A week in the life of me and NYC

Oh New York...

The love/hate relationship I have with that city just grows more confusing every time I visit.

This time I was travelling for a courier race, Monster Track. A huge scary beast of a race. It was also a great excuse to hang out with all the people I'd met in New York working in 2006.
Everyone I know there is amazing. It's that simple. Good people who opened their arms to me. The place on the other hand...

Don't get me wrong, I love Brooklyn. Fucking A1 love it. Manhattan though... it makes me angry, frustrated, lonely, bitter. I really don't like Manhattan. Sure there's sooooooooo much to do there, but at what cost!? Racing and dicking around on my bike in Manhattan is one of the most unique and fun experiences I've ever had, but working on the bike there is a different story. It's a hard, lonely, painful job, with little reward. I think this is why the community is so strong there. Really if they weren't so tight I think they'd all go crazy. It would certainly make the job a lot more difficult. I have a lot of respect for full-time messengers in New York.

I flew into JFK amidst the 1st big snow of the year. I don't know how we landed, but we were stuck on the runway for over 2 hours... this was extremely not fun... at all... Then hauling my bike bag through the snow to get a cab to Brooklyn. Fuck the subway, i was tired, hungry, and most importantly, thirsty. To the Levee!!! The barman was nice enough to let me build up my bike inside, so I got a little tipsy while doing that... then people started arriving and my heart was aglow. I was so surprised at how many people rode out in that shitty snow to come say hi, it was really sweet. To celebrate this fact I propmptly got shit-faced, started an argument and... well I don't really remember much after that point. Ah! You've gotta love the Irish.

Thus began a week of couch surfing, bike riding, being smelly, awkward situations, extreme drunkenness, loving, hating, not really sleeping... you get the picture...

Monster Track itself was extremely fun. My self-preservation instincts kicked in and told me I didn't really want to go careening around Manhattan with all this ice around. And I listened. A DFL team of like-minded individuals was assembled and we decided to race together at our own pace and basically get drunk while doing it. We found it a bit difficult to go slow really so we decided to abandon the race after the first section and hang out at the Trackstar checkpoint. This was a sweet choice as the shop was crowded and all the racers had to come in and sign 666 on their asses before they could move on.

Once the race was over we rolled over the Williamsburgh Bridge to Brooklyn for the after party. I'm not a huge fan of these things as they generally end in a fight, specially in this city where a lot of people take these races WAY too seriously. Put a lot of really drunk messengers together for a few hours and it's really not a pretty sight, so I took off and went to another bar for a more civilised drink. Don't get me wrong, I still love all these people, it's just that sometimes it's better to bow out gracefully and live to fight/drink/cycle/whatever another day.

Ok, let's call this a part one, it's getting long, and I know how easily distracted I am...