Freeze Time, Free Time, and Times Square...

I had this moment over the weekend.

I'm going to meet Blythe an hour earlier than the party called for. The plan was for us to catch up before social obligation called me elsewhere. Blythe tells me she's running late.

I decide to leave at the appointed time anyway. What the hell, I'll walk around a bit.

Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to walk around Times Square. This is a problem on multiple levels.

1--Even when it's cold, Times Square is fucking crowded.

2--It was a beautiful day.

3--It was a weekend.

It reminded me of the worst traffic jams that would happen at Kingwood High. Usually because some idiot couple was busy making out and held up all the works.

Times Square itself is that annoying couple that holds up the works. It is busy seducing everyone who sees it for the first time.

It got me the first time I saw it. I'll admit to it, yeah. There's something impressive about something so overwhelmingly...bright. That's really the only way to describe it. Bright light not from anything natural or visceral, the light that comes from the driving force of technology and commercialism. It is a huge gust of wind and it will knock you flat on your ass if you let it, but like all things in nature or un-nature, there's a certain amount of respect to be paid to it.

I'm not in a rush. There's no reason I should let the standard New York reaction to the tourists bug me. I've got an hour to kill. Time to slow the pace down a bit.

People are yelling. They are trying to hand me things: this restaurant, this other club, strip club, free cell phones. I shake my head. I don't want any of it.

It is chaos, chaos, chaos. People are beat-boxing for change. Men in Hawaiian shirts stop to stare at pretty women as their wives smack their arms for even the hint of letting this place seduce them into something different from where they came from and who they were there.

For a brief moment, the noise subsides and I hear a band playing Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair."

It reminds me of my mom. They always do.

And to hear something so peaceful and haunting in the midst of everything that could be considered the opposite of it brought a sense of calm to me. Someone could have blown a building up in front of me and I would have cocked my head to the side and looked at the grisly scene as if someone had just placed an exotic entree in front of me that I had never tried.

It was the easiest I had felt in my own company in a long time.