Farewell to Babylon...

 "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man..." -- Heraclitus

I am now (right after I post this) on the road.

I am leaving the formerly-beloved city of New York for the sunnier climes (one believes) of North Carolina.

The event prevents something of a conundrum, emotionally.

I am a Native New Yorker, perhaps the last of a Dying Breed: born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, raised in Brooklyn and Staten Island and tempered on the meanest streets there ever were, whether it was the literal battlegrounds of Flatbush or the Serengeti Plain that is Wall Street.

I mourn for this once-great city, where those of us who grew up in it find it becoming less-recognizable by the day. Forever changed by a vast influx of morons vomited up by the waste places of the Earth west of the Appalachians and east of the Rockies and the universities whose intellectual and social horizons shrink and narrow by the hour, and by the vast hoards of The Great Unwashed, people deliberately let into the country to act as coolies for the upper crust and as a life-support system for a professional bureaucracy at the state and federal level.

A veritable swarm of disease-carrying locusts expected to vote, like the people who will soon take advantage of them, for other people who might, on a good day, be able to find their own asses with both hands and a road map.

When they can be bothered to actually do so, that is, seeing as how they spend almost all of their time finding new and exciting ways to destroy everything while profiting from it.

Because "democracy", you see.

I will not miss a city that has had the vitality sucked from it by a certain mindset. There was a time when New York was synonymous with "Can Do"; these days, everything is "Can't Do".

Mostly because "do" manages to offend someone, mostly by reminding the bulk that they are incapable of "do".

I have seen New York at it's best: the spectacular rise from the ashes, the vibrancy of everything one saw, touched or experienced, the thrill of the rush, the rough-and-tumble of daily life.

I have seen it at it's worst: Son of Sam, Blackouts, Blizzards, Race Riots, Mafia Wars, 9/11. 

And even The Worst was seen as nothing more than an obstacle to overcome, eight million souls who generally hate one another miraculously banding together to do the impossible.

You could once set your watch to it.

Now it is a lifeless husk. An old lemon squeezed dry by taxes, crime, mental patients roaming the streets, where the chief lingua franca is either some obscure Central American dialect or Chinese. A place where the former stolid glory of Greek-revival architecture has been turned into an Urban Suburb for the Gender Studies and wanna-be Bourgeoise Bohemian Bolsheviks, a permanent cloud of pot smoke filling the air, while the ground is littered with human waste and used hypodermic needles. A place where the former risk-takers became the risk-averse, where great slabs of society have been hypnotized by welfare and what Kathy Shaidle once referred to as "The Tyranny of Nice".

(As a note, those who practice this sort of dictatorship usually turn out to be the least-nice people you've ever encountered. If Virtue Signaling were an Olympic Sport, New York could field several thousand Dream teams every four years in an instant).

It is all gone.

The childhood wonders of Coney Island. Vanished.

The ethnic neighborhoods. Sterilized.

Everything gentrified and stripped of anything that ever gave it distinction or character.

The landmarks all renamed for dead democrat failures in a great rewrite of history.

Everything, everywhere, crumbling, decaying, decomposing in real time.

Even when something is rebuilt, it becomes little more than a monument to a slogan (see: "Freedom Tower") invented by some government ass or ruined beyond salvation by "activists" whose influence is simultaneously demented and unnecessary.

I've buried the love of my life this past year, so now perhaps it is time to immolate the stinking corpse of Gotham.

More like Sodom-on-Hudson.

This hurts.

But, as they say, I move on to better things.

I'll be in Raleigh, NC sometime this afternoon, a place, I'm told, where common sense does still influence the lives of the people who live in it (I'm also told this is becoming a precarious circumstance, but, hey, at least the Decline doesn't speak Cantonese and come with free Bat Flu).

I'll be working for a subsidiary of IBM, a place where only the best-of-the-best reside and who still do amazing things as a matter of routine.

I will be tossing the heavy tax burden of New York out the window.

Opportunities and options that seemed unthinkable six months ago now present themselves like a series of gaudy-colored floats passing by on parade.

There's good fucking barbeque.

I leave with a heavy heart and a great deal of sadness, for I leave behind family and the best friends a man ever had.

But I fill with a sense of optimism fueled by a simple thought:

At least I don't have to live in a jungle playpen lorded over by the likes of Hochul, Adams and AOC anymore.

The Three Stooges.

And if you'll allow my metaphorical set of stooges to contain a fourth member, a great, big FUCK YOU goes out to Charles Schumer, a man becoming so desperate to maintain his tenuous grasp on power that I predict he will announce his transgender status any day now.

Anything for attention, right Charlie?

This seems an appropriate time to roll out, strangely enough, the New York State motto:

EXCELSIOR!