observe, the rain which washes the new york streets of crime and the scum who thrive on it. lightning and thunder sent by a just god, smiling on the righteous, who laugh from our high apartments and hotel rooms. o but what a sight! what a time to be alive! i saw 3 hobo corpses, but i couldn't take a picture through the white men in suits who were gathered around them and hollering and celebrating and holding their 100$ bills to the sky. 30 years since travis bickle fortold of such a great flood, here i am, watching, smiling and drinking this cool, refreshing martini. i can hear him laughing in heaven, and i laugh with him. the new york streets are louder than ever before, howls of sinners shred through by the thunder of the mortality they so squandered. such luck i was here to see this! everyone back home will go apeshit!

vvvv

imagine synth brass and slap bass plunking around

i could be literally anyone here, but i'm not, it's really me, at the diner from seinfeld!!! wahey!!!!

pfft

today was rubbish. i'm too sweaty and lonely to try and be funny. hopefully tomorrow i'll get some pep and write about it, some good stuff did happen. i got a nice shirt. spending way too much time on the internet.

i might go down to the cafe from seinfeld later, i'll post a pic.

day 2 continued

jesus christ the portions are so fucking huge here, even though very few people in new york seem to be obese. we went to mcdonalds at the top of macy's yesterday, holy shit, i totally forgot how huge everything is. our large is their regular, and their large is a fucking bucket. i don't think super size exists anymore, but wuttttt how can they do it to themselves. i know i'm nay but a waif but i can eat like any good fatty and it was far far too much. maybe the strain of maintaining such a serious unhappy face all the time helps them sweat it out. i just had a bacon cheeseburger at "big nick's" just a minute away, it was massive, a generous fist of pig and cow to stew with the chicken down in my magic tummy. i wanted to have pie and ice cream for dessert, thanks jack kerouac, but i couldn't even, so disappointing. the menu is fucking insane too, 24 pages of this:















holy shit, i didn't even notice that turkey burger til now. a pound of turkey meat, that's masochistic. kitchen nightmares taught me that probably 80% of the stuff on a menu this huge is festering in tupperware waiting to be reheated, but, they deliver for free! steaks and shit! which is fucking amazing, what a good idea.

so anyway yada yada i seperated from my family in times square and went for a walk. i should mention i stayed in times square before so like this was maybe the 8th time i'd been around it and i'm pretty sick of it by now, especially all the people. so many people. so all i did was head to this comic book shop i went to last time, now i'm a bit more clued up on comics i found some really cool books, i totally jewed out though. "20$???" complete with the ol eyebrow raise. i think i'm gunna go back and buy a couple of these anthology books, syncopated they're called. i googled the name and this http://syncopatedjottings.blogspot.com/ is the only relevant thing really. anyway they were cool. there was a fat dude in the adult comics section upstairs too, fat guys browsing porn is always gets a chortle.




















here are 0.001% of the wonderful ppl in times sq. just imagine being hot and sweaty and that there's this unplaceable unpleasant smell all around. fat people reading this won't need to imagine, lol, jk.

so yeah, i saw up, holy shit. another great pixar adventure, and though i'd definitely say the beginning half hour or so is much better than the rest, it's probably only because the beginning is so good. touching. pixar are well safe. it was in 3d too which is always cool. i guess you dorks back home will have to wait til cocktober to find out for yourselves, hahahahaha. they showed the teaser trailer for toy story 3 too, fuck year. the jokes in it were pretty corny though so i hope the actual film is better. oh shit, that old bitch is on the tv. i've totally forgotten her name. joan rivers. she probably made a joke about her old vagina, what a gas, women everywhere feel that beat in your chest, that's empowerment.


















seeing that scene in 3d was fuckin badass.

so yeah after that we got back on the ol A train to 79th, back to the hotel. look at me, talking like a regular joe, like one of them. brilliant. sitting here by the loud as fuck air conditioner proud as pie in my mj t, tim's watching john stewart, these jokes are totally going over my head. i think that's it for the day's events, i'm sure there's anecdotes i've told myself to remember and have totally forgotten. it's not pathetic that i make sure to remember things that are happening while they happen so that i can tell people about it. experiencing it is just not enough.

the conversations with my family are getting easier. all is well. hitting the guggenheim tomorrow, then meeting aohan. should be cool. wish u were here. x

day 2 7pm

midnight back home. seinfeld is on, it's still relevant over here. i even saw an advert for it on a bus stop. you know it finished 12 years ago? sad. so i woke up around 9 in my underwear lying next to my brother. in fact i woke up at one point during the night and my knee was touching his leg, it was so creepy. speaking of which, i got a nice MJ tribute tee today, a black medium number with a collage of moments from his whirlwind career and the dates of his birth and death on it. it looks like the print will come off if i ever try to wash it, but i would never wash it anyway, it has a part of his soul in it.




















i don't know what those two fingers touching are from, isn't that ET? it guess i could say its because he TOUCHED me, LOL!

it was raining like shit all day today, it still is i think. so fuck muggy, i think it's meant to stay now, i hope i don't slip on wet pavement and crack my head open. first we went to the rockefeller plaza. first stop - NINTENDO WORLD. i looked for a piece of clothing which wouldn't make me look like a guy who goes shopping with his mum in bexleyheath, couldn't find one. they had toy pikmins and link from wind waker though, which was funny. i played frisbee on the new wii sports resort, and sucked at it bad, in front of all the children. they're making such a huge deal about the game, which if you think about it is a full priced version of a game which only sold well because it came free with the wii. nintendo sucks nowadays. i only went so i could look down at all the nerds. but, i did meet rob the robot, and president obama, finding that i only had enough memory on the camera for a picture of one of them.















suck it barack.

then went to the GE building aka 30 rock, didn't see tina fey or alec baldwin, went into the NBC shop, considered buying a seinfeld t shirt, decided against it, tried to book an NBC experience tour but it was all booked for hours so now it's set for friday, great, i get to see some corridors again, went to the met museum shop which is miles away from the actual shop, which is dumb anyway, and like all art gallery shops it was so fucking dull. they always have an air like an ornament shop, so silent and humourless, like all these overpriced books will shatter if someone who isn't into art touches it. suck it, art gallery shops. you're bell ends.

prime burger was an old school new york diner, sort of like the one in seinfeld, sort of like poppins restaurants, if anyone remembers what they were like. like it hadn't been touched since the 70s. everything's brown and brass. since it's so close to the rockefeller and the business district it was full of seriously unfunny new york fellaz in suits, the people that work below the guys in american psycho. seriously, i was sat next to these two guys, and one of them was talking about how he bodyboards and how he went out to the beach with his wife and how his hips are still sore cuz he's never danced so much in his life and how his son is doing tryouts for hockey (no lie) and the other guy was just kinda laughing and asking him questions so he could reel off more bore. the guy who welcomed us was this pretty old black guy with glasses like mine, a streetwise morgan freeman type. all the waiters there were pretty old and pretty gnarled and they were arguing in their concrete and muscles accent, one was called johnny, and they referred to a guy called mike. "classic new york names", i quipped to myself, and smiled my signature wry smile. we ordered from a bricky white guy who was being really nice, which was pretty unnecessary given the forced tip, so it felt good to be welcomed in a city which we are so obviously not from. i got "chicken in a basket", which he said would take 20 minutes, time which they must have used to grab a chicken, inject it with 5 syringes of growth hormones, and stick it in the fryer, since the pieces of chicken i got in the little metal basket were fucking colossal. my family all got little toasted sandwiches, which looked exactly how you'd expect, so i have no idea why they decided that people who ordered chicken would be 20 stone. seriously though, nando's for shame. in hindsight i should have taken a photo, i was too busy stuffing my face tho. they gave me a bun and fries too, which i didn't even look at. so with the mother of a bunch of baby chicks safe in my stomach, i left, and we went for a little stroll. oh, and there was a picture of sarah jessica parker eating there, i don't know for what purpose, but i didn't notice it until we left. had i noticed it before, i wouldn't have been able to eat.

after getting a sickly sweet cookie from this cutesy bakery, we went to the hotel chocolat of new york, a place called godiva. there was a "work available" thing on the door, and standing there in the rain, by NBC studios, i felt my destiny crash down on me from above. i'm emailing my CV when i get back. then we decided we wanted to go see up. the pixar film you know. some creepy igor doorman told us there were cinemas in times square, so, a subway later, we were back amongst the horde. went to AMC, new york city's answer to bexleyheath cineworld, next showing was in 2 hours. after being like "what do we do now lol" i took the opportunity to go off on my own, meet up when the film starts. saying that, we've spent so much time here being like "what do we do now lol". you'd think there's so much to do here in a tourist way but it's mostly just shops and some art galleries. when i was solo so much crazy stuff happened, but we're going out to eat now, i'll write more later. hi lotts!

ps

also, at the risk of sounding like charles, i did actually get really obvious eyes from a girl on the subway, like, it's not even that i wanted it, but i was looking back and everything, holding her gaze, with mum dad and tim standing beside me, all caked in sweat, and i totally pussed out. just to be able to say i talked to a girl on the subway in new york, you know? pathetic victories.

day 1

so i was up all night playing infamous. using the power of evil electricity, i can now glide through the air, grind on anything that is grindable, and summon a gigantic bolt of red lightning to kill mutated junkies. and the game is pretty good too, LOL! since i was doing all that, i didn't sleep, though 10pm/3am matt bird now knows that wasn't smart. still not gunna sleep though, i need to document my day.

blah blah the plane took off at 9:30 am, painless, except for when my mum chose what juice i wanted and kept insisting that i was hungry and giving me tissues when i coughed. i was all like moooooooom! but it didn't stop her emasculating me. since anyone who reads this (me) knows me, it's maybe a moot point to say i'm 21, since nothing i do reflects it, but still. i didn't choose to be such a faggy manchild. anywayz, i watched notorious on the plane, doing my best to enjoy it in a white dude watching a film about gangsta rap sort of way, but it didn't work out. it seemed kind of stupid, he was a dick and sold drugs and cheated on his boo but w/e he became a famous rapper and got a movie made about him, so what do i know. where's my biopic? boring white shut in ages 21 years and remains a boring white shut in. jason biggs plays me, eugene levy plays my dad, but nothing funny happens.

i also watched slumdog millionaire, i thought the kid from skins was a really bad actor, but generally it was a good larf, i can see why danny boyle's mental kid screamed at the baftas.





















the man who made it all possible.

then we got to JFK, some fresh off the boat ukranian guy got us in his taxi and raged his way through tons of honking innocents, frequently driving on 2 lanes and saying how much he hated new york and mentioning the mandatory tips. by the way, fuck mandatory tips, that's bullshit. 20% is insane. i decided before getting here that i was gunna be more outspoken and friendly so i asked him what he thought of brits and he was like "very quiet" and that was it, i kinda laughed, i only really said it because my dad was sitting in the front and saying all this embarrassing polite english stuff, like mentioning that flushing meadows was where they play tennis. i'm pretty sure niko didn't know what tennis was. i didn't really understand him, but i think we bonded. he took us to the fancy milburn hotel on west 76th st, and said "see you tomorrow, ha ha". after a good hearty awkward as fuck group laugh, we parted ways, got our room, went to our room, mum said it smelt, she went back and asked for a different one, theyre like ok, and we got a much better room with a flat screen, where i'm sitting right now. icy.

then we went off to the nearby central park to go see where john lennon got shot. after we'd walked for about 10 minutes i remembered my bag wasnt on my shoulder anymore and i tried to play it cool (in front of my parents) and casually sprinted back to the lobby, which was bad enough in front of all the new yorkers, but it also messed my hair up and i had a middle parting by the time i got to the lobby, i looked so much like the old mr muscle, everybody cared about what i looked like and laughed out loud. my bag was in the room, hahahahaha.


















^ artist's impression of me in the lobby of the milburn hotel @ 3pm

central park is boring, it's fucking humid as shit out here, we went to strawberry fields where some guy shouted about john lennon. my dad was enthralled that strawberry fields was in the shape of a tear. then at the end he said about paying 500$ to get a bench with your name on and passed around a hat. meanwhile, i shot a passing guy with long hair and glasses, but no one got it, except for him, so we went to my old stompin ground, times square, via macy's. macy's is the naffest shop i think ever, so many awful expensive clothes. and i got no eyes from any girl, i don't think they go for skinny nerds in new york, what, i know right, seriously, jesus. it's not like i had much to say to ma and pa so i basically spent the day looking at people while they stared straight forward, or at the nearby dude with the rad tribal tat and bead necklace.















john lennon's ghost must have ghost creamed himself seeing that photo of himself. what a kind sentiment.

so many tourists in times square. foreigners and americans not from new york, all different colours but equally as sweaty and bent as us. squeezed our way through the m&m store, 400$ for a hilarious m&m themed guitar, i can imagine johnny pubes from club sushi laffin away at that shit and then handing over the loot from his jd sports salary. blah blah, loads of people, crappy merchandise for 1000$ a piece, we all stressed the fuck out and went back to the hotel. i'm getting bored of this. basically my family crashed and i spoke openly for the first time in about 30 hours to people online, and at around 10 i went outside for a smoke and walked around, new york is so fucking cool, everyone's just hanging out and laughing, i heard some guys playing basketball in a hall, and a guy was just selling books at a table in the street, 10 at night, books and blues records. i looked through to see if one of the 4 blues men i knew were in there, they weren't, but man. it's good to feel that beautiful buzz of being somewhere different. i kinda wish i had someone to talk to though. my brother is cool, but we're just not like that. that's why i'm writing this inane shit. we look so fucking similar walking around too, it's like the better looking bespectacled chuckle brothers moping around the city but without any of the crazy stuff, only the depressing stuff.















tim mum me in in times square. aren't we wackz?

oh, and i talked to a canadian guy we met in amsterdam, aohan, who is - funnily enough! - sub letting an apartment in the bronx, and we're gunna hang out on wednesday and smoke up and go to the zoo, which is tops really. i'm sure afterwards i'll be brimming with anecdotes, i won't be able to contain myself. tomorrow, who knows. maybe i'll go to another shop or landmark. analplay420 is the only place to find out.

peace to my friends, from new york. x