I am a native New Yorker who was in midtown Manhattan on 9/11. I’ve blogged about my experience on that day, but I rarely talk about it. Start telling me your 9/11 story–as many Chicagoans were wont to do when I first moved here–and I’ll probably change the subject.

But on Friday, May 21st, I found myself with the unexpected opportunity to be interviewed by the nonprofit oral-history project, StoryCorps. The project has a permanent recording studio in New York and several mobile recording trailers that travel the country, allowing families and individuals to record precious memories and life experiences for posterity–all of which become a part of the national archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Late on Thursday, May 20th, I learned that StoryCorps’ shiny, silver Airstream trailer was in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, where it will remain through June 26th as part of the Historias Initiative to archive the stories of Latino families in America. I knew that StoryCorps also has a September 11th Initiative, created to allow people who were affected by 9/11 to share their stories as well. For a while now, I’ve pondered participating in it. On a lark, I checked the available StoryCorps interview dates in Chicago, figuring they’d be all booked up. Much to my surprise, in the middle of the mobile studio’s busily booked schedule was one opening–coming up in 14 hours.

So with barely time to go to bed, get up, get ready, and get there, much less think about what I was about to do (which was probably a good thing), the next day I sat down with two welcoming StoryCorps interviewers in the cozy mobile studio and told my story. The most amazing parts of it for me were telling it to two twenty-something adults who both currently live in New York, but didn’t arrive until the New York I was telling them about had been changed forever…and learning through the telling just how deeply I really am still affected by 9/11.

It took me seven years to realize I’m a Chicagoan now, part of the post-9/11 New York City diaspora, because of that day. It still takes my breath away how well I remember my long  journey home over the Queensboro Bridge and down Queens Bouelavard. And I went away from the interview realizing I’m in Chicago because it reminds me of the softer, gentler New York City for which I still mourn. (And, yes, there was such a thing–before security searches and submachine guns became permanent fixtures of the Big Apple’s urban landscape.)

If you’re so inspired, you can browse here to (at least try and) schedule an interview for Historias or any other reason while StoryCorps remains in Chicago, or browse here to make an interview appointment at any StoryCorps fixed or mobile facility.

Finally, you can hear my 9/11 story by clicking the play button or download link, below. It and all submissions to the September 11th Initiative will eventually be housed in a special archive at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, currently under construction at Ground Zero. I’m proud to finally have had the guts to record it. And if anyone manages to find meaning in it, then it was worth showing up…

Download audio file (Mike%20Doyle%20September%2011th%20Story%20(StoryCorps).mp3)
Mike Doyle September 11th Story (StoryCorps) | 41:04m | 37.6MB | download (mp3)

(Photo: I’ll have fries with that…)

So today begins the last year of my youth, and I’m trying to handle it. My body has long told me that year came some time ago. Chronic pain in my right hip and the old man “Uggh!” I groan upon standing suggest a chronological age a bit beyond my newly current 39.

The last age I took so hard was 25. Back then, launching into the latter half of my twenties without having achieved richness or thinness had me feeling like a big loser. Luckily, my self-confidence has improved since then. Now launching into my final 365 days before middle age without yet having achieved richness or thinness just has me feeling old.

“You have to remember, you’re only as old as you feel,” Sole Man Donn told me this afternoon. He meant well.

“I know,” I said. “And I feel old.”

“Well,” Donn continued to the well-worn punch line, “then go feel a 20-year-old.”

Last month, when my newly arrived mid-life crisis first began its sneak-attack, I noted the fallacy of the phalluses of twenty-somethings to adequately assuage the angst of advancing age. Not that I’d throw a fresh, nubile grad-schooler with a high libido and two working hips out of bed. But he’d have to be okay with leaving by eleven–a body this old can no longer survive on six hours a night.

Besides, those youngsters have little respect for their elders these days. Eight days ago, a new friend, the recent Oklahoma-expat, Overly Frank, showed little pity for the quickening pace of my deterioration. Guys who are too young to remember the first run of Star Wars–because they weren’t born yet–rarely do. The blood was spilled in I.M. land…

10:33:38 PM Mike: I’m facing the last 8 days of my life before I begin the last year of my youth.

10:33:56 PM Frank: That is one way of looking at it. Or it could be that your youth ended 3,279 days ago, give or take.

10:36:19 PM Mike: I will, of course, remind you of that smart remark in a few months when you finally turn 30…I believe my card will read, “My condolences to your youth.”

10:38:28 PM Frank: Well, my card to you will say that “age is just a number… expressed, in your case, in scientific notation.”

10:57:27 PM Mike: Next time I see you, should I pat you on the head and sniff for that new-baby smell around your soft spot?

10:57:48 PM Frank: Are you making fun of my hair loss?

10:58:20 PM Mike: No not at all. Though I was thinking in regards to your turning 30 I could just send the flowers to wherever the hair went.

11:00:18 PM Frank: Okay. There were gloves. Not anymore.

Then again, fellow advanced-adult bloggers haven’t been any more comforting. The response from Chicago Tech News publisher Todd Allen when I told him I suspected my mid-life crisis was upon me: “You’re going to look mighty funny buying a Corvette and not knowing how to drive it.”

Rimshot. Try the veal. Remember to tip your waitress.

I’m actually grateful for the humor. I’m surprised how much of a shock the realization of 40 being just around the corner has been to my system. Age really is just a number, and I feel happier, more fulfilled, more on track, and more spiritually aware at 39 than I ever have in my life.

None of that made it any easier to suppress the urge to strangle the barista in the coffee bar where I’m writing this when an hour ago he popped a suicide-by-depressing-lyrics mix of songs by artists trying to save polar bears on late-night TV into the CD player.

The Sinatra at Lido’s Caffé in Oak Park at the weekly coffee klatsch last Tuesday night was a lot more bearable. The new rule being I’m no longer allowed to verbally refer to Doctor Dementia, instead Hoosierella, Pastry Chef Chris, and new pastry-chef-squeeze Bearoke opened the evening wishing good thoughts towards the temporarily incarcerated Gay O.J. (no FIB should ever attempt a low-speed flight from Cheesehead fuzz on a suspended license–’nuff said.)

They needn’t have worried, though. My thoughts last week were stuck on impending AARP membership. But I’d already tread that ground the previous Tuesday, so I covered up my angst by asking how everyone else was doing.

Hoosierella never saw it coming. “Hey,” I asked her, “did you and your husband ever find out if the chocolate-flavored condoms you got from Chris really tasted like they were supposed to?”

As her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, I continued.

“Well,” I amended myself. “Really, did you ever find out?”

“Be careful how you answer,” Chris interjected. “You know where this conversation is gonna end up.”

“Um, no…” ‘Rella stammered.

“You know what?” Bearoke intervened as a palpable sense of relief went around the far side of the table. “I’m pretty sure they did. One day at work, we had a whole bag of flavored condoms, and we were pretty bored.”

Boy, was that sense of relief misplaced.

“Go on,” I said, as I sharpened my inner pencil to take notes.

“We decided to have a tasting flight,” Bearoke continued as I thanked the Universe on behalf of my byline for friends like these. “We sorted the condoms by type, blew them up like balloons, passed them around the room, and licked them to check for flavor. And surprisingly, most of them tasted just like what the package said.”

“Most of them?” asked Chris.

“Well, except for the cola-flavored condom. That just left a nasty, sweet aftertaste in your mouth.”

“You’ve gotta tell me,” I asked Bearoke, barely able to get the next words out as I descended into tear-inducing laughter. “Was it like a wine tasting? Every time you licked a condom, did you have to spit afterwards?”

“Oh my God,” said Chris to the table, “look at his eyes! He’s writing a headline for his blog as he’s sitting here!”

He knows me well. I’ll let the gang know of their most recent turn on Carless later tonight when they fête me for my birthday at Poor Phil’s prior to our regular appearance at Lido’s. The crowd won’t be as large as the surprise party my old NYC friends threw when they thought I was moving back a couple of years ago. But these local guys have my back, too.

Unfortunately, at my age, I have enough back for all of us. Besides suffering through Sarah McLachlan tunes in public places, I also often sit at my dining table to blog. Recenty, when the aches and pains of age came calling once again as they so often do now, I came to the realization I either need comfier chairs or a fatter ass.

No one should worry about quality time with the birthday boy tonight. Thanks to age’s waning metabolism (yeah, that’s it), these days there’s more than enough of me to go around.

(Photo: Different bridge, same exodus: my experience on 9/11. Credit: Joseph Rodruguez.)

An annotated version of the following entry is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline.

Today, with the world again awash in retrospect, I usually prefer to be blogging about about courtesy, or kittens, or one of any number of safer, happier, topics. Seven years on and I had originally thought not to mark the occasion again.  At some point, we just have to emotionally let go inside, or we destroy ourselves. In the end, while I feel no need to make a pilgrimage to a dusty construction site in Lower Manhattan, I still feel a need for words.  I wrote these particular words in 2006, to mark my experience of the fifth anniversary of 9/11.  Here’s my story from that day…

The headline a quote from my old New York friend, Sarah Massey, and one that speaks to my experience, as well. I rarely dote on that day. It’s been years since I stood on the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade at dusk, candle in hand, surrounded by thousands of my neighbors, mourning. I felt no need to watch the cable documentaries, nor for that matter Nicolas Cage crawling out from under a slab of concrete on the big screen. I was in Manhattan that morning–once was enough, thanks.

A native New Yorker’s devotion to their hometown is a fierce, almost irrational thing, rivaled only by a Chicagoan’s devotion to this great city. We don’t leave Gotham lightly. But it’s been five years since my hometown died for me, and almost four since I left it behind, perhaps for good. I’ll always feel the loss, but I don’t want to forget the day that caused it. I rarely tell my 9/11 story. I was only on the fringes of the hell that happened downtown. But I was in Manhattan. And I was part of the exodus.

I was halfway to work before I knew what was happening. Already, my inbound Q train wasn’t very crowded. Had I turned on the TV that morning I’d have known why. But I woke up late and wasted no time stumbling out the door. As we crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I thought it was odd that a group of people were pointing and staring out the windows on the south side of the train. I figured they were tourists. I didn’t looked up from my iPod.

That changed when we made our first stop in Manhattan. A woman boarded and spontaneously started talking about an airplane having crashed into the World Trade Center. I put away my headphones. I had a sinking feeling, which was rewarded one stop later when another new passenger joined the discussion and announced the second impact. Hers would be the first of many uses of the word “terrorism” that I would hear that day. She said we were under attack. At least we were underground.

I changed trains and headed up to my office above Grand Central Terminal. On the way, my train was delayed in the tunnel for several minutes, and I had the impression that every single person in my car was holding their breath. At my job, there was no work to be done. Everyone was crowded around the TV, watching the breaking news from Washington D.C., seeing smoke rise in split-screen above the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I had colleagues in the north tower. Judging by the impact hole I could see, I was sure they were dead. But I didn’t dote on that possibility, because our office sat directly in the shadow of the 60-story Met Life Building and I wasn’t waiting around.

Back outside, Midtown was surreal. People leaned on buildings, talking, or sat on the curb, crying. There was nowhere to go–the subways had stopped running. Instead, like elsewhere, people gathered around the nearest television monitor and watched the news. It was in a deli on Third Avenue where I saw the first tower fall. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming, it didn’t fully register until they replayed the tape. And still it didn’t make sense. It was incomprehensible, an icon of the capital of the world, erasing itself from existence in a matter of seconds. I had the momentary feeling that I was observing myself from without, and wondered if I was in shock.

That’s when the exodus began. With the primary means of moving about New York City–the subway–shut down, there was little else to do but walk, and the non-residential population of Manhattan began doing just that. Unfortunately, I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the direct path to get there from Midtown follows straight through lower Manhattan. So I knew I wasn’t going home. I decided to head for the home of my Portuguese friend, Jose. He lived in Elmhurst, Queens, six-and-a-half miles away. I started walking.

People with radios were talking about reports of transit buses being mobilized at the foot of the 59th Street Bridge to bring evacuees into Queens. I made my way to the bridge in an increasingly huge column of walkers. It seemed we all had the same idea. A mile later at the bridge, we found dozens of willing riders waiting, but no buses. Spontaneously, groups of people began wading into traffic, walking next to cars up the onramps to the bridge. A lone police officer tried in vain to stem the tide of pedestrians, but within a few minutes, several lanes of the bridge were taken over by thousands of walking evacuees, myself included.

We walked in traffic, next to cars and vans and delivery trucks overflowing with disparate strangers being ferried over the bridge by hundreds of Good Samaritan drivers. Walking next to the huge wheels of buses and trucks was the trickiest part. Halfway across the mile-long bridge, I looked south towards where the World Trade Center should have been. All that was left was smoke. A rumor went along the bridge that there were other hijacked planes and other targets in New York. We walked as quickly as we could to firmer ground.

There was little solace to be found when we reached Queens Plaza. Still with no subways and a trickle of buses, most of us just kept walking. I continued up Queens Boulevard, befriending for the moment a group of office workers from Midtown who were attempting to walk home to Long Island. They had a radio. We heard about the plane in Pennsylvania. Four miles later, before I finally turned off of Queens Boulevard at Jose’s house, I paused to consider the line of evacuees. Consuming the sidewalks on each side of the street, it stretched, in both directions, as far as the eye could see.

Cell service having long since evaporated, I arrived with no notice. Jose’s sister had just returned from retrieving her daughter from school in Brooklyn. She blew her car past emergency barricades on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and shadowed emergency vehicles to get there and back. The students had watched the towers fall from the roof of the school. I sat down for the first time in three hours and witnessed the TV images that the rest of the world had been watching since that morning (though to this day I refuse to watch footage of the jumpers). Jose was stuck safely at a work meeting in New Jersey and wouldn’t make it back to Queens for 24 hours.

The subway returned in the late afternoon, and I was able to travel to my friend Alan’s house on the other side of Park Slope, where he and his boyfriend, Esteban, were waiting. But it was slow going and lower Manhattan was off limits–a restriction assailed by one hysterical woman, obviously in shock, who complained to the conductor that she was going to miss her appointment on Chambers Street, a thoroughfare at that moment covered in ash fall.

When I emerged from the subway in Brooklyn, the cloud from Ground Zero hung directly overhead, as if a comet had passed by a just little too low. I collapsed into Alan and Esteban, and we all collapsed on the couch. We avoided the view from Alan’s living room window. Until that morning, it had framed a panorama of lower Manhattan gathered around the Twin Towers. We turned on the TV and started to write one of a million lists begun in New York that day to attempt to determine the whereabouts of our friends and colleagues who had worked in lower Manhattan.

Our task was made slightly easier when I saw two of my colleagues from the north tower in a news broadcast, walking slowly away from Ground Zero, covered in soot. It was the first moment in a very long day that I felt joy. Before I finally left for home, we also watched 7 World Trade Center burn and fall into itself.

I walked the 13 blocks between Alan’s apartment and my own with my shirt held over my mouth, a pose matching everyone else walking through Park Slope that night. The wind had changed. The acrid cloud from Ground Zero, intensified by the fall of the final building, was now hugging the ground through Brownstone Brooklyn. It was a sickening smell that would become familiar to all New Yorkers in the weeks ahead. A combination of burnt concrete and death, the odor would permeate the subway system well into 2002, every train through lower Manhattan carrying the stench to the farthest corners of the city.

Also in the weeks ahead would come the candlelight processions, the spontaneous vigils, and the walls of the missing–everywhere, the walls of the missing. That was the most overwhelming part. Not the masses of anonymous photos posted on the gate at St. Paul’s Chapel, but the single fliers you’d find taped to lamposts in your neighborhood bearing the familiar faces of casual strangers you’d smile at in the grocery store but would never see again. I didn’t let it in, at first. It would be five days before I would watch the St. Patrick’s Cathedral memorial ceremony, lie down on the floor of my apartment, and uncontrollably sob.

After 9/11, for a time, New Yorkers became less contentious and more united amongst themselves than usual. That didn’t last, but other changes were more enduring. Gotham became and stayed a city of fear, and swat teams, and bomb scares, and checkpoints, and pat-downs, and magnetic wands, and machine guns. I waited two years, but the machine guns never left. So I did.

Once, Devyn and I had a heated discussion regarding the experience of 9/11 in the world beyond New York–most specifically, in Chicago. Since I’ve been here, whenever the subject of 9/11 has come up, I’ve always been amazed at the lengths to which Chicagoans go to try, seemingly, to make that day theirs. Every one (including Devyn, when he lived here), remembers the shock, the fear, the evacuation of the Loop, the tense weeks and months immediately after. I’ve been unfair for a long time in my estimation of the local experience of that day. Truly, we all were changed by 9/11, and we all still carry the emotional scars from it, no matter where on the planet we were when we turned on the TV.

Seven years later the scars have, at least, begun to heal. But I can’t shake the nagging feeling that, for a minority of us, the wounds will never fully disappear. So I beg your forgiveness, but try as I might, there’s one thought I just can’t let go: the world may feel a tragic ownership of 9/11, but that day can never fully belong to those who watched it on TV or were evacuated from their own downtowns, terrified but safely afar.

In my mind and in my heart, September 11, 2001, will belong forever to the New Yorkers and Washingtonians who ran for their lives that day.

And to those who weren’t given the chance.

(Photo: And I am led once again to the same conclusion…but not the one I expected. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.)

Last month, I accepted the job offer of my life in New York City. Today, I turned it down. At long last, I admit it. I am hopelessly in love with Chicago. I’m staying right here.

In some alternate reality, I could be the communications director for a very groovy environmental nonprofit in Manhattan. I could be living and working back in my Gotham hometown, hanging with my old friends, and rediscovering the New Yorker in me. As I’ve recently chronicled, I was on the verge.

The unexpected offer came in the first half of August. But with the second half of August came my apartment search. I was standing in the living room of a $1,450-a-month, erroneously allegedly non-basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, when doubt crept in. I told my apartment broker I wasn’t interested, at which point the irked landlady leaned in to him and whispered, “You need to show him some more apartments around here so he gains some perspective.”

Prescient words they were. My job offer would have afforded me the apartment. But, as I realized with each passing day I spent in my hometown, my heart simply wouldn’t afford me New York. Not anymore.

You can’t fill up the present with the past. Don’t get me wrong, I love my old east-coast friends. But while I remembered the New Yorker in me for a glorious month spent along non-Lake Michigan shores, I also remembered the myriad reasons why I don’t live along those shores, anymore. All the things I formerly took for granted, factored into the cost of living in the Big Apple, I now found weighing heavily on me (primarily because of their lack in America’s Second City): dirty sidewalks; potholed streets; 110-degree summer subway stations; perilously crowded everything; rifle-toting National Guardsmen at every commuter rail terminal; NYPD S.W.A.T. teams in Times Square.

Worse, for the privilege of living in such a–compared to Chicago, anyway–squalid environment, the finagling and financing to be done in order to secure an NYC apartment is worse than ever. As the gap between haves and have-nots grows ever wider in the five boroughs, the ability of common folk to find, afford, and be approved for the smallest of apartments in the most marginal of neighborhoods has waned beyond my ability to comprehend (six- to 12-month security deposit, anyone?).

My New York City friends find all of this to be absolutely normal, part and parcel of being able to live in the self-described capital of the world. I used to agree with them. But after four-and-a-half years in Chicago, I had the terrifying feeling that the day after my potential move I would wake up in sweat-stained sheets screaming names of Chicago neighborhoods into the east-coast darkness.

Because I have gained perspective. I live in a city that, although imperfect, affords to most of its citizens the ability to have a quality of life that only the wealthy and lucky can touch in New York. Care to live in the heart of downtown Chicago on the 38th floor of a historic tower? Have a panoramic view from your pillow? Walk to four supermarkets, three department stores, dozens of restaurants, every rapid-transit, bus, and commuter rail line in town, the Art Institute of Chicago, the financial district, and river and lake–within five to 10 minutes from your front door? What would you pay? In New York City, my rent on that would be about $3,000.

In Chicago, I pay $835. (Have I mentioned the balcony you could park a car on and the 360-degree, 61st floor roofdeck?) Any questions?

Well hold off on them, because there’s more. In four weeks in New York, I also failed to encounter a neighborhood with the same friendliness or finesse as the Hogtown nabes that I’ve come to haunt and covet in my years here. Andersonville? Lakeview? Pilsen? Printers Row? It’s a long list without equal outside Chicago. Boy, has this town spoiled me.

Ultimately, Chicago is without equal outside Chicago, and I am too deeply in love with this city to give it up–obviously even if you paid me. Such has been my lesson this year. So why have I been trying so hard to leave? I believe I was so lonely in my former, now-failed relationship that when my old New York friends came back into my life last spring, I saw them–and New York–as an antidote for my emptiness. Once Devyn left (and moved on his own to NYC), the feeling only worsened, stiffening my resolve to go through with my own moving plans.

But it’s four months later now. My dance card in Chicago, both platonic and romantic, is (astoundingly for me) more full than ever before in my life. Life has returned in a big way, and that’s a blessing I don’t take lightly. I no longer feel lonely, and I’m far better able to appreciate all that I’ve got in Chicago. Not the least of which, as I’ve said many times before, is the ability to live among Chicagoans, the friendliest, most upstanding, and, indeed, most loving people I’ve ever encountered anywhere.

I expected this post to be about coming to the same conclusion that I came to four months ago: that I still want to move to New York. Instead, I’ve come, happily, to the same conclusion I came to four years ago: that I would much prefer to be a (carpet-bagging) Chicagoan. And so it is.

I will always be grateful for a history spent in America’s biggest city. But I continue to look forward to a future to be spent in America’s best city. Chicago, what the hell was I thinking? I love you. I like you. I get you. I’m staying.

Um, buckle your seatbelt, folks.

(Photo: Where I’m from, the more things change, the more they stay the same.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I don’t remember being here, yet nothing ever changes here. I’ve spent almost four weeks staying with friends in New York City; it’s almost as if I’ve already moved and settled in (even without a job offer and apartment lease yet). So much has changed in the four-and-a-half years that I’ve been away. Residential and commercial development is sweeping the Big Apple the likes of which I’ve never in my life seen. Housing costs have become even more astronomical than ever. Funky neighborhoods have become sadly Establishment (good-bye, Park Slope), while former slums have become exclusive enclaves (hello, DUMBO). It’s hard to realize that this is my home.

What’s curious, even with all that’s new, the fundamental remains. The dirt, and noise, and crowding are overpowering (while Chicago resembles an orderly northern European city, New York resembles a crazily ebulliently southern European city all the way). But they mask this city’s century-long status as the crucible of immigrant American beginnings. Everyone comes to New York, and everyone who comes here belongs here, simply by dint of having the courage to stay here.

But if you stay here, it’s purely on Gotham’s terms, not your own. Qualities of life and standards of living considered overwhelmingly normal in other cities are unrealized fantasies for millions of New Yorkers. A sub-$1,000 rent? Renting an apartment at all without having to pay a broker fee equal to 15 percent of your yearly rent? (Honestly, reread the last sentence). A clean and pee-free sidewalk? A line shorter than an hour at the Trader Joe’s cashier? An afternoon seat on the subway? You must be dreaming.

None of that has changed. I wonder why exactly I want to leave my downtown Chicago idyll when I think about it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I left these stomping grounds of mine for a reason. The pressure, the struggle just to exist in the five boroughs…it simply doesn’t exist in Chicago (much as some Chicagoans would beg to differ). Is moving home really worth putting up with a downward lurch in my everyday quality of life? I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe I never will.

But sitting in a Rego Park pizza joint a couple of weeks ago and hearing four pungent New York accents animatedly announcing the trials and tribulations of living here from the next table, I was humbled. Four years ago, I considered those classic New Yawk accents base, and droll, and uneducated. In that pizzeria, I suddenly realized how powerfully that accent now brings me home and makes me feel welcome. I’ve heard it all around me for weeks, now. I find, muchly in spite of myself, that I actually crave to be around it. My own accent, layered in its own way with four years of Chicagoisms, has been swinging like a loose gate between Midwest and New York for weeks. Friends in Chicago have already asked me to slow down when I call them.

One of those friends, suburban hip-chick Val, tells me that the measure of a city should be the people whom you have there, not the places or things. I wish I could import Val to New York–she’s right. I crave the people back home as much as I crave the wonderful way they express themselves. I don’t know how that intersects with the coming changes in my day-to-day life.

I want an answer. I wish I had one. I wish I had an apartment, yet, for that matter. Because I have to decide. This is it, one of those life-changing junctures. A fork in the road. Which one do I take? How do I move forward knowing all that I will leave behind in either city?

And what do I do if I make the wrong decision? The shadow knows. God knows.

I wish I knew, too, for the window of opportunity is growing short. I feel like I’ve found myself again in my old stomping grounds this month. And yet, I have the perilous feeling that I have no idea at all who it is that I’ve really found. I am not coming out of this experience the same. That’s all I know for sure.

(Photo: An honest look of shock as I sit amidst one-third of my surprise 37th birthday party.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I turned 37 this month in my hometown. And while August continues to merge into seemingly one exceptionally and unexpectedly long trip to Gotham to interview and apartment hunt, it was turning 37 that I found most informative. Purely for narcissistic reasons. Essentially I was smoked.

Shortly before my birthday, I flew in to begin my interviewing process and attend a GLYNY Alumni Group Board of Directors meeting. The meeting, taking place on the eve of my birthday, was uneventful. We came, we saw, we argued. I bitched. A lesbian expressed anger. Someone hummed a showtune. It was what you’d expect from your average LGBT working meeting. The plan was that the nine of us would all go have dinner after the meeting and I’d have a quiet birthday the next day, probably spent with my best friend of 20 years, the very “Juicy” Peter Morley.

The birthday with Peter happened as expected. The birthday eve, however, had other plans. While we were walking to our regular food joint, Sammy’s Noodle Shop at Sixth and 11th, I stopped the gang for a quick drink at our regular hooch joint, the estimable old-man bar, Julius at West 10th and Waverly. I should have known by the way half the group didn’t come in to imbibe that something was afoot. I should really have known when everyone argued that we shouldn’t bag our plans and go have Mexican, instead.

Now before I go on, let me explain one thing. I haven’t had a birthday party in 20 years. I’ve wanted one, sure. Who wouldn’t want a cake, several (hopefully too few) candles, and the warmth of your close friends to share same with you. But as my teen years morphed into adulthood, my eventual circle of friends (not to mention my highly estranged family) never again was conducive to the potential for such festivities. I am not ashamed to admit that for many years, I’ve mourned that fact. An adult birthday dinner with your boyfriend of the moment is nice. But every year, come August, I became painfully aware that I would never, ever in my life be guest of honor at a surprise birthday party.

i was wrong.

I finally clued in to that fact when we reached Sammy’s. As I stood there, speechless for fear of crying if I dared open my mouth, one by one, a steady stream of my old friends emerged from the after-dusk shadows of Sixth Avenue. Twenty-six of them. Each one feigned surprise to find me there. Each one came to celebrate my birthday. And for the next two hours raucously, we did just that.

I won’t belabor the obvious. Yes, yes, now I’ve had my surprise party, dream come true, my friends totally got me–but good. You get that part. What thoroughly blew me away, though, is that, once again, it was my old-is-new-again GLYNY friends filling my heart with joy. It was also the largest reunion event we’ve had since we began to come together again last March.

The job and apartment searches continue apace. I have good friends in Chicago who want me to stay. But on the subject of returning to New York City, I’m finding it very hard to argue with 26 opinions in favor of my doing so.

And I love each and every one of the 26 people holding those opinions.

(Photo: No-Entry sign at Love Canal, NY. This was a NYSDEC fiasco, too.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

What was I thinking? The first day of the first of my interview trips to New York City this summer, I wore my interview clothes from before my crack-of-dawn airplane ride, to my arrival at 20-year-best-friend Peter’s house an hour after I literally walked out on my planned interview at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Before I left NYC in 2003, I knew NYSDEC to be somewhat less than a class act. I’m surprised at how short my memory has become during my tenure on the shores of Lake Michigan.

I could give perilously putrid details of my past dealings with NYSDEC and their consultants, but my experience with them this month sums my understanding of them up more succinctly. NYSDEC was to be my first Gotham interview of several. A community relations position, too–the absolute heart of what I love to do. I envisioned reaching out to families and businesses in working-class neighborhoods and helping organize informational meetings to collect their concerns regarding open space and clean air in their communities.

I know, I know. But for some reason, I always give governmental agencies the benefit of the doubt. One bad apple–or experience–shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the reputation of the whole barrel. Or state regulatory agency. I mean, not everyone at, say, the Post Office is, for want of a better term, postal. So all of NYSDEC couldn’t be untrustworthy.

Feh. After the afternoon of my alleged interview, I am still awaiting evidence to the contrary. I arrived at NYSDEC’s Long Island City, Queens office on time, prim, pressed, and prepared to give it my ethical all. I gave my name to the receptionist, sat, and waited. And while I perched on the tired, leather, government-issue waiting-room chair, fidgeting with my tie, I wondered about the culture of the agency that was about to interview me.

Very quickly and wholly unexpectedly, I got my answer. Into the waiting room strode another prim, pressed, be-suited individual. An off-puttingly stern individual, however, made even more off-putting by his loud snarling loosely aimed into his tightly clenched cell phone:

“You better listen, because your job is on the line, ok! You hear me? That reporter is coming to check up on the site and he better not find anything! You make sure it’s clean enough for him to see it and not have anything to report or it’s your neck! Are you listening to me? I don’t care what’s there. Make it look spotless!”

You’re putting me on right? Where’s the camera? Am I being Punked?

Sadly, no. The gruesome truth: as I sat in the offices of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation awaiting an interview for a job involving telling the truth to New York State residents, a Department of Environmental Conservation functionary was strutting around in full view of the public ordering another NYSDEC functionary to hide environmental contamination information from the same public. And my heart–and my estimation of NYSDEC–sank into the floor below me.

But what was I gonna do?

Let’s face it, I need a job to be able to return to my Gotham hometown. And let’s not mince words, I need a good-paying one just to be able to pay NYC’s astronomical rent. I’ve had healthy interest in my communications-laden resume, but who wouldn’t want a cush state job?

And when you get right down to it, isn’t every state agency everywhere at least a little corrupt? The world we live in is an imperfect place, and those in power, or wishing to remain in power–sometimes at all costs–have the upper hand and ultimate say in official decisions at all levels of government, no matter what good-government minded individuals might like to believe.

I can’t change the world alone, and I need an income to live in it. What choice did I really have? I might as well just muddle through the interview, maybe get hired, and see if NYSDEC was really all that bad. I mean, what could a few lies told here and there to the public by a well-meaning community-relations official really hurt?

All of this flashed through my mind in one turbulent moment as I got up, walked over the receptionist desk, and canceled my interview. Sure, I need a job, but I’d like one at an ethical organization, thanks. And there’s no paycheck big enough to make me forget that I have to check my principles at the door in order to receive it.

As I walked back to the number 7 train, having for the very first time in my life walked out on a professional interview, I wondered whether I had made the right decision. When I got to the subway entrance, I paused, considered my career goals, and looked back at the NYSDEC building. I realized the conversation I had witnessed couldn’t have been an isolated one. And with that light bulb flashing over my head, I realized one thing more about NYSDEC, this time with absolute certainty.

You couldn’t pay me to work there.