I hate to say this but some things in life are just more interesting than sex. I arrived in New York City yesterday afternoon — fresh from a long-ago upbringing Southern Appalachia and more recently via rain-washed, sun-blessed Seattle — and I’m just in love with this barkingly (and irrelevantly) dirty, wide-open, light, airy, and non-incomprehensibly human city. OMG! It’s beautiful at almost every scale.

I’m staying in a cute little hotel near Bleeker and Hudson streets in Greenwich Village. Just walking out the door is a “cultural experience” — another word for “what did you expect, aliens?” that politely wallpapers over 10,000 stereotypes and expectations derived from people who experience that which is only new as “other.”

As I walk around I keep having these breakthroughs, about which I won’t bore you but that are as nourishing as rich broth.

I would like to point out two things I saw on an afternoon outing (not the morning one where I walked, cheerfully but absolutely lost, for almost two hours before literally turning around and seeing my hotel.)

The Magnolia Bakery

The Magnolia Bakery, around the corner. Line out the door. And down the street. A harassed-looking woman in an apron letting people in in ones and twos, explaining that it’s busy and people have to wait their turn. Heavenly aromas wafting out of a vent window on the side, redolent of butter and vanilla and seven-minute frosting. When I asked someone at the back of the line what the deal was he said “the cupcakes.” I said “everybody?” His friend said “yes.” I said “well they do smell awfully nice.” And she added “...and the bakery was on ‘Sex and the City.’”

And yet, just one block away from these mainly young, pretty single-looking “Sex in the City” watchers there was also

The Bleeker Street Playground

The Bleeker Street Playground is full of the healthy byproducts of real-live sex in the city — almost certainly this city — and (even less remarked on) the goodness-you-still-around, no-less-lovely-than-before parents in the playground, parents who were having real adult sex in the city at roughly the same time actresses and actors with roles like “Cary” and “Samantha” and “Big” (I think it was “Big?”) were only pretending to do so.

But here’s the thing. I’m not scolding when I say things like this. I think it’s wonderful that all this, a location for a show, a Mecca for fans, and a playground for what’s real, coexist so naturally here.

(Loved the bookshop across the street by the way.)

Oh, and lest you think it’s all philosophizing and ruminating, I’m temporarily breaking my photo-posting fast