886, New York
Frustratingly often at the moment my days are filled with a kind of low-level anxiety. Not completely debilitating per se, but most definitely tiresome. I feel it now even as I try and put it into words on a page. But the exact notion of what it is irritatingly hard to pin down.
For the most part it feels like a quest for something that is just out of reach. Potential not let off the leash? Ambitions unfulfilled? I suspect others feel it too.
I have anxious dreams like this sometimes too, ones where my goal is tantalizingly just out of reach. Most often I am running late for a flight and simply can’t cover the ground fast enough to get to the gate on time. Paradoxically, my journey in these dreams never ends, but neither does the plane leave. It is a labyrinth without an end.
In fairness, this is probably a good thing, as when I have these dreams it is invariably my mind playing a neat cognitive alarm that means I very much need to wake up and pee. I have never once reached my seat on the plane in any of these dreams, as my suspicion is that to do so would result in a lot of piss-stained laundry to do the following day.
The easy solve for these tedious dreams is found in the effort of waking up, crossing the corridor to the toilet and relieving myself at a time when I really don’t want to get out of bed. But inevitably this convenient silver bullet is not available for the wearisome anxiousness that plagues the occasional daytime.
As someone who is prone to analysing problems over and over (and over) again, I have tried to rationalize the gloom like a passing raincloud; merely part of the ebb and flow of life. Sometimes it rains, after all. This is a convenient metaphor, but doesn’t always help much in the moment.
Like in my dreams, this daytime anxiety is a quest for something. The holy grail I am seeking could blithely be described as something like contentment, serenity or calm, but more accurately it is a mere moment where your mind is at rest and able to experience the world in real time.
Everyone has, I hope, experienced these bright, sunny moments, where everything just flows and life is mind-bendingly easy. They are not everyday moments, but they do exist, and unlike in the aircraft in my dreams, I sometimes do manage to sit down, buckle in and watch the wheels leave the tarmac. But that is not everyday, and chasing that feeling on the other ones – even if that isn’t a realistic prospect – is, I think, the problem.
This is, I admit, a rather odd way to segue into a story about visiting a restaurant, but hear me out.
As every university student knows, the best nights out are the ones you don’t plan. The ones where a few mates turn up at 7pm for no particular reason and a few hours later you are having the time of your lives and cavorting with traffic cones in a way you never expected to be that much fun. The nights you plan, the ones where you are chasing the feeling but no one is really up for it, or the pub is rubbish, or the club is half empty and the girls uninteresting, are the ones that are a total let down. But you stay out anyway – maybe trying another bar in the hope things will improve – before finally, and much too late, giving in and trundling home with a rotten kebab and a belly full of regret.
By the time you reach your late 30s, planning a night at a nice restaurant is about as close to the feeling of planning a big night out on the town as you’re willing to get. But you go through the same rituals, the same optimism about having a magical evening full of laughter and fun, and the same anxious twitching and regret when it all starts to go a bit wrong.
Having never been to New York – well, apart from the time I choose not to acknowledge when I was there for 14 hours in my early 20s with no money, no clue and was given a severe lesson on the evils of bedbugs – my recent trip there was a classic case of planning the big night out.
In the films and on television, New York often seems totally magical – full of endless possibility and colour and life in a way dreary old London wishes it was. In reality, the New York I visited was, at least before the sun went down, an unrelenting hellscape of filth, tourists, more filth and more tourists. Everywhere I was, the next place I wanted to be way always at least 45 minutes away on the crumbling and filthy (did I mention filthy?) subway. Prices were astronomical, even before the bizarrely mandatory tip. I secretly fantasised about what a restauranteur would do if I didn’t choose to pay this nonsense tax. Surely I could beat a large angry chef in a footrace down the street, even if it was on his own turf?
But I digress. After 7pm, when the sun went down, the city transformed. For one thing, filth is black, making it less obvious when it is dark outside. Plus, it felt like the people who actually lived there woke up to have fun, while all the tourists waddled back to their hotel to rest their aching wallets and feet. Despite being a concrete jungle, people seemed to live on the streets. On stoops, in the packed park near NYU, and in the restaurant and bar tables that inhabited sidewalks (one of the few lasting positives of the COVID epidemic IMHO).
We were in town for a wedding. Actually a rather beautiful one of some friends, who are too good looking and too nice to be real people, but who somehow seem to live and walk the earth much like the rest of us. The impossibly beautiful wedding was held at an impossibly beautiful boathouse in Brooklyn, which was only brought back into the realms of reality by a few light spots of rain, some ominous thunder - charmingly laughed off by the charming groom as a couple of planes - and some drunken hecklers from the other side of the lake, who clearly weren’t invited.
Wedding aside, my plans for New York had inevitably included chasing “only in New York” moments. A walk in central park, eating a slice at night after a show, visiting a proper Jewish deli for chopped liver bagels. That sort of thing. And, for the most part, this had been a stunning success. The one thing that has eluded me up to that point was late night Asian food, set against a backdrop of other post-pub revellers looking to soak up the booze. This may or may not actually be a “New York thing”, but in my head it is, so indulge me for a moment.
The strange thing is, chasing moments generally leads to disappointment. It’s never quite what you imagined, or quite as magical or fun or carefree. This was confirmed when, after the drinks, we sat down at an Italian restaurant for pasta, having not found any Asian spots on Google nearby. It was suitably late, but the food was all wrong. Who eats pasta at 10.30pm on a Friday?
But somehow, and I don’t know how, we found out that a cute Taiwanese spot was just round the corner. Arguably we should have found it earlier given my wife follows them on Instagram, but that is beside the point. So we excused ourselves without ordering from the perfectly acceptable Italian and danced round the corner to 886.
And, strangely enough, it was bang on. A cool retro interior, loads of other post-party revellers, piles of fluffy white rice, and most importantly delicious dark, savoury, Asian dishes to scoop them all up with. It was fun, charming and very New York. Well, at least to this outsider.
It is about this point in a story that I generally search for a moral, or a cheap joke, to try and wrap it all up with a convenient bow. Perhaps harking back to a witticism in the earlier paragraphs, like a poor man’s Dave Chapelle.
But at the moment I don’t really care to make a joke about a Taiwanese restaurant where the punchline is me pissing myself in my dreams. The wistful feeling is still here. The sense of something unfulfilled. It will pass, I’m sure, but thank god for those moments of levity, however and whenever they come.
