I had a post all ready to go, full of vitriol and cynicism about America and the perversion of its ideals that I witnessed on Friday, October 13 (how often do you get that date? Every eight years or so?) that made the following points:

• The memorial planned for Flight 93 – the United plane that crashed into Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11 – is tantamount to the theme park-ization of the sacred, perverting the current impromptu structures there into nothing short of a tourist trap and twisting what was organically created by those initimately affected by the tragedy into something consumable by all;

• The interview and photo shoot I did just after visiting the Flight 93 site, which would feature Spencer Bailey, a survivor of the Flight 232 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989, was a media fabrication of hero worship for someone who – by his own admission – was simply in the right place at the right time, not someone who did anything particularly heroic;

• The tour I took of Hershey, Pennsylvania – home to the world’s largest chocolate plant – was a symbol of this country’s obsession with overconsumption and gluttony. The tour guide even went so far as to say that the purchase of Hershey’s products was a selfless act of philanthropy, not just a desire for candy, since a portion of all proceeds benefit the Hershey’s campus, a foster home/school for underprivileged children;

• And the late-night pictures I took of Three Mile Island, site of a 1979 nuclear meltdown, were indicative of America’s quest for the illusion of security – we’re never really going to be safe from a nuclear holocaust, or terrorism, or war, but we’re sure as hell going to act like we’re invulnerable.

I was going to write about all of that, stringing the lyrics to John Cougar Mellencamp’s ‘Pink Houses’ – itself a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the American Dream – but I can’t bring myself to finish it without coming off as a jaded cynic. So instead, I’ve decided to simply show photos of the above four events and to describe the good times I had in New York the day after Friday the 13th.

One of the great paradoxes between my personality and my career is my dislike of New York City. Prior to yesterday, I had never had a good time there, because every time I visit, something goes wrong. In 1998, there was the Forced March Around Manhattan Because My Friend’s Dad Doesn’t Want To Pay For A Cab. In early 2006, there was the Visit A Friend Who Ignores You. But I’m a magazine editor, and that’s the center of my industry. Two of my three former interns now work for magazines there, in fact.

So if I want to continue working in publishing, I should learn to like the damn place.

If liking New York is my goal, this most recent did a good job of changing my mind. I started the day with a photo shoot in Herald Square, and realized the following two things:

1. There’s always something going on, no matter what part of the city you’re in, no matter what time you’re there. People will always be walking around, providing great backgrounds for photo shoots.
2. Not a one of those passersby care enough about what you’re doing to even look in your direction. I could have been naked except for a a tin-foil hat and angel wings while I was taking those pictures and I would have been given the same disregard as my normal, fully-clothed self was.

Times Square was an absolute monstrosity, almost schizophrenically frantic – but it was exactly as it looked in all the pictures I’ve seen. The metro system from Wall Street to 34th on the 2 Line was exactly like taking the El in Chicago. Greenwich Village was full of fetish shops and NYU students and everything in between. In short, nothing surprised me, and I felt like I blended in.

My only regret was not going to the Blue Note – a jazz club I’ve wanted to visit since something like 1994 – but we did have a drink at The Slaughtered Lamb, a pub with the most rockstar name *ever* and a logo that depicted a wolf, fangs bared, snarling at the moon, so that was a good consolation prize.

In short, I suppose I’m as guilty as anyone else in this country for wanting my memorials to be theme parks and my temples of consumption – Hersheytown for some, pubs like The Slaughtered Lamb for me – to be monuments to gluttony. And who am I kidding? I’m staying in rural Vermont right now, ready to get up early to take pictures of the changing New England leaves (which my sister says makes me a ‘leafer,’ a tourist who shows up in the fall for photos) and I’ll be in Salem, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening to exploit the memory of the witch trials.

I even bought a t-shirt at Strand, the famous ’18 Miles of Books’ store at Broadway and 12th when I visited this morning.

Sometimes hipster cynicism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.