Tip off

When discussing the Left Bank or Haight-Ashbury, historians of all persuasions will agree on some basic arteries of truth to the Big Questions.  Where and when did it exist?  What were the major causes?  What were its lasting effects?  When the dust is through scattering and settles, early twenty-first century Brooklyn will still emit light to those looking back down the road of time.  I can see the talking heads decades before they speak.  "Brooklyn" will be in Williamsburg, primarily, but honorable mention will be given to anything serviced by the L or G.  "Brooklyn" will be a movement against consumption, a re-imagining of urban America and post-racism running in perfect concurrence with the Obama Era.  "Brooklyn" will be the model for new Bohemia's twenty-first resurgence in cities riddled with post-industrial blight. 

Of course, the capillaries will be subject to debate.  Some will overemphasize "Brooklyn", others will be too dismissive.  Some will ascribe certain influences and influencers too much meaning, others too little.   Some will think it started in the '90s, others will go with 9/11 because that makes for most convenience. 

As for the Final Curtain, this is a rare instance where we know the exact time and place of a cultural touchstone's coup de grace: Friday, September 28, 2012 at the intersection of Atlantic & Flatbush. 

I speak, of course, of the Barclays Center, that faux-rusty oval that bathes in the light of the Best Buy at the Atlantic Terminal.   The developers convinced the government to kick out the residents, under-deliver on sustainable jobs, and destroyed more than a few neighborhood fabrics along the way.  This is already sufficiently documented.

The true meaning of the Barclays Center is Entertainment.  "Brooklyn" came about because a generation of the world's best & brightest did not want the friendly sponsors of Must See TV to decide their hours of leisure.  Together, they decided that could be done in-house.  "Brooklyn" was a back-to-basics with little things like human conversation or witnessing the performance of music in the same room.  You met the artist, shook hands with the chef, and read the blog of the person you went to school with.  It was still Entertainment and privy to the same critique as being all window dressing and distraction while the rest of the world imploded, but there was some authenticity there.  We put a name and a face to our favorite forms of escape.

Now, Brooklyn will have it piped in via the Beast of Convenience.  We can buy our season tickets to watch big men run back-and-forth.   We no longer have to leave our borough to see concerts featuring elaborate choreography on stage.  We can make a quick pass through the mall before going home, just in case we need anything.  For the moment, that's not really us.  But the people for whom that appeals are coming.  And they're likely going to want a parking space.

Does this mean that it wasn't in motion beforehand or that its vestige will entirely disappear?  Of course not.  Brooklyn (not "Brooklyn") is on the doorstep of being the hub of the entrepreneur and creative professional.  Before, "Brooklyn" was the type of place marketers in rimmed glasses and slim cut-shirts would call "edgy" and "hip."  Now, Brooklyn will be where those marketers live.  The artists and Bohemians are leaving town.  Artisanal pickles and bike lanes will be the last remnants of The Circus.  I can see the handlers locking up all the tigers and elephants.  The clowns are taking off their shoes.  It's time I grabbed one more funnel cake and got back in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl, just for nostalgia's sake. 

Counting

It happens this time of year.  Autumn, in both nickname and manipulative manners, is entirely geared toward descension.   The leaves fall.  The temperature drops.  The light dims.  We turn our calendar pages until but one remains.  And then.  And then.  And then.

This is one we actually don't think about.  Okay, New Year's Resolutions matter for the forethought, but nobody really follows through with them except sadists and the overly religious.  People are generally more concerned with where they'll be New Year's Eve than they are for the first three months of any given year, unless they're about to give birth.  And Spring?  It is lovely, except that it's never quite hot enough for those most miserable during Winter, and they're always the most vocal.  Summer is unequivocally cruel and only celebrated by those in educational institutions and the clinically stupid.  Show me someone who enjoys humidity and temperatures north of 90 and I'll show you the who's who of most likely to camp out for the newest iPhone.

Fall is the only time of year people do not want to end, die-hard snow-sport enthusiasts excepted.  The next day will likely not be any better than today.  There will be less light and more cold, but it's not that we're dreading tomorrow; conversely, we still have a few major holidays remaining.  The Good Ones.  With our families and shit like that.  So we stand in the one time of year that we're content enough to just let it be today.  The sales of Nativity calendars are nothing if not pure irony.

So then I found myself drumming on a steering wheel yesterday, counting the days remaining in this particular post.  Eight.  It's a once-per-week gig, and I will miss one day for "vacation", so it's expiration is not all that imminent.  I'd be lying if I said the counting was entirely arbitrary, because the act was in anticipation of The Big Move.  I'd also be amiss were I to describe the act as a desperate bargaining act for deliverance or some self-pleading for assurance that it would all soon enough be over.  I like the job fine enough, even if it doesn't make me wet and lustfully ripping off my garments.

Maybe that's just the metaphor for Life as I happen to find it right now.  It looks super great and we're all having fun, but maybe there's something lacking below the surface.  Not that I wish it to change right now; I might even be in the autumn of my New York Existence for a nice little bit.  I just might take a little more time to appreciate all those things that should be given a little more time to be appreciated.  Good friends.  Late night bars.  People with whom I agree politically on every street corner and nook and cranny in between.  Let's throw museums in there, even if it's disingenuous. 

And I'll keep counting.  Some days it will be in anticipation.  Others in sheer terror.  The one certainty is that it will always be down.

I was young

Every time one returns to a place they were formerly is an opportunity to gauge what hath time wrought.  We can wax nostalgic about the smell of a baseball glove or out-of-body ourselves when the radio sounds out that same tune playing when we got our first backwoods handjob.  Any place we've been is a place of memory, thickness varying.  And when one knows of their imminent disappearance or departure, each moment might as well be sealed in amber in their own mind's eye.

Is there anything special about Brooklyn's 7th Avenue?  Arguably, I guess.  It doesn't belong in the guide book, but there are far worse places to drop your kids off at school or do your grocery shopping along.  It's also one whose pavement I know very well, not from having lived along it, but from years of commuting by bike or patronizing its bars or stopping into one or another of its establishments for any one of a number of things.  It is there, just like I was, over the years and again last evening.  It will be there like I soon will no longer.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I will not be the sole party breaching this contract of memory.  7th Avenue has changed since I first saw its pavement, though less than the rest of this Great Goddamn Apple.  This city has more identity crises than to be found in any returning soldier, a product of the millions of delusional dreamers and quixotic outcasts who stuff themselves into micro-living spaces in the name of personal freedom.  We roll in like thunder and leave like the last drops of rain caught on post-storm branches; even when we fall, we still find ourselves clinging.  And while we're stuck on that branch, if we take the time to look around, we see that the world has changed around us.  In shades and nuances, sure.  But when we're a part of the bigger storm, some of us find that the difference is worth remark.

When did you live in New York, they will ask.  2005-2012, I will respond.  2005-2012, they will repeat, mostly to themselves, and they will stare up at the ceiling deep in thought.  I will wait a few seconds to respond, out of courtesy, and when they have not been able to hazard a prompt reply I will then inform them:

I was young, once, and I moved to New York in the latter stages of the Boutique Dumpling Phase and the onset of the Falafel Craze.  Cupcakes were still in high fashion, long before the advent of the Mini-Cupcake.  I worked hard and paid rent and lived my life well through the Banh Mi Sandwich Explosion and the Ramen Age.  I reasonably partook in Meatball Mayhem, saw the Meatpie Emergence for the sparkle and fade for what it would be from the get go.  I always respected the food truck and remember fondly the days when coffee shops had couches and acoustic rock, before it was fashionable to transform them into Scandinavian industrial spaces.  There was but one Chipotle that I knew of.

Back when I moved here, compact discs were still sold inside stores, not exclusively on sidewalks.  Smart phones were non-existent, so I saw the last days of New York's See-And-Be-Seen Era, before it became Check-In-To-Be-Checked-Out. 

I lived in the East Village during its great epoch between AIDS and needle-sharing and its resurgence as post-fraternity row.  I had nights out in Williamsburg and Greenpoint back when there was a discernible difference between them.  I lived in Prospect Heights when one couldn't find a bagel, but had several options to get their hair braided.  I was here when Park Slope stayed open past midnight, when Crown Heights was a No Go, DUMBO was for artists, and remember that, sometimes, it felt like I was trying to gentrify Sunset Park all by myself.  I lived in Brooklyn before the French started saying tres Brooklyn.

I was surprised by the inelasticity of the mustache and never quite got swept into flannel.  I never wore a pair of jean shorts and stayed away from tank tops and neon-rimmed plastic sunglasses.  I always went for the beer-and-a-shot, folded my slice properly, smoked weed in bar gardens, pissed on shiny condos or abandoned lots (never single-family residences or architectural gems), told people I was a writer, Shazam'd good tunes, read The Onion on the shitter, drank from The Turkey's Nest in McCarren, and was down to go where you were in case it offered something better.  And through it all, there I was: earbuds in, a full beard, riding atop an old Schwinn, comfortable inside my hoodie.

I was young, once.

Never forget

There's not much that makes the Big Book.  Under the bold assumption humanity will not have self-immolated entirely by then, students of American history two centuries hence will still know 1492.  Lexingon, Concord.  Abe and the First World War, if only for the great prelude to its more captivating sequel.  The Cold War will be a highlighted term, but not a subject that receives even a full class period.  Obama's picture will be there and George W. Bush will be mentioned.  Ditto Iraq, Afghanistan.  On the syllabus these latter four will all fall under The 9/11 Era.  If truth is objective and we set aside our fears of third rails and conversational bogeyman, we are left but no choice than to give credit where it is due.  Osama bin Laden claimed that he would bring America to its knees.  He was right.

This is the one where I unequivocally state that what happened on September 11, 2001 was terrible, horrific, tragic, or any other adjective that seems woefully inadequate.  I'd use them all, but you get it.  Burned to death by ignited jet fuel at a white-collar job on a Tuesday morning ranks right up there for worst ways to go.  The dream is to expire in close proximity to ones you love, painless and complete.  Many of these people spent their final hour on the PATH train at rush hour. 

With my sympathy credentials established, we can resume talking about the great villain who, in all his hubris and prescience, predicted that he would get the biggest domino to topple.  The statement was pure bluster and I'm sure even he was astonished at what ensued.  There had to be several follow-up questions to those with news of the outside world while he was holed up in Tora Bora: 

They did what?!
Really?!
You've got to be fucking with me.....really?!

A good quarterback always thanks his line and so too should Osama have given proper acknowledgment to his supporting cast.  We all know the story.  America's first special needs Commander-in-Chief with Dr. Strangelove calling the shots at Number Two.  White bread simpletons manning the levers of executive oversight, channeling some bizarre bloodlust that breeds in two-stoplight towns.  Corporate America wrote the checks, cashed in on a generous net, and everybody did their part to help the free press stuff its nuts down the part of the throat where the truth is supposed to come out.   We doubled-down on consumption and discovered that, oddly enough, having millions of the country's Best & Brightest flipping real estate in the sunny states or watching numbers scroll on computer screens as their principle occupation was not exactly the cornerstone of a robust economic model.  There've been a couple other things too.

The unspeakable tragedy of September 11 is the tragedy of what is not spoken about.  Somewhere in the past eleven years our Great Leaders made a killing off our sucker bets in the Shell Game of our iconography.  We traded the good parts of the Bill of Rights for the unadulterated reverence of a pair of office buildings. 

I would say it's propaganda, but I don't think it's deliberate.  The irony is simply too thick, even if the projection is so painstakingly simple: Let us mourn all those who died in the office buildings.  Let us never forget the office buildings.  Let it be known that we will not allow our office buildings to be attacked.  Let us now build more office buildings, and we will all work in them patriotically.  Except for the ones we need to go do the dirty work.  We'll think about them while we're reading our cell phones at Qdoba.

And it's eleven years later and tomorrow we will talk about how we are all victims again.  Those who actually did lose a loved one, whether it be that day or in the conflicts our Great Leaders leveraged out of our fear, will find the grieving grounds a little crowded.  Sometimes the bumper stickers don't sate our need for attention.  We'll all be happy to know that history is taking note.

Moving day

Not the Big One; we've still got to flip the calendar for that one.  This was of the relocation variety; more something that occasions a gripe on Facebook than a warm and fuzzy personal missive to all those known and others that could have been known better.  Just put out the bulletin and see who wants a couple Friday evening beers in exchange for hauling some rice bags stuffed with hangers and neglected shoes to the fourth floor of the next place you will never truly sink into.  Ah, home.  Or, the best approximate for what a home could be for someone transient even by Brooklyn's loose standards.

What floor was it on?  How many guys helped out?  How many have you done?  This sadistic act of swapping living spaces is the Big Apple's national sport.  If the ancestors could picture me sweating in a stairway, laboring over a Case Magic stuffed with CDs I haven't listened to in a decade, they would've toughed out the Potato Famine.  And the Bolsheviks.  The reprisals after the Spring of Nations would have been nothing compared to this sad envisioning of their progeny. 

This is what keeps us packing light.  This is what keeps us vigilant.  This is what makes us truly New Yorkers.  Moving in New York is the only thing that makes you feel more naked than the day you were born.  At birth, you're bald, covered in blood, slathered in acne, and more resembling a Mongolian appetizer than a living soul, but at least you haven't developed your conscience.  Stand outside a brownstone next to the same flannel bedspread you used in your college dorm room brushing against the urine-soaked pavement, beside a crate full of books that include the Spanish-translated Harry Potter series, and then tell me you could possibly feel more vulnerable.  Throw in the fact that it's all in a borrowed Volvo that won't start and you've just promised food to a half-dozen and things can get a little tense.  Not like September's hot enough as it is.  Fortunately, we're resourceful, New Yorkers that is, so we know to go down to the auto yard at Clifton and ask if they know someone with a van.  He's Franky and he'll show up in a half-hour, and the next thing you know you're out $60 but it's nighttime, Evan Williams sitting beside you, and you can stare out at the bags containing everything you own, and you know that you'll unpack most of them.  You might even hang one of the framed pictures.  But not too many.  Best not get carried away now.

Temporary digs for temporary people.  People do not move to New York and have their Oklahoma Moment: stick a flag in the ground, spit against the wind, talk about where they'll milk and the strong farm hands they'll breed.  This is the city for the tortured souls, those who want to treat their life like a concrete Slip n' Slide with a broken hose.  They hand you beers along the way, but the only certainty after the experience is that you went on the ride and that you're somehow better off for it.  It's a bit like the military, but our tattoos are not supposed to have a common thread. 

Which is all to say......something, but What Exactly seems to be a bit elusive.  All I really know is that I should be having Poignant Thoughts about how this will be my Final Apartment in the great New York City Experiment, but that still feels a bit too early.  Or too late?  By this point, I don't even know.  I'll just stare at my books and think about how I really don't want to read Faulkner.  I'll look at an African mask and think about how I don't want to hang it.  I'll look at my sheets and think about "making my bed", but I'll just refresh the Evan Williams and give myself a mulligan.  I just got here, after all.  Best not to push myself too much.  I'm newly born and fully exposed and feel like, for at least this night, I can be a thumbsucker once again. 

For those keeping score at home
0 for 3 last week, including a Buffs loss.  I didn't get laid, but might as well check to see if I got the clap by some vengeful deity anyway.  Fortunately, Sportsbook.com gives a bonus registration credit and I've got $15, all of which will go to Oklahoma State (-10.5) over a shaky Arizona squad.  It's still Alabama's title to lose, and this feels like the week A&M justifies its conference presence with a Solid Win over the Gators.  Georgia's good, but they're consistency is in the early season choke job and that just might come at Faurot Field.  Buffs, unimpressively, by 17.  LSU mauls the Huskies.  Don't be surprised to see Sparty fall.  The game slate is shit this week, so, in other words, a great one to spend outside.  You'll find me on a barstool anyway.  And never, never-fucking-ever, wager confidently in the first week of the season.  It's time to get professional.

On hurricanes

A tree grows in Brooklyn.  A willow weeps in Louisiana.

Let's allow our subject to broaden to growth and survival.  Time and place.  Let's speak of life's ephemeral moments and its indelible permanence.  After all, we now face the onset of autumn, our annual changing of colors and the subsequent arboreal casts' shedding in preparation for frozen winter.  A practice since long before Whitman, yet one that seems new each time around the bend.  If you recall, Whitman did see a live-oak growing and I can't seem to remember just why I began writing about trees.

Ah, yes, Louisiana: that's where he saw it growing.  That's also where last week's radar projected a giant windy cinnamon roll would reach this continent and wreak some serious shit on man and sedentary nature alike.  There was some attention paid.  We're talking multiple refreshments of The Weather Channel homepage, over-the-shoulder glimpses of televised weather reports in other people's homes, and a few attempts to see if Twitter had Isaac trending while I was relieving my bowels.  It most certainly was and they most certainly were.

My first thought was for the health and well-being of all who lay in its path; their safety primarily, the preservation of their possessions and surrounding environs a not-insignificant, albeit distant, second.

As if.

I was thinking about me.  True confession suggests noting that I wished Hurricane Isaac would not destroy New Orleans before I lived there.  Bear in mind, never did it cross my mind that I hoped it would not destroy the crescent city while I lived there.   After all, that would be a story.  The hurricane leveling a great city before I could live there would be like talking about not seeing my favorite band because I couldn't swap my shift at the California Pizza Kitchen; like turning down sex with Dream Girl because I couldn't resist masturbating to a rerun of Silk Stalkings.  It's describing something you would have done, but never did, and the whole moral of the story is that you'll seize any opportunity to tell a story. 

I didn't want to be the guy who was going to move to New Orleans but then it got destroyed.
I didn't want to be the guy who thinks of another place to move just to keep in accordance with his calendar.
I didn't want to be the guy who gets lost any further.
I didn't want The Great Spirit to send me an additional, unequivocal semaphore that my lofty ambitions are entirely fucked.

But then, it didn't.  And then, the clouds parted to reveal the post-storm landscape for what it was, and what it still remains.  And we're not talking about a desire to wade through waist-high shitwater for its own sake, or for bragging rights as the experience's derivative.   The point is that as I sat in air-conditioned coffee shops and condo-shaded wine bars, I saw a tree growing in Brooklyn.  Several of them.  For a few, their roots splintered the pavement at just that right distance between the curb and someone's front yard.  For others, they were of middling height and undignified stature and placed as though they were the final answer of some coffee-addled Yale landscape architect's senior thesis.  New York campaigns to plant one million trees.  New York tells its dogs not to piss on this one here, that one there.  New York sees a tree as an appreciable asset; something to dull the neon din of that goddamn Duane Reade across the way.  In Louisiana, if it can remain through a Hurricane, so it shall remain. 

And we're stepping back here.  Projecting.  Because there is the city where trees are a part of some vision for the next urban aesthetic, and there is the city that just wants a reminder that something can survive.  The city that reinvents and the city that rebuilds.  The city trying so hard to become that urban planner's wet dream, and the city that just wants to get back to what it was.  Both are so desperate.

But then again, so am I.

And so I see a place where people live because it's close to the F train.  And I see another where life must be so great that they would rather spend weeks bailing out the shitwater of dead neighbors than moving to higher ground.

Never eat in an empty restaurant.  A teetotaler is not to be trusted.  Aberrations abound, but show me the city nobody would ever struggle to live in, and I'll pull out the atlas and point out one million places that aren't New Orleans.

Bring on the shitwater; I see a Live-Oak growing.