Picture it in your mind's nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

My A-number one visceral fear is speed. More than knives or snakes or confined spaces. Speed. I won't even go on a motor boat if I can help it.

What annoyed me was that I so often attempted to weasel out of things on purpose, it killed me to do it by accident. It seemed like a waste of whatever detailed lie I was going to have to come up with.

For a long time I wanted to draw, but I could never get the proportions right. My still life sketches were the artistic equivalent of someone who has misjudged the space constraints of a postcard, the handwriting shrinking uncomfortably at the bottom.

I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I'd live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.

Picture it in your mind's nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.