Sitting outside on the stoop with my beer or my bottle of wine and my smokes on a warm, weekend evening, I'm never short for cheap amusements. The neighbors don't stop to chat with me, the way they do with everyone else up and down the street, and that's fine. That's the way I prefer it. In fact, if folks did stop to chat with me, I wouldn't go out there. The fact that I seem invisible to all of them is my only invitation out onto the stoop.
Events melt one into the other out there.
The cheap, drunken laughter, the occasional shrieks from some domestic dispute down the block, the dying, golden rays of sunset reflecting hard and sharp off the top windows of the building across the street, the kids on their rollerblades slamming into the parked cars, the unexpected neighborly dogfights. Where I am, I look at it as the balancing point between the brownstones full of Famous People and everything that the Famous People fear most, deep in their guts. It's a good place to be, this balancing point. Growing up, my whole town was a balancing point. Folks kept their private lives private.