousness. 

It might make me selfish, it might make me a masochist, it might make me a generally terrible person, but I miss being in a city where the chaos and tumult of my interior world was mirrored by the chaos and tumult of my surroundings. I miss being in a city where the public expression of human emotion has been normalized and no one scolds you for talking animatedly on the phone while walking along a busy sidewalk. I miss deliberating with a handsome stranger while walking along a busy subway station concourse as to whether the row of human excrement we serendipitously both just passed could have been intended as a public art installation. I miss talking to my personal trainer, who was also a professional cartoonist and published author, about Proust and our respective childhood traumas between sets. I miss overhearing conversations about internal family systems therapy at the pool. I miss seeing my therapist, who was also a portrait painter, and had run away to New York from somewhere in the United States when he was a young gay man and now owns a house in the Catskills. I miss being in a city full of crazy, beautiful, brilliant people, where none of these qualities is a social disqualifier. 

I miss not having to deal with “tall poppy syndrome”, which is the main drawback of living in an egalitarian utopia. If Australian society is a poppy field, then tall poppy syndrome refers to the socially mandated practice of cutting the head off any poppy that dares to grow above the height of the rest. If you do too poor a job of minimizing yourself in Australia and accidentally cause an Australian to admire something about you then, at best, this will cause them to completely ignore you while thinking to themselves, “what, does he think he’s special or something”. At worst, they’ll go out of their way to effect your complete social annihilation. 

By way of contrast, in New York if someone admires something about you, they’ll tell you exactly what that thing is and how much they love it, ask for your social media details and then send you DMs inviting you to their and their friends’ parties. The practice of being stopped and complimented by strangers on the street in New York is something I found disconcerting at first. In Australia, it has happened that strangers have yelled things at me while I have been walking along minding my own business, but the content of such yelling has always been exclusively disparaging. The most inventive drive-by heckle I received was after I bleached my hair and someone who I assume was a tradesperson because he was driving a pick-up truck drove past me and yelled, “you got silver hair, ya dickhead!” so I yelled back at him, “I know! Help me, please!” He just carried on driving. 

But in New York, when strangers yelled things at me they were always nice. I didn’t get as many unsolicited compliments as Jude, but I still got enough to compensate for my complete lack of genuine self-esteem. One time a group of sixteen year old girls outside a high school on West 30th Street yelled out “you’re hot!” in unison. It made my day. Another time, a man smoking a spliff on 8th Avenue cocked his head to the side and nodded approvingly at my limited edition white and red Comme des Garçons sneakers and told me, “those are some fly kicks”. For the next five minutes, it felt like I was physically levitating, if only by half an inch. I know I should be a self-contained adult who is beyond the need for external validation through compliments, but I do not think that is ever going to be a realistic possibility for me. And by the end of my time in New York, I too became a person who yelled compliments at people I had never met, because I realized it did not cost me a thing to share a positive thought about someone else that had already formed in my mind only for the purpose of encouraging them to feel good about themselves, a habit I of course discontinued immediately after I returned to Australia.

I would be lying if I said I did not also miss random, anonymous encounters of a slightly less innocent nature. Between walking Jude to and from Washington Square Park in the morning and along the Hudson Riverfront as the sun was setting in the evening, as well as my daily visits to at least one and sometimes up to three of the Equinox locations in the area bounded by Houston Street, 34th Street and 5th Avenue, in any given day my eyes would meet those of at least ten men that I wanted to sleep with and up to twenty that wanted to sleep with me. I never let those little sparks of electricity lead to anything else, but it was nice to know that the potential was there. Without potential, life becomes something very close to death.

In Sydney, the most attention I get on a regular basis is from female Pilates instructors making adjustments with their very soft hands to my almost bare torso while neglecting the other students in the class, who clearly require their assistance more than I do. I usually have the steam room in the gym to myself, in which case I’ll unconsciously start singing showtunes, and when I am joined by someone it will invariably be a dad in a pair of speedos who will insist on talking to me about his children, with whom there will be a not inconsiderable chance that I went to the same school. Occasionally, I will see a homosexual man walking on the street who I find physically attractive, but I know that on the off chance he feels the same way about me, if I were to open my mouth and a sentence longer than five words were to come out it would be an instant boner killer for him. In New York, when I started speaking, guys would want to sleep with me even more. It was mind-blowing. And while I understand that a desire to constantly come into contact with attractive people who want to sleep with oneself is not the most legitimate reason to want to live in one particular city over another, I would also not say that it’s the least legitimate reason.  

I also miss New York for reasons that are less reflective of my own subjective deficiencies and more of the city’s objective virtues. I miss its diversity. I miss its color. I miss being educated on the history of African drumming on the subway and being taken to church by drag queen Kamilla Kockman doing an Aretha Franklin medley at my favorite neighborhood drag bar. I miss hearing different languages spoken in the streets, particularly Spanish (in any part of the city) and Yiddish (when in Brooklyn). New York might be a melting pot that’s a little overheated and sometimes looks like it might even boil over, but at least it’s still a melting pot. Sydney is more like a breakfast buffet with some vibrant and nourishing foreign cuisine and indigenous dishes at the very end but with most of the prime real estate taken up by different kinds of white bread and flavorless condiments.

Racism is obviously a significant problem in the United States, and I could not confidently claim that Australia is a more racist country than America. But I also could not confidently claim it’s less racist. It’s differently racist. It’s more quietly racist. So quiet is the racism that as a white-skinned person, you would not realize how racist it actually is until you go and live somewhere like New York and then come back to the Eastern Suburbs and every morning pass maybe a hundred people walking along the coast and getting on and off of buses and lining up for takeaway coffees, not a single one of them being a person of color, and you ask yourself, “who are all these white people? Where did they all come from? Why are they all essentially the same person? Where are all the actual people?” 

And then you remember that there are people in Sydney who are not white, but they all live in the other part of the city, the part which does not have charming heritage-listed villages and beautiful beaches. You wonder why that is, but then you remember reading about a handsome Black barista from London being fired not long ago from a cafe just up the road because of the color of his skin, with his manager explaining to him, “you know how Bondi is, the locals are a bit racist”. And then you remember the tweet that Azealia Banks posted last month, where she wrote that Australia “makes me utterly miserable and I’m too black and beautiful to have a bunch of white people in my face playing with me over their WEAK ASS CURRENCY.” But then you also remember that Azealia Banks once posted to Instagram a video of her digging up her own dead cat and cooking it in what looked like a broth in a big pot on a stove, and then accused everyone of racism who questioned whether she had in fact eaten the cat she had just broadcast herself cooking, explaining that it was actually a DIY taxidermy project. And then you consider that perhaps what Azealia Banks posts on social media should, just like soup, be taken with a grain of salt. And then you remember that Azealia Banks is from New York. I miss New York. 

I miss so many things about it. I miss spending most of my time on my own without ever feeling lonely. I miss the city being my friend. I miss not feeling like a freak or an alien.

I miss my heart filling with music every time I walked out of the front door and the feeling that I had just stepped into a city-sized stage of a Broadway musical. I miss every day feeling special. I miss feeling special. And hopeful.

I miss feeling. I’ve read that one of the main issues with taking crystal meth regularly is that one hit produces more serotonin than ten orgasms, and so once you have been using for a while and then stop, nothing will ever feel profound or exciting in comparison. And so I've come to the conclusion that if New York were a drug, it would be meth. And Sydney would be camomile tea.

But the thing I miss most is my little man, my life companion, my Northern Star. I miss putting him in his backpack carrier and taking him on the subway to Central Park on the mornings we woke up early enough to make it for off-leash hours. I miss going clothes shopping with him and taking him to my beloved CVS on 8th Ave and to Trader Joe’s on 6th Ave, and eating with him in the sukkah of the cafe at the end of our street, where every waiter was an aspiring musical theater actor and would individually come up to our table to pet Jude and flirt with me. I appreciate that it might not be strictly legal to take a dog into all those places, but no one in New York has the time or energy to care about a dog being inside a commercial premise, especially when the dog is as cute and fluffy as Jude and his head is sticking out of a backpack carrier that was clearly designed for a much smaller dog. Rather than telling us off, the staff at Trader Joe’s would ask to take selfies with him. If you tried to take a dog into a supermarket in Australia, a siren would immediately go off and the authorities would appear to confiscate the dog and take the owner into indefinite custody. Australia is less like the land of the free than it is like a nanny state, a country even richer in rules and regulations - that are always strictly and rigidly enforced - than it is with coal and iron ore, and where the citizenry are treated like children and seem to generally prefer it that way, an attribute which does have its pros as well as its cons.

I miss taking him to Fire Island. I miss picking him up from his minder on East 30th Street and his groomer on West 25th Street, and how for the first few blocks he would continuously look back at me to check that I was still there. I miss drinking White Claws and dancing with him to Whitney Houston in my apartment before I would go out. I miss having the most completely nonsensical, doomed-from-the-start experience of my life and sharing it with my very best Judy.  

But Jude is fine. While I am sorting the mess of my life out, he is enjoying a very extended vacation in Los Angeles. As Johnny Depp and Amber Heard discovered when they fell afoul of Australian dog import regulations while trying to smuggle two little dogs in on a private jet and were almost imprisoned, Australia takes the task of protecting its status as a disease-free fortress island very seriously. While taking a dog into the US is cheap and painless, bringing one back is a six-month, $10,000 ordeal (and that’s in actual dollars, rather than the cheaper Australian variety) that starts with something called a “rabies neutralizing antibody titer test” (that is in addition to a rabies vaccine) 180 days before departure, and ends with at least ten days in a quarantine facility in Melbourne (for the dog). 

Had I known I was coming back to Australia six months ago, I would have had the titer test done and started the rest of the process then, Jude and I would already be united and I would not still be listening to “Easy on Me” every single day. But the decision to return was made only three weeks before I boarded the plane, at the point at which it appeared to be the only conceivable option still open to me to avoid some even greater peril, since for all intents and purposes, it seemed like somewhere between Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, London, Mykonos, New York and Montreal, I had lost my mind. And there’s not much one can do without one of those, other than returning to “Go” without collecting $200. But fortunately, I have a brother who is a musician and lives in LA, and he kindly offered to look after Jude while the fluffy one completed his waiting period and the remaining tests, treatments and examinations required as part of the 16-step process mandated by the Australian Government Department of Depriving Single Gay Males with Mental Health Issues of their Only Source of Joy and Comfort.   

Equally fortunate is that Jude does not share my personal aversion to Los Angeles. The last time I was in LA was to pick him up in March 2022, since I did not want him to make the entire 21-hour trip from Sydney to New York, which involves a layover in LA in any case, by himself. After collecting him from the Qantas freight terminal at LAX, we remained in the City of Angels for three days to give him a chance to stretch his legs and get used to the dogs in America. When we returned back to New York, it was thirty degrees colder than in Culver City (an area of LA in which I chose to stay because of its proximity to the airport and possession of a well-reviewed dog park and Equinox gym), but so relieved was I to get away from all the motor vehicles, bad architecture and insincerity of La La Land that I nearly cried when we got out of the Lyft at Chelsea. There were also tears of anticipatory joy at the thought of showing Jude around his new home and of what I dreamed our life there could become. Now there are also tears, but they are made of more bitter stuff, or they would be if I was not once again taking psychiatric medication that cuts weepy nostalgia from my range of available emotions.

I’m still not sure if New York brought out the best of me or the worst, and as such whether it would even be advisable for me to ever go back. None of that really matters, since I could not really afford New York last year, or at least not the way I was doing it, and I certainly cannot afford it now. Yet, if I would have played my cards differently, this problem could have been solved before it arose. I could have done a much better job at being Anna Delvey (or Andre Delvey, as the case would have been) than Anna Sorokin did, since most people I met in New York assumed I had a trust fund without my having ever said anything to give them that impression. I suppose it is not an unreasonable assumption to make of a 31-year-old staying on their own in a nice apartment for a seemingly indefinite period of time in the most expensive part of the most expensive city in the world, especially when that person has no discernible occupation and spends the majority of their time walking their dog and going to the gym. I am also much better looking than Anna Sorokin, or so I would be led to believe by the unsolicited feedback I have received on that matter by most of the gay men, many of the straight women, some of the straight men and even a couple of the lesbians of New York. I also had too much of a conscience to go along with or exploit the falsehood of my ostensible trustafarian lifestyle. But although the truth as to what I was doing in New York is much less glamorous than Anna’s fabricated narrative, it is also a much more interesting story.

The long of this story is very long, and will require several volumes to tell properly. But the short of it is as follows. At the start of the pandemic, I quit my job because I was being bullied out by one of the partners at the recruitment agency at which I worked, having been the second of a string of consultants that left in similar circumstances. But I still had to keep a roof over my and Jude’s heads and so, not perceiving any other options in a frozen job market, I started my own company doing what I was doing before, something that brings me absolutely no joy, which is headhunting corporate lawyers. And then to my surprise, Bookatz Consulting brought in $700,000 (Australian) of commissions in its first twelve months.

A less happy surprise was that one year in I had blown a large proportion of the profits on extravagances that included multiple Paul Smith suits (that I never had the chance to wear in Australia due to a lack of demand for face-to-face meetings during the worst infectious disease pandemic of our lifetimes) and a Mariah Carey-themed birthday party (after the lifting of lockdown restrictions) that I spent $25,000 on. But then, at almost precisely the one-year mark, I decided that I'd had enough of Australia, enough of corporate lawyers and HR managers and enough of accumulating pointless but beautiful things that no one around me could appreciate, and so I fled the country to blow the rest of the cash in various locations around the world.

The reason that after seven almost nonsensical months of sort-of being based in New York I ended up migrating (legally) to French Canada was because I did not see any appeal in playing border control roulette at JFK for a sixth time, and as it turns out, Canada will give anyone a 2 year working holiday visa as long as they are under 35 and a citizen of one of a list of 37 countries that are as diverse as Chile, South Korea and Australia. And as a result of the extremely lax border restrictions between the US and its northern neighbor, I was able to drive myself, Jude and the possessions I had accumulated (including a number of cherished houseplants that was under the legal maximum you can bring, which is fifty) up to Canada in a Uhaul truck. The Quebecois border officers did not even look inside my Uhaul, or ask for any paperwork for Jude, who was sitting next to me in the cabin for the duration of the seven-hour drive like the good boy that he is, so I could have been bringing 100 semi-automatic weapons with me, 5 tonnes of cocaine and a dog positively overflowing with rabies. I wasn’t, obviously.

Yet after the successful border crossing, as soon as I unloaded the Uhaul and began to settle in Le-Plateau-Mont-Royal and it became apparent that my new adopted home was not in reality a Valhalla populated by characters exclusively cut from the same cloth as either Celine Dion, Justin Trudeau, Leonard Cohen or the drag queen Giselle Lullaby, the psychological, spiritual and existential breakdown I’d been putting off for four years began to set in motion. From the moment I arrived in Quebec, it was a three-month downward spiral, a deterioration of all kinds that started slow but then accelerated dramatically on the day the first six of Montreal’s 83 annual inches of snow fell in one go, right at the time that my bank account balance was dwindling to zero. And then one afternoon I found myself trying to climb over the suicide prevention barrier of the Jacques Cartier Bridge and before I knew it, I was being taken to the Jewish General Hospital (having requested the nice police officers take me there, despite it being on the other side of the city, as opposed to the goyish facility called Notre Dame that was around the corner), and being strapped into a gurney by the first properly fuckable monsieur I had seen over the course of my entire stay in Montreal. And then three weeks later, I was on an Air Canada flight to LA (with Jude in the hold) and two days after that, I was on another flight back to where I started.

Perhaps if I had been the exact same person but born fifty years earlier, it would have been possible for me to lead the romantic life of an impoverished homosexual artist living in New York, like Andrew Holleran or Robert Mapplethorpe. The question of whether I would have achieved their success is an open one, but at least I would have had a chance at happiness. There is nothing romantic or commendable about being poor and gay in New York in 2023. Having to live off less than an annual six-figure sum, after taxes, today means sharing an apartment in an outer borough and cooking your own meals. And having found being a full-time flaneur in New York stressful enough, I do not think I could survive having an actual job there, especially not one that involved having a boss. Capitalism is obviously a big, ugly scam but it’s the least horrible system for ensuring that millions of humans can more or less peacefully coexist that we have come up with. And if I’m going to have to participate in capitalism because of failure to be rescued from its rules by my “art”, then I’d rather participate in the less ruthless, fairer, more forgiving version practiced in Australia, where the weather is also nicer.

So it seems that when all is said and done, the only option I am left with is to acknowledge that where I am is home, and to accept that I am not special and that life is not a Broadway musical. It is a series of sunrises, and the sound of waves lapping against a big, wet rock while the pages of another day are turned over.