I love old New Yorkers. I'm not speaking of age, I'm speaking of people born of the Boroughs. Hardy folk that proudly count back the generations of their family that lived "in the neighborhood." Men who live for baseball season, women who live for the happiness of their families. The young couples that you know will still be together in 30 years, just fatter and a bit more leathery. Working class masses in family homes and rent stabilized walk-ups. People with names like Mikey, Jojo, Fran and Dot, who stuck it out and didn't move to Long Island or Westchester the first chance they got.

I suppose that's enough waxing poetic on people not normally seen as verbose, romantic or very beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder however.

I've been having terrible nightmares lately about tragic events that have happened in my lifetime and it's almost as if the floodgates are now just opening and I'm feeling the gravity of each situation for the first time. I think I completely distanced myself from reality in order to survive childhood sometimes. I hope I'm a strong enough adult to deal with all of these surfacing emotions.

I watched TWA Flight 800 explode over the ocean when I was 10 years old. I saw, first hand, 230 people go up in flames and plummet into the Atlantic. I sat by for days, as locals joined the search efforts, coming in and out of the marina with gruesome stories and no good news and just a few months later I enjoyed the beach where it happened without a second thought to the tragedy. I guess no 10 year old can fully wrap their head around something of that magnitude, but now, 13 years later I have a gigantic pit in my stomach over the entire ordeal. Why am I having nightmares about it now?