Gee, Officer Krupke...

Fact: (TM Dwight Schrute) When Leonard Bernstein first took it into his head to create West Side Story (and what a wonderful idea that was, too. Who'd have ever thought that Shakespeare's most ridiculous tragedy could be so vastly improved with just a few crappy haircuts, bad Puerto Rican accents, and references to "rumbles" in the alley?) he was thinking of my neighborhood. That's right. In fact, he was thinking of the public housing project next door to my building, and over which my bedroom window looks. I don't really think much has changed in the intervening 50 years.

Sure, I've never seen a knife fight out my window, but there remains a sense of quiet foreboding mixed with desperation. In a city where no one stands still, lanes and alleys of this project always have at least a few stationary figures, no matter what time of the day or night. Just standing. Staring. Sometimes whistling, sometimes talking, but always waiting. And I don't know for what. For "something's coming I don't know what it is but I'll know soon as it shows?" For "Tonight, tonight, I'll see my love tonight?" For something slightly more ominous, like "A boy like that, who'd kill your brother?"

I see thousands of people a day, on the streets, on the subway, at the store, in the office, but they're always, constantly, inexorably moving, and there's something shockingly foreign about these people who just stand still. I watch them out of the corner of my eye as I stride confidently through the alley back to my apartment, my apartment which is literally 200 feet, but might as well be 200 light years away. My world is not their world, and when I take that short path, I know that I am nothing more than a guest in their strange and immobile world. I wonder what they're world is like, but in the end, I wonder if perhaps, I don't really want to know.