Paris and Newark: Same Difference

Paris is a lot like Newark, New Jersey. There are buildings and roads and cars and people. The people like to eat, sleep, fuck, have a good time, and earn money. They smoke cigarettes and they drink alcohol and they occasionally look up at the sky and wonder, but mostly they just go about their day. It is really quite the same, in fact. They have windows and door frames, they wear socks and shoes when they leave the house, there are trees with leaves and benches in parks so that people can sit. The people eat with forks and spoons, chopsticks in Asian restaurants, and they laugh the same and kiss the same, and even fart the same. In this sense it is also a lot like Seoul, South Korea and Ko Phangan, Thailand and Edinburgh, Scotland where people also live under roofs and have windows and door frames and eat and sleep and fart more or less in the same manner. There must be some correlation between these places that I’ve been. A common conqueror? A silk road, perhaps?  What a profound disappointment to discover the world is full of farting people that reside under roofs and have eyes and ears and butt cheeks all the same.

So I am from here and you are from there, and I have been here and you have been there, and we can talk about it until one of us falls asleep in our soup (which is also the same)—but aside from a handful of astronauts and a myriad of lunatics no one has ever been anywhere all that different, because, well, it doesn’t exist.