I was out today, in my early stages of shopping for a car. I think that New York will look a lot different to me when I have a car. Then, I might know what they are talking about on the radio when they carry on about taking the upper level versus the lower level on some bridge I'm not sure I've ever seen.

Actually, I know the bridges around here pretty well. But I know them as a pedestrian, not a driver.

I used to think it was dangerous to walk over the bridges in town, but lately I've made a hobby of walking the length of as many bridges in NYC as time permits. I might make another try at the Brooklyn Bridge tomorrow.

I've heard many reports of friends-of-friends' next door neighbors' nephew (or something like that) getting the shit beat out of them on the Brooklyn Bridge, but I don't know anyone with direct experience.

I used to live right off the George Washington Bridge, which I knew at the time to be a pretty dangerous place. Unlike the Brooklyn Bridge stories people told me, there was ample reason to believe that the GWB was a crazy place to go for a stroll.

The window of my room was so close to the George Washington Bridge that when there was a traffic jam I could overhear people in the cars talking.

If you ever come in to Manhattan from New Jersey on the GWB and you go past the exit to the West Side Highway toward the FDR, look to your right at the first building , and look for the eastern-most window on the 2nd floor of that building. That was where I lived for about a year in 1991 and 1992.

Back in the day, you could have seen me leaning out of that window waving at you poor bastards stuck in midnight traffic. Some nights I'd hold up a can of Genessee Cream Ale to offer you a toast, and once in a while you'd get a laugh out of it.

That window was my vantage point for seeing the riots during the summer of 1992. There was serious looting and violence after the police killed a drug dealer by chasing him off the top of a roof.

This was the summer of Rodney King. It was hot as hell, everyone was out of work, and as I remember it the rioters announced that this was their chance to express how frustrated and pissed of they were about ... about EVERYTHING.

It felt dangerous to be in the middle of something like that. Somehow, when I saw people rioting on TV, I imagined they were expressing something universal. In my stupidity the L.A riots looked like the kind of thing all people would do if they had enough malcontented energy and, most importantly, the political agenda to support it. Hell, it almost looked like fun.

I didn't see the Washington Heights riots in that way while they happened. It reminded me, to my chagrin, that most of what I knew about Los Angeles was what I'd seen from police helicopter video.

I used to be afraid of a lot of things around here. Bridges were one thing, but for some reason it was the tall office buildings in midtown that most struck fear in me.

I look at them differently now. At worst, I am indifferent. At best I connect tall buildings to the metaphor of human aspirations and accomplishment.

I used to have soddenly romantic visions of impenetrable, mighty corporate fortresses offering opportunity for all Americans.

I now assume that behind the bold façades live dysfunctional bureaucracies over-staffed with hives of under-employed people assigned artificially limited responsibilities. I compare corporate America to the social life in the Hamptons: "Everyone" is at the scene and virtually no one is happy to be there.

Anyway, I'm shopping for a car, and as I walked toward some dealerships I saw this sign:

I wondered what would happen if I bought that sign and put "SORABJI.COM" on it. Who would come to this web site? Who would even remember how to spell the word? Probably not a lot of people.

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