Jersey City, NJ

Seth Godin blogs every day. I blog every, I dunno, year or something. I’d like to change that. I have a million thoughts, feelings and impulses a day I want to share, but I end up getting bogged down in a sense that I can’t tell a story unless it’s perfect. This affects every aspect of my life.

So I’m going to try, for awhile, anyway, to blog every day, about *something,* and it’s going to be good (dammit), but of course, not perfect, because that’s impossible, and I gotta learn that.

I’m holed up in my room in Jersey City, in a neighborhood called The Heights. I don’t spend much time here, because I’m usually either in NYC or en route there, because that’s where my work is, and most of my friends. It’s an ok room, nothing fancy. I have a bed, a bedside table, a desk, and a bunch of milkcrates I use to store stuff in. I have, on the wall, a big road map of the US, and a rough painting of Neil Young’s “Rust never Sleeps” album cover, done by an artist who’s name I can’t remember. All this artist does is album covers, and he does a ton of them, slapdash but cool looking.

Jersey City is directly across the Hudson river from Manhattan, about half a mile or so. You can see the buildings of lower Manhattan looming in the distance. My dad lived here for awhile when he was a kid in the late 40’s, when my Granddad was, briefly, the pastor of a church here, on Hudson Street.

JC can be rough now but it was much rougher back then, and my dad’s stories reflect it. He witnessed a murder, for instance. I can’t expound on it, cause I don’t know the details. Something about a quarreling couple and my dad cowering in the bushes across the street.

It’s weird to think of my dad — in many ways a consumate Southerner — as a stickball-playing, rough-and tumble-Northeastern kid. But for awhile, that’s what he was, until circumstances forced my migratory grandfather and his large family to pack up and head South to Virginia, and later, North Carolina. (That’s a whole other story, and maybe one day I’ll tell it. Someone should.)

I’m going to clean up now, trying to prepare this place for a subletter so that I can hit the road for tour in July and August.

3 thoughts on “Jersey City, NJ

  1. You also have to remember that Seth Godin usually posts fewer than 100 words in a single post. I’m glad you’re going to post more often, though. Down with perfectionism!

  2. This is dad – glad you are fighting off the urge and pushing through. Look forward to more blogs. I was looking up more famous people that came from Jersey City and came across website N J City University / JC past and present. Checked out Underground Railroad and Dutch Reformed Church role in early reconciliation of slavery. Great stuff. Looking forward to “Headliners”. Be interested in the background of that term.

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