The Jungle Doodle

I was thinking about the city as a jungle. On Facebook, I talked with a woman who chided me for labeling the office a "nice jail." She told me that the office has its uses, and she's right. The office, during my working life, was the jungle where things got sorted out. And I gained a lot from knowing how to maneuver in the office.

The anonymity of a huge city like New York is often presented as a negative... and it is... but it is also a positive. A guy with good tech skills can't be blacklisted. There's always another employer. Nobody knows you. You have the freedom to try out some things about sex that you might prefer not to have broadcast around your little home town out in the Styx.

I liked being out all night in NYC, and I often worked the midnight shift. The city becomes quiet. Only the maintenance and critical workers venture out. I could drive my car right up to the skyscraper where I worked and park.

I spent my life in such great cities, primarily Chicago, San Francisco and New York City.

It was a great adventure. If it were possible, I would have spent all my adult life in any one of those towns. It seems to me sometimes as if I have done everything and been everywhere. 

Comments

[Dad Bones]

Your wide ranging experiences in the jungle far exceed mine but I did have a job delivering the Chronicle in San Francisco. I would pick up my papers in front of Cecil Williams' Glide Memorial Church about 4:00 A.M. and deliver them to apartment and hotel dwellers in the Tenderloin with my '49 Dodge pickup. I did my own collecting so I got to meet all of my customers plus the working girls, hustlers, drunks, drag queens and other jungle life that could be seen at that time of day. I'm glad I did it. I had a huge key ring to get me into those old buildings and rode in a lot of creaky ancient Otis elevators and walked down many drab hallways smelling of early morning toast and coffee.

[Howlin' Steve]

That's a great story, Dad Bones.

Right out of Raymond Chandler.