I went into the city the other day — you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it was. Every office, every bar, there was a clump of people standing outside smoking and no room to go around them. On such a gray day you could hardly tell if you were inside or out. Throw in packs of taxis and all the delivery trucks and it felt like there was twice as much carbon as oxygen.

Moving through midtown was like crawling through the ventilation system of a sewage treatment plant. I was popping acetaminophen every two hours to push back a toxic headache and came home greasy and worn, my bowels frozen in ladylike terror at the places where they would have been called on to perch.

Is there any true architectural beauty at all in that city, any block or view that ranks with Paris or the European capitals? Is there a single café where you feel welcome to spend the afternoon talking to an old friend? Is there anything at all the city does well besides retail? 20% of its mental life is shoes, in shop windows and on the feet of strangers. In three subway cars you only see one newspaper being read.

What does this city offer but a challenge to our idea of comfort? Art that aims to shock its benefactors... Dead-eyed women whose bodies are a feast for the eyes, deadfaced women with bodies to die for, deadening lust... The city is like a gigantic obstacle course. All New York really has to offer now is the struggle to survive.

In movies when they show a person walking down a crowded New York sidewalk the people are always mysteriously headed in the same direction. Navigation is actually a little more complicated than that.

To those who notice, every sidewalk is a fashion runway. A surprising number of men were wearing hooded sweatjackets under blazers, as were both the friends I was meeting up with and myself. It was a chilly fall day, early in the season, a transitional moment for people who hadn’t quite gotten their middling cold look together — or perhaps people wanted to themselves embody transition, to cover all their bases by straddling the line between gentry and working-class. A few women were still bare-legged, wanting one more chance to show off a favorite feature, and two or three dashing men wore sweaters without jackets like campus heroes striding around chest-first after a victory over their rival.

Many cabs had decorative patterns painted on their hoods, pastel flakes and psychedelic reptilian scales, a civic art project whose cheerfulness I appreciated, even if it was for the sake of the tourists.

There’s been a citywide outbreak of ATM booths, some of which take up almost as much room as two small restaurants. I guess the visibility makes people feel safer while the clean bright spaces also double as ads for the banks, another sign of how far the city has fallen into the clutches of Wall Street. There’s a Whole Foods squeezed in every couple blocks now – time to buy stock.

In the city I see the servers and the served. Of course, the service sector exists in most economies but elsewhere the lines aren’t so sharp that one doesn’t assume those who are being served themselves serve at other times. The difference is fashion, which here marks luck’s clear line between the children of men. Some people dress so luxuriously one can’t imagine it’s their day off from a Starbucks apron. And of course, it’s not.

What service there is is mostly superfluous. Why should one speak to a maitre d’ before taking an open seat? Like sales clerks quietly on the watch for thieves, the maitre d’ performs a secret social function, in this case discreetly sorting the clientele to better or worse tables based on a quick read of their status. Like the doorman, this position can only exist in a stratified society. Meanwhile out in the pragmatic suburbs even the one function I never imagined could become self-serve has: cashiers are vanishing as customers ring up their own purchases at Home Depot and Wal-Mart chains.

And yet it is only in the city that one sees two people walking together in animated conversation. This is what I have come back for but I’m not sure I am still fit for it. I can barely bring myself to ask my friend a question, to get through the preliminaries and warm up my throat so we can start to pour out again the golden music of dissection and lament.

We had lunch at a new diner that was trying to bring a homey small-town feel to East 23rd Street near Madison Avenue; I believe we passed several with a similar goal. Everything cost 30% more than I thought it should but I disregarded the prices as if on vacation.

In the course of the day we went into a Barnes and Noble, an Old Navy, Dave’s Army Surplus on Sixth (which was filled with Europeans), an Urban Outfitters, and a Starbucks. More chains have come to the city since I left, Home Depot, Chipotle, even the despicable Raymour & Flanigan. Another distinction of the city is being eroded; soon it will just be art jobs and bars.

One of my friends had five appointments the next week trying to find daycare for his daughter. The appointments as he understood it were financial auditions he couldn’t hope to pass. Currently scraping by as an adjunct, he explained the university's newest money-making scheme to us, which involves requiring all students in one of their programs to do a junior year abroad so they can start letting in 25% more students than their city housing currently allows. It’s a brilliant off-site storage scheme, kind of like those airport parking services where you drop off your car and they drive it off the lot and later when you pick it up it has six extra miles on the odometer and sticky pine needles all over the windshield.

The only thing scarier than today’s corporations are these large institutions which are run like corporations, blindly maximizing revenues but without ever releasing their profits back into the economy, feudal dragons sitting atop a tributary hoard of coins and golden goblets.

New York offers a surge of energy, a current one joins that carries one forward ceaselessly along the sooty streets, being looked at and looking, resting and soon rising again to march. I sometimes think of it as a grand ball at which instead of whirling in circles the dancers move in straight lines down long avenues and across perpendicular streets to the grinding modern accompaniment of traffic and construction noise. Energy is great when you’re young and have energy to match it with but as you age it turns threatening and starts to drain you.

We don’t have a favorite restaurant, a favorite bar, a hang-out, even a general neighborhood to call our own. My New York was always the street and what I knew of it was mostly what I could see from the street. Beautiful women in designer clothes would go in one door of a hotel while ordinary women in uniforms went in and out another; I was never inside.

I saw college kids work for free in the hopes of getting a steady job, day and night absorbing the sensibility which is itself the city’s most important and valuable commodity; if you have it, two hundred words are worth three thousand dollars.

I saw degrees of success aspired to or attained legible in the warp and woof of every passing human garment… Desire invited everywhere but never manifesting, everyone cool and hard as if desired but undesiring… Only mad beggars laugh here, and only the insane talk to strangers.

I saw street music and the red light district killed off by the chief of police, along with an unfortunate African street peddler who had reached into his pocket to prove his name.

Race and its considerations seem suspended here in lower Manhattan, returning only when the subway goes above Columbia or into Queens and the car quickly changes color in one or two stops. This is because every other prejudice has been replaced by money and a slick, heartless, joyless version of beauty.

My urban forays always turn out punishing marches through a landscape that offers little refuge. Twice I bought tea for the right to sit, the price reminding me how unwelcome I was to stay.

If civilization is a triumph over our natural instincts as Freud maintained, then New York is the pinnacle of our civilization. The paradox of the city is that it is a horrible place to live because everybody wants to live there and that everyone still wants to live there anyway.

Its rubies are all plucked by the highest bidder and safely stowed out of sight; what's left is unlivable, overrun, inches from crumbling into ruin. It's hard to see the beast clearly from the dark of its belly but from where I stand New York looks like an absolute shithole.