Turn, Season

When I first started this blog, I thought I wanted it to be like Moby Dick, or the Old Farmer's Almanac my parents had when I was little: Open to one page and read an argument for the ontological disposition of whales. Turn to another for a limerick or story, short enough to digest with breakfast. Instead, I wound up writing mostly about bands I saw during what I think of as the "Wonderful Underworld" epoch of North Brooklyn; and then once that was over, little essays about my feelings and a brooding annual evaluation of my Progress as a Rake. 

But now that I have settled a bit, I would like to write more often and more in the Almanac mode. So here is a morning chapter:

The best tuna salad in the world

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients:

One can of tuna from the store

One or two stalks of celery, diced

One shallot clove, minced

About half of one kosher dill pickle, seeds removed, minced (a couple of Claussen's "sandwich slices" work well for this)

One large spoonful (like a soup spoon) of mayonnaise

One tablespoon sriracha

1/4 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning

Ground black pepper to taste

Mix the mayonnaise, sriracha, paprika, Italian seasoning, and pepper in a medium-sized bowl. Discard any excess oil from the can of tuna and add the tuna to the bowl, using a fork to flake it apart. Add the remaining ingredients to the bowl and mix well. Put the tuna salad into a sandwich or enjoy with crackers or something.

A pretty good green salad

Yield: 1-2 servings

Salad parts:

A couple of big handfuls of arugula and baby spinach leaves

One handful of cherry tomatoes, sliced in half

One handful of baby carrots, sliced into thin rounds

One scant handful of dried cranberries

One handful of walnuts, crumbled by hand 

Dressing:

A splash of extra virgin olive oil

A splash of apple cider vinegar

1/4 teaspoon of spicy mustard (Kosciusko Spicy Brown Mustard works well for this)

1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano

A splash of lemon juice

Ground black pepper to taste

Whip the dressing ingredients together, then pour over the the salad parts.

City of Dogs

We lost David's campaign.

I'd been knocking doors for him on Tuesdays and Sundays, more frequently and more regularly than I think I've ever come out for one of our candidates. Per usual, I took some time off before election day to canvass even more; and then on election day itself, I woke up at 4:30am and took a car service from Sunset Park out to a house on Coleman St. in Marine Park, right on the edge Flatlands, to help a nice older Bernie supporter lady named Carol run one a volunteer dispatch site for the southeastern section of the district. My site co-captain Chris and Carol and I got everything set up in her back yard in the cool, pre-dawn twilight; our first volunteer arrived for his shift at 6:00am. By 9:00am the sun was creeping across the patio and it was clear that it was going to be a blazingly hot day. I spent the next eight hours turfing and dispatching canvassers and occasionally taking refuge in the A/C in Carol's furnished basement.

In the late afternoon I got fidgety and picked up a visibility shift at a nearby high school. I staked out a corner diagonally across from a mouthy Kevin Parker visibility guy who was flagging down cars in the intersection to hand them lit. (A weird and bad tactic, but a strategic step up from most machine incumbent visibility hires, who usually just sit under a tent with a boom box.) In the final hours of voting, the campaign sent me to a synagogue on Ralph Ave. At 9:00pm when voting closed, I asked one of the poll workers if turnout was any higher than in the June Assembly primaries (in which we'd gotten washed in races that should have been slam dunks for us, like Samy Nemir Olivares' in AD54). She said it was maybe a bit worse, which I felt immediately in the pit of my stomach. A few minutes later, Chris and his wife picked me up in their car on the way to the results party. We found out en route that we'd probably lost.

A year's effort! For a result that took minutes to compute. I felt gutted, and like a child I didn't try to hide how I felt at the party. I suppose part of it was that I'd been so deep in the work and seen so many other people deep in the work that I was sure we were gonna pull it out. I could just feel it, you know? In my fugue state I'd forgotten all of the reasons the campaign was a long shot: The Bad Unions supporting the incumbent, the self-righteous fake progressive spoiler who wouldn't drop out, the mid-campaign redistricting that ratcheted up the difficulty of the turf. It was sort of... existentially embarrassing to be brought back to reality so quickly. I drank a few seltzers-and-bitters and limped home on the subway. A rotten night. On the platform at Atlantic Ave. some time around 2:00am I saw a Kurt Fuller-looking dude wearing a "Biaggi for Congress" t-shirt over his button-down shirt. Well, I thought, at least that guy is having a worse night than me.

The following weekend Nina and I flew to Mexico City.

I hadn't left the country in three years, and Nina'd built up some vacation time that needed to be spent. CDMX was an enthusiastic compromise destination. This guy's requirement: Not a beach. It's not a beach! It's an almost unbelievable geographic premise, actually: A sprawling metropolis physically built around the sacred architecture of multiple ancient civilizations. A tropical London, but cleaner and prettier with better food. And not actually tropical—the temperature in the city never rose above 75 degrees for the duration of our stay, and often dipped into the 50s in the evenings. And yet it was greener than I expected, with towering rubber trees and palm trees and Jacarandas draped with lianas, and brightly colored flowers exploding on every side street and down the greenways built in the middle of almost every major thoroughfair.

CDMX is enormous, and its major geographic partitions are called delegaciones but I think you can think of them practically as big neighborhoods. We'd booked accommodation in Roma, a formerly fancy (?) part of the city downgraded to shabby chic after the earthquake in 1985. It's now full of coffee shops, and—strangely enough—book and vinyl record stores that actually receive foot traffic. The first full day of our trip we walked around the neighborhood, admiring the parks and plazas, and exploring a collection of artwork at Museo del Objeto del Objeto made by patients at a local "psychiatric rehabilitation facility" (prison, really). My favorite artist was a guy named Enrique who'd drawn an endless series of tableaus of anime muscle guys going down on anime girls with bat wings. On a recommendation from Chi who'd spent several years living in CDMX I ate an ethereally good avocado-and-mint cemita at Panadería Rosetta.

The second full day we were there we took a bus north to San Juan Teotihuacán to see the pyramids, leaving from the CDMX version of Penn Station, filled with fast food outlets and bakery stalls where the pan dulces were crawling with honeybees. We stopped outside the entrance to the site to examine some enormous nopales growing by the side of the path. We were part way through taking pictures of them before we realized we were standing on top of a nest of fire ants. The site itself is a sort stone avenue lined with built. The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, which are just staggeringly huge, are positioned at either end, and the Pyramid of Quetzlcoatl is sort of in between. There is scrub grass and wildflowers and what we realized were pink peppercorn trees growing everywhere. Despite the presence of hawkers selling and noisily demonstrating little mouth devices that simulate the roar of a leopard, the city of the gods was very quiet. A half dozen stray yellow dogs wandered around in the shade of the pyramids, politely begging for food and water from visitors. Some of the dogs had distended nipples from having recently given birth. They seemed like they knew things.

After stopping to rest and buy Pinguinos from a vending machine (and accidentally catching some of the dogs having sex) we visited the on-site museum. A figure who appeared again and again in sculpture and mural work was Huehueteotl slash Xiuhtecuhtli, the "old god," the old man of the fire. I was really taken with his appearance and overall nasty vibe! The ancient Mesoamericans really tapped into a resonant vein of godhood with him. Witness him: Stooped, emaciated but indestructible; sneering toothlessly as he emerges from the darkness lit flickeringly by the heavy brazier he somehow carries on his head. The old man demands blood sacrifice at the mile markers of your life; he sees you become old in due course, standing by with leering fascination as you fill up with bitterness and regret. The snarling old man who outlives you.

We took the subway home from the bus station, passing through La Raza station where - instead of advertisements - the walls of the pedestrian tunnels were given over to a large educational display on the science of dark matter and the history of the universe. A long section of tunnel was kept dark except for glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Yr fave (the MTA) could never!

Everyone told us to set aside a full day to visit the Museo Nacional de Antropología, so that's what we did. It's a great museum, really comprehensive; maybe similar in scope to AMNH, minus the animals. After uneasily clocking more than a few variations on Huehueteotl as he surfaced in the pantheons of all the major Mesoamerican societies, we took a walk through the Bosque de Chapultepec. We crossed a footbridge over Circuito Bicentenario into Condesa, pausing to watch a helicopter weave its way between the skyscrapers in Cuauhtémoc. We ate dinner at El Tizoncito, where they claim to have invented the taco al pastor. They were pretty good!

The next day we headed down to Coyoacán to visit the respective museum-houses of Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, as well as Diego Rivera's personal indigenous art collection, Museo Anahuacalli. I had maybe the best hot chocolate of my life at Café El Jarocho. Trotsky's house does what it says on the tin: You can poke around in the actual building, preserved (in theory) in the state it was in when he was murdered. I saw The Prophet's toilet. We touched the oven knobs in the kitchen and looked at the hutches in the courtyard garden where the Bronsteins kept their rabbits. Naturally, there were roses growing around the hammer-and-sickle cenotaph. (I touched that, too.) Frida's house is hugely popular—you have to wait on line to get in, and they kind of herd you through it. There's not much to it, though; all of her really famous work is in museums and galleries. So the house is mainly worth seeing for its preserved studio workspaces and day beds and kitchen and such. I didn't really care for the Museo Anahuacalli, which seemed to me like not much more than a rich guy's hoard of artifacts, presented without much curation or attention. It's in a very cool building, though, and for climbing to the top floor, we were rewarded with a huge study for a mural featuring Stalin and Mao telling the rest of the world how things were going to be.

The place we ate at that night, a bar/restaurant in Condesa that fried heart-shaped tortillas and promised a really good michelada (though we couldn't figure out how to get them to bring us anything but the simplest kind) disagreed with both of our digestions. So we spent the next day largely confined to our hotel room, watching most of the ridiculous Netflix scammer drama Inventing Anna.

The next day we felt stable enough to head out to the Centro Historico and the Templo Mayor. The Centro Historico is appropriately historic and central; the subway station you get off at is Templo Mayor, which is a block from the Templo Mayor, the Aztec pyramid that the Spanish repurposed as the seat of colonial government. You can walk around in the exposed ruins of Tenochtitlan and touch the stonework. We touched it! By the time we finished exploring, it was too late to get into any of the other museums in the neighborhood, so we sat on a bench in Alameda Central and ate medianoches from Pastelería Ideal.

After checking out El Chopo, the "punk market" in Vasconcelos, we spent the last full day in Polanco, where went to the Museo Jumex, which had a fun, cheeky exhibition by Urs Fischer, featuring an artwork consisting of a motorized human tongue that would slurp out a manufactured crack in the wall every so often. There was still time when we got out, so we walked across the street to the Museo Soumaya, which Chi warned me was not great, and, you know, it's not great! It's a lot of European paintings of fucked up chinless Jesuses collected by a rich guy. The building is cool looking, I guess, and on the top floor they have a bunch of Rodins.

I'm still recovering from the trip and from the campaign. But I'm starting to feel... free. And Halloween approaches.

The Conqueror Worm

Well, reader, what can I say: Your narrator got COVID-19. Your boy was infected with the novel coronavirus. After approximately 2.15 years of side-stepping the crashing waves of world-historical events, one of them overtook me and splashed all over my ankles. Suffice it to say I am fine, but boy is it ever a pain in the butt to have to isolate oneself, even in the most plush circumstances.

I'd been vaxxed (twice) and boosted (once) starting in early 2021, thanks to the efforts of my sister, who'd mastered the city's scheduling system once the vaccines became generally available. She also drove me to my initial vaccine appointments (Pfizer) at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, just around the corner from Mayday Space. She and Pete had bought a new car, and she and I marveled on the journey at the way it automatically paused its engine to save fuel while idling at a crosswalk. The vibe was off that summer, but being vaccinated at least made me feel like I could once again go anywhere, do anything. But then the winter came, with the contagious new variants, and that good feeling evaporated.

So I had been playing it reasonably safe for the first months of 2022. After the COVID spike eased in January, I'd gone back to working out of my one-seat Gowanus co-working space, strapping a mask on whenever I got up to get water or go to the bathroom. And I'd been canvassing twice a week for David Alexis, NYC-DSA's standard-bearer in Flatbush and the figurehead of an organization-wide effort to end the career of Kevin Parker. We'd been knocking doors since the fall (with a pause during the winter Omicron spike) but had been consistently masking up while doing so. In the end, my best guess is that I got it from a trip to the dentist, the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I'd done the week in question.

The first sign that I was sick was a mysterious pain in my upper back on Saturday afternoon. Like a pulled muscle, though I hadn't done anything strenuous. Nina and I went to sit in the grass on the western slope of Sunset Park, and I just couldn't get comfortable. So we got up and took the subway to Home Depot to pick up some seedlings for the burgeoning herb and tomato garden she's been cultivating in the alley behind our apartment. The next morning, ahead of my canvass shift, I was feeling decidedly "off" - light-headed, unmoored. I resolved to take a COVID test just to be on the safe side, and that's when I got my first, faint double line. I promptly holed up in my little office room and began to work out logistics with Nina (who improbably tested negative) by calling down the hall.

It's hard to recollect my symptoms precisely because of how mild they were. I had something like a sinus headache at first, then a scratchy throat and a sniffle. It didn't feel great, but it was obviously nowhere near what people were experiencing in the first wave. For a few days I lost my sense of smell - but not my sense of taste - which was fascinating but also annoying, because it happened right when I was feeling fully recovered and wanting to chow down on the nastiest foods: Signature sandwiches and waffle fries from Sunset Bagels, the various snacks and frozen treats Nina had acquired for my convalescence.

By far the worst thing I experienced physically (and mentally) while I had COVID was fully self-inflicted. Nina'd bought us some breakfast from the Sunset Park Diner and had thoughtfully ordered me an orange juice. That stuff has historically been challenging for my digestion, but I figured I was sick and I should get some extra vitamin C so I drank it anyway. Sure enough, it sent me straight to the bathroom within the hour. That part wasn't great, but the real awful thing was that I managed to clog the toilet with way too much of the fancy toilet paper we've been spoiling ourselves with. (I know, I know.) And then when it wouldn't go down, I stupidly tried to force it down with the plunger, which only stopped it up more. It's the worst I've ever fucked up a toilet. We tried everything to unclog it, including...

• Dish soap
• Epsom salt
• Flushing it a lot
• Using a drain snake
• Plunging it a lot
• Just waiting a while (8 hours, maybe?)
• Messaging all of my nice friends in DSA asking for advice because I fucked up my toilet like a child

The thing that finally worked, which we happened upon after I sent a panicked, eleventh-hour text to our unflappable building super Pawel, was a special variation on the drain snake called a "toilet augur." It looks sort of like a big violin or cello bow. Pawel dropped one off outside our door and within minutes the toilet was working again. Just hugely embarrassing from start to finish.

I tested positive for 12 days, from the end of May 'til the first week of June, and I was resolved to stay in my room for the duration, no matter what the CDC might have to say about it. So I had to find some way to pass the time.

One thing I did was dig into Breath of the Wild on the Switch. As a sort of shared, household holiday gift, I'd picked up my friend Noah's Switch and found a copy of BotW on eBay. Somewhat to my surprise, Nina fully embraced the game and invested hundreds of hours into it over the winter months. It didn't even bother her that the thing was suffering from Joy-Con drift, which I noticed immediately the first time I picked it up to play, and which made it impossible for me to concentrate. She just powered through it. Once she relinquished the device, I'd had it fixed, and now that I was laid up I figured I should take my turn. At first, the game failed to grab me - the promise of an "open world" frankly didn't seem all that appealing. As a first mission, I'd done an important favor for a king in exile and been rewarded with a hang-glider (?!) unlocking a massive extent of new terrain filled with monsters and villagers and quests and problems and dialogue and so forth. It was all a bit overwhelming, in a familiar sort of way, having done this kind of thing over and over again across a lifetime of Gameing. So at first I only engaged with the game in small ways, like picking up a side quest where you try to recover some of Link's memories of Princess Zelda. And this was where a compelling (to me) narrative thread emerged: The unlocked memories reveal a world-historic attempt to unite disparate factions and defeat a powerful opponent, with Zelda herself organizing the entire course of her life in preparation for the conflict. And she fucks it up and everyone dies! The leaders of the factions she's brought together all die. Link pretty much dies. So the the world you are exploring is sort of what's left in the aftermath of the Good Guys blowing their big shot. Feels alegorically rich!

I also watched a bunch of movies. My friend Steph and others answered my call for recommendations, and I got some real good stuff off YouTube for a few bucks a pop. Here are some highlights:

We're All Going To The World's Fair - All of my Twitter Friends were talking about this one forever and I got sick of waiting for it to come out on Streaming so I just bought it on YouTUbe. A young person sort of mentally disintegrates after joining a collaborative online role-playing community. Very queasy and disturbing but kind of ethereal as well. It's good!

Let's Scare Jessica To Death - Very, very beautiful movie about a lady who gets out of a mental hospital and struggles to deal with being in an open relationship while she fixes up an old house with her husband in upstate New York. And there's a hippie vampire. Zohra Lampert is extremely plausible as Jessica.

Anguish - This is a wild one! Zelda Rubinstein from Poltergeist and Michael Lerner (who I guess has been in a million movies but always puts out a strong single-episode Seinfeld character vibe) are the stars of the film within this film which is basically about having a panic attack at the movies. Speaking as someone who had to go out to the lobby for a few minutes when I watched Twister as a kid, this was very relatable and authentic.

Popcorn - This is one of those movies with a cover that really made an impression on me as a pale, unhealthy pre-teen picking over the VHS tapes at Tower Video. And has often been the case when I've sat down to actually watch these movies as an adult, this one turned out to be pretty goofy and not very scary at all. A group of college students organizes a film festival to rehab a dilapidated movie theater and a guy starts killing them. There are a few different films-within-the-film that are clever and plausible.

The Slumber Party Massacre - Does what it says on the box! I don't know how much I got from it as a viewer in 2022 but it's a real, you know, artifact; and I'm glad I finally watched it.

Year of Spending Money

Things I enjoyed:

Evolution of Horror
No One Is Talking About This
Moonstruck
Comfort To Me

Midway through the journey of my life, I found myself on the threshold of a dark forest.

It was late June. In my capacity as Co-Chair of NYC-DSA's Brooklyn Electoral Working Group I had just presided over the humiliating defeat of two of our three candidates for City Council. Our organizers had mounted valiant campaigns on their behalf, and Co-Chair Grace and I had personally canvassed our hearts out for them alongside hundreds of DSA members, but it hadn't been enough. I tortured myself with explanations that seemed obvious in hindsight: We'd taken on a fundamentally inessential project, trying to distinguish ourselves in a field uniquely crowded with Nice Progressives. Worse, our members knew it - knew we'd violated our sacred pledge not to waste their time - and resisted our attempts to turn them out to canvass at the levels necessary to win. Was this explanation correct? People smarter and less emotional than yrs truly presented a litany of persuasive alternatives. These things are certainly complex. But at my most hopeless it was hard to shake the feeling that our failure was our fault.

On top of this: Within days of the election, which in my home Council district was in part a referendum on Brad Lander's proposed Gowanus rezoning, Nina and I woke up to find a crew of workers in hazmat suits stripping asbestos from the roofs of neighboring buildings. No doubt the real estate trust who'd bought up most of our block had pulled the trigger on a demolition plan months in advance and in full anticipation of a successful rezoning, but it certainly seemed like the concrete manifestation of the outcome of the election. Within a week or two, the buildings on either side of us were surrounded by scaffolding and gutted down to their facades. What would replace them? The developer's web site decreed a stately pleasure dome (with multiple floors of shopping and dining) occupying almost every square foot of our block, except for a carve-out directly around our building. Our landlord had apparently missed his shot at converting our little mound of plywood and styrofoam cladding into cash. (Was he greedy and short-sighted, like all landlords? Or simply lazy, like all landlords?) My job was gracious enough to pay for a seat in a small co-working space a few blocks from home (in a minor coincidence, the same cubicle farm that had served as Team Brandon petitioning HQ) but faced with the prospect of a year's worth of construction, and with being surrounded by so obviously worse a built environment, we knew we had to get out.

I was days from turning forty. The prospect of navigating the hell of the rental real estate market had me preemptively bitter and brooding on the future. I'd been wasting my life in various jobs since I was a teenager in the name of saving money. I'd long planned to use those savings to escape the market, escape the scam of wage labor. I'd had a dream of devoting myself to useful technical work on projects of my own design. I'd had a dream of learning to be creative, of making Something Important. Now I was Old, and it seemed to me that I might no longer have the time or energy to follow through on those plans. Was it too late? What was I waiting for? I suggested to Nina: What if we bought an apartment?

We interviewed a few friends and relations who'd been through the process themselves, which was tremendously helpful and orienting. It also yielded a connection to a broker who explained the technical aspects of the process and began setting up appointments for us to look at apartments. Because of the pandemic, and because of our broker's summer vacation schedule, we looked at all of the apartments unaccompanied and then debriefed with him over Zoom. The very first place we looked at was a huge and beautiful apartment in a Finnish co-op in Sunset Park, eerily close to everything we'd said we wanted. I was a little shook, to be honest. Surprised at how good an apartment could look. We went on to see a few more places: Another huge apartment, this time in a massive Flatbush co-op; a shiny, newly-renovated apartmenet in a Prospect Lefferts Gardens building in the process of going condo. "Only a few rent stabilized tenants left," the seller's broker bragged. We could almost see the blood dripping down the walls. It was the prime of summer. Warm afternoons, surprise downpours that caught us as we speed-walked down streets in Kensington. After some deliberation, we resolved to make an offer on that first apartment we'd looked at in Sunset Park.

Buying an apartment confirmed a few things I had suspected for a long time as a renter but had never known for certain: First, the housing stock avaialable for purchase is just... fundamentally nicer than what's on the rental market. It stands to reason - rich people want to live somewhere nice; landlords merely want to find the price equilibrium. Second, the people who shepherd you through the process - the buyer's and seller's brokers; the gelatinous, incompetent lawyers - are essentially parasites who perform very little actual labor and reap a huge financial windfull simply through proximity to the core trasaction. In this way, they're not much different from landlords and rental real estate brokers, except that they're not shitting on you and pressuring you the whole time. The sums of money involved ensure that everyone is very nice as they exploit you.

The application and interviews and closing process lasted through the end of the summer and into the fall. Our closing was on an early afternoon towards the end of September, at a law firm that happened to be a few floors below my old office at Conductor, at 2 Park Ave. South. After it was done, we walked south towards Union Sq. trying to shake off the unreality of it all. Eventually we found ourselves near Flats Fix, where Comrade Alexandria used to work. It seemed like a good omen, so we stopped for guacamole and margaritas. Our server laughed when I asked if the bartender could make mine a bit less strong. In my anxiety over the day, I hadn't eaten anything. I got to my little office space tipsy bordering on drunk, still trying to metabolize what we'd just done.

It feels good to be coming back to Sunset Park. It's not mine, of course. I'm a white guy, not even Finnish. But I've invested quite a bit of my life here, in different ways. So I hope it'll have me.

This new home has been far and away the nicest place I've ever lived. We'd failed to note during our search that the building in Sunset Park wasn't just one of the genuine original Finnish non-profit housing cooperatives, it was quite possibly the first one, with a bronze historical plaque and a Wikipedia page to make it official. We moved in towards the end of October, in time for Halloween. The brownstones between 4th & 5th Ave. draped in decorative cobwebs. We weren't set up to receive trick-or-treaters on the day, but figuring there'd be kids in the building we put out a basket full of fun size candy bars on a stool in the hallway. Sure enough it was picked clean by morning, fulfilling a lifelong ambition of mine to give away the good candy.

A dozen years ago when I lived down by 5th Ave., I'd always thought of 8th Ave. and the wider Brooklyn Chinatown area as being a long hike up hill for not much to see or do. That was a mistake, and I see it differently now. It's actually a paradise, alternately bustling or idyllic, with every modest pleasure of commerce just a few steps away. There's a Buddhist temple with a vegetarian restaurant in the basement down on 51st St. and an aquarium's worth of sea creatures on sale for culinary use on 45th St. The gruff genius cook who sells huge bags of dumplings for an impossibly low price out of an assuming storefront on 44th St. We quickly painted most of the rooms (no shade to the previous owners who'd covered everything with a sort of dusty cream color) and in doing so became regulars at the Brooklyn Color Factory on 7th Ave. Ba Xuyên, still great. A full grocery store, right across the street, open 'til 9pm every night. In the other direction there's a kind of ur-bodega piled high with crates of Modelo and boxes of Marinela Sponch; occasionally staffed by an enormous and affectionate gray cat named Mickey. Then there are the two cats at the small convenience store a block to the north, and a rambunctious kitten at the 99c store on the far corner where old guys play video lotto all day. ("Too many names" for that cat, said the guy at the register.) The hardware store on 5th & 41st that I used to go to all the time is still there, and their current cat is a friendly calico named Linda.

To get to work, I often take the B70 bus, which passes practically right past our front door on its way up from the VA Hospital in Dyker Heights, down to the train station at 36th St. On a cold morning, it's a small luxury to curl up in a back corner seat and make 10 minutes' worth of progress on a John le Carré novel. On the way home I usually get the D up to 9th Ave. and walk past the new location of Savoy Bakery and the El Bronco taco truck, over this one weird gurgling sidewalk grate in front of that building with the ridiculous name, The Dartmouth.

Two days after we moved in, the wrecking balls started swinging in earnest in Gowanus, turning the South Brooklyn Casket Company, the kickboxing gym, and various and sundry warehouses into rubble. It felt like we'd only just managed to grab the rope hanging from the helicopter in an unlikely escape from the mummy's collapsing tomb. With a good deal of it behind me (?) I can see that so many things in my life have gone that way: So many opportunities I just barely managed to grab, so many awful consequences just barely avoided. I'm slow to recognize when I'm on the precipice, slow to appreciate a good thing when it's right in front of me. I'm trying to get better.