The planet Asimov, I covered its ground through and through, and studied each of its plants and animals, trying to figure out a way to get myself and the creatures back to earth.  When the meteor that killed the dinosaurs hit the earth, debris flew off into space forming this other planet in the asteroid belt called Asimov, and the early life forms that manifested on Earth clung on to some debris and I found them here.  I’m trying to get them back to Earth to study them.  But then again, I’m a space hobo that eats rotten cans of beans and cheese from Gingernation, (the Wallgreens of the universe).

These life forms wanted me to help them with their survival.  Since they couldn’t live off the land on Asimov, they had to get back to Earth.  The thing about my mission, is I can’t go back to earth, without being shot out of the sky by the Dorian Sky Patrol.  I was exiled from Earth because I called Obama “my homie” and he took offense from that.  Now I have to live off of whatever person is willing to give me anything to eat and drink.  But I needed to get these creatures to earth before they all die.  There was something about these creatures that bamboozled me.  I can’t touch them.  Whenever I try to, my hand passes right through their figure, as if their forms were made out of literal visible thin air. The only way I can get their attention is by using my guitar and playing “Maps”.  They even come and sit right next to me when I strum the chords on the lazily tuned strings.

The creatures can touch me but I can’t touch them.  I think that the other half of their body is in a parallel universe, and this side of the universe makes their skin or whatever covers their body feel like a sea snails’ slime.  They don’t speak English or french or Martian, but they can speak Morse code.  As they were speaking about joining us on Asimov, my body started to change and melt in a sort of way.  Excruciating coursed through my body as it melted into a puddle of slime and springing back up to look like the creatures that captured me in the first place.  saw the other half of me wander off into the endless depths of space as my cart of beans washed away with the wind that swept the barren fields of Asimov.  The creatures had a new member.  His name was Devon Argall.

Half-asleep, I wandered through this unexplored city, blinded by the infinite blinking signs on Fifth Avenue.  My feet ached beneath me as I sauntered behind my ecstatic mom who didn’t seemed to be bothered by the fact that I just spent almost thirteen hours in a small car with my farting brother.  We introduced ourselves to Elizabeth, our host that saved us from trying to find a hotel room in the suburbs of New York.

She gave us a tour of the whole upper-west side of New York in five hours that night.  I didn’t think that New York really was, “the city that never sleeps” until I spent five hours passing free pizza stands and chicken kabob food trucks and sleeping homeless people. We walked up Fifth Avenue and visited Times Square just in time to see the Vietnamese Barbershop quartet sing either the American National Anthem or the Vietnamese National Anthem.  At the end of their song they shouted, “God bless America!”  We grabbed hot chocolate from the by standing hat/kabob shop, and walked to the base of the Empire State Building.  By the time we got back to Elizabeth’s house, we were so tired that my brother fell asleep as he was falling into bed.

The next morning we woke up at six for early breakfast at the coffee shop around the corner.  So there we sat in a crummy little coffee shop with cameras ready and glasses on.  In New York my mom made us walk up and down the island of Manhattan.  Then I had a spur of the moment great idea; a game to try to eat as many slices of free pizza possible.

We split up into teams. I was teamed up with Elizabeth, and the other team was my mom, dad and brother.  That way both teams had one person that knew the busy streets of New York.  We stayed together in one group obviously.  There was this one place that we circled back to every twenty minutes but every time around we wore a different jacket or hat.  After about the fourth time, the vendor started to look suspicious.  After that afternoon we all took a nap.  I ate so much pizza that at the time I felt I didn’t have to eat until Thanksgiving.  Then I woke up realizing that it was a dream.

That next morning I woke up wanting to puke.  My brain pounded in my head. My stomach was in my throat that morning. I honestly couldn’t remember what I did the day before. Then I thought that the vendor spiked my pizza the fourth time ’round.  That day we decided to take the metro bus downtown, but I put the wrong coin in the deposit box and somehow that created a chain reaction that made the bus stop working.  The bus driver didn’t even get mad.  I doubt he noticed though.

There was a strange man on the subway bus that morning.  The man had a son, who were obviously living on the streets and they were asking for money, food anything.  No one even looked at him.  Feeling sympathy, I gave the child a five.  They didn’t deserve to suffer for what life has done to them.  So I helped someone who was in desperate need for food and shelter.

The last day, I woke up at 4:30 and watched the sunrise out side the apartment building. The blinding glare from the sun made the whole world turn orange.  The graffiti that surrounded my seemed to confess to me.  I stayed down there for at least an hour.  While I was down there, I realized that graffiti is just a gallery of someone else’s nightmare, compressed into one word, carelessly spray painted on the side of an In and Out.  Graffiti is someone else’s way to express their feelings about life and what it has done to them.

That is what New York taught me.  New York was one of the most memorable places I’ve ever visited.  I learned that many people go through misery and evolve into people that can say that they have lived the hard life.  New York will always be a great memory.