Brooklyn

Very, very recently, as in 2.5 days ago, I picked up my suitcases and wheeled them into Brooklyn.  The part of Brooklyn where no plaid is worn, no microbreweries exist, and contains probably not a single resident that had ever considered consuming either.  You guys, this is the part of Brooklyn where you don't stumble home drunk at three in the morning.  If you have to go home at three in the morning in these areas, which I stubbornly remain prone to do, you walk quickly on high alert.

What is more alarming, though, is that in so far as I haven't been attacked, robbed, raped, or killed (*knocking on my new giant wooden desk*), I rather like it.  Yes, that's right, I said it: I rather like Brooklyn.  These parts that haven't been gentrified, they have a certain no-nonsense character to them.  There are no 19-year-old NYU kids taking life seriously and reciting poetry in cafes that charge $3.50 for organic Columbian coffee.  Instead, people here don't chat at all.  They walk quickly down the street in silence, and mostly alone.  Young mothers don't wheel around strollers.  They carry their spawn with their own arms and speed down the sidewalk even faster than my signature lightening speed.  Even old people are practically flying down the sidewalks with their canes and walkers, making me feel hella embarrassed and wondering Why the hell am I walking so slowly? What is wrong with my legs Goddammit!  Sometimes people stop inside a tiny storefront deli and come out with a 8oz. papercup of coffee with no labels about 2 seconds later.  And everything basically costs 99 cents.  As my friend Will says, yup, I pretty much live in the Harlem of Brooklyn.

And yet when you start looking around a bit more, you see that life here is much the same as life elsewhere: people running errands, going to work, carrying on in the same basic way that we all do no matter where we live.  When I slide open my curtains in the morning, people are walking their dogs, buying their morning coffee, going to the subway to go to work.  And when I come home at night, even though there ceases to be any white or asian people on the train many, many stops before I get to my own stop, my fellow riders are at ease napping in their seats, reading fashion magazines, listening to their iPhones, playing with their MacBook Pros.  No, I do not know how anybody can afford a MacBook Pro, or for that matter want to hand over their life savings to Steve Jobs.  But whatever, to each his or her own.

There is a big tree outside the window where my desk is situated.  Simply cannot wait for the tree to start blooming, and for the two suspicious-looking identical black SUVs parked right under the tree to go away.