staycation (n.): a vacation on which one stays home and enjoys the pleasures of one’s home and environs

I was introduced to this word at a party last night, in reference to my plan to stay in New York more or less by my lonesome during greater Christmas. It’s more or less perfect, as slang terminology goes. My plan was to chill in NYC…well, forever, really, but I started thinking about how long this stretch of vacation was going to be, how few other Jews I know in New York, and how I didn’t have anything resembling a plan for the weekend since everyone else had skipped town. So I jumped in the car and drove to Baltimore. My parents were pleasantly surprised.

The drive from New York to Baltimore is a no-nonsense, business-like drive across interstates, turnpikes, and massive bridges. Driving in New York City, one is obligated to develop a serenity with regard to traffic: the cars are plentiful, sometimes the streets are narrow, someone’s always double-parked, and these are simply facts of life that you work around. The bottom line is that most of roadways in New York were built between the ’30s and the ’60s and they reflect the demographic realities and driving customs of their era. So be it.

The horror show of the drive to Baltimore, though, is when you discover that the entire eastern seaboard has faced similar demographic changes to New York, only at a different scale. Consequently, even in smooth traffic, there are bottlenecks and clogs and goofy anachronisms all along the route. The New Jersey Turnpike goes from five lanes to three. The Delaware Memorial Bridge starts as a four-lane highway whose speed limit is 45 MPH, and then degrades into a confusing series of windy two-lane ramps at 55 MPH. Construction is endless and unchanging. If anything should put to rest the theory of intelligent design, it is this drive.

And still it’s the best option. The curse of Delaware is that to pass through its miserable fifteen miles southbound costs a driver $7.00. I took it upon myself to dodge the second, $4.00 toll today, which meant a detour along Maryland state highways through (or near) the towns of Elkton and North East, which I was once told were notorious for their KKK membership levels. It was only one highway exit’s worth of distance, but it took me twenty minutes. To avoid the dreary highways of the Atlantic corridor is to add countless hours to your trip, and not pleasant, scenic hours — the alternative to the drab interstate drive is a crawling, hand-over-hand trip through the endless suburban sprawl of chain enterprises and tract housing that all of the East Coast, from Boston to Washington, has become.

I have a fearsome attachment to the East Coast. I grew up in Baltimore, I was schooled in Providence, I live in Brooklyn. I am firmly convinced that people who grow up in California are hippies or wusses or frauds or all of the above, and that the rest of the country is what people like me fly over to get to the places that matter. (Don’t try to dissuade me — you’re wasting your breath.) But I really fear for the East Coast’s future. I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not, but it feels to me like the population density of the megalopolis has increased at an alarming rate over the past fifteen years or so since I’ve been somewhat sentient. What was once forest and cornfield is now terribly ugly, sloppily-designed housing further and further from urban centers, merging nightmare suburb into nightmare suburb until eventually the entire region will have been painted into a corner by its own poor planning.

I know this is hardly a novel realization, but it’s worth screaming and shouting about again, I think. I like living in New York in part because in the city I don’t have to be exposed to this inexorable march of progress. Our grid is set. The only way to go is up, and while I do shudder to think of brownstones being demolished in favor of frightfully unsightly high-rises, I don’t see this much. What I see is big apartment buildings being thrown up along arterial avenues, or dilapidated rowhouses being replaced by six-to-twelve story doorman buildings. I question the business sense of these structures, but as long as they’re reasonably aesthetically pleasing, they don’t bother me, because they don’t have that stench of consumption the way suburban McMansions do. They may replace older construction, but they don’t chew up wilderness and turn it into architectural corn syrup. And the influx of people is no inconvenience — New York is built for critical masses of population and feeds off the density like an organism.

Anyway. What was I talking about? I can’t remember anyway. Best finish up and get to bed — I’ve taken on a challenge to write and record a Christmas song by midnight tomorrow and I’ve never heard of a “song” before.