What with the heavens exploding all around us, New Yorkers have gone rather batty over the last few days. It used to be such battiness was business as usual, but as rents have steadily increased, so have the rates of NYC normalcy. Though it’s rarely acknowledged, New Yorkers have become some of the nation’s biggest conformists since the “Friends”-style gentrification began with the Rudy Giuliani Reign of Terror. Every generation of NY mourns the one that preceded them, of course, but I think I am right in preferring the Lady Bunnies of Alphabet City over the assless chaps who now preside over Nouveau Brooklyn. Continue Reading →
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.
I wake with the sun. The air is as sweet as it ever gets in Brooklyn; the early morning, as gentle and warm. My permakitten creeps next to me on our fire escape and together we study the city, so pretty while it sleeps. And yet. I keep thinking about how easily sweet the air was in the country. How my sheets and nightclothes felt and smelled when I’d dried them in the sun rather than the laundromat. How I’d slept. Continue Reading →
What with the heavens exploding all around us, New Yorkers have gone rather batty over the last few days. It used to be such battiness was business as usual, but as rents have steadily increased, so have the rates of NYC normalcy. Though it’s rarely acknowledged, New Yorkers have become some of the nation’s biggest conformists since the “Friends”-style gentrification began with the Rudy Giuliani Reign of Terror. Every generation of NY mourns the one that preceded them, of course, but I think I am right in preferring the Lady Bunnies of Alphabet City over the assless chaps who now preside over Nouveau Brooklyn. Continue Reading →
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.
I wake with the sun. The air is as sweet as it ever gets in Brooklyn; the early morning, as gentle and warm. My permakitten creeps next to me on our fire escape and together we study the city, so pretty while it sleeps. And yet. I keep thinking about how easily sweet the air was in the country. How my sheets and nightclothes felt and smelled when I’d dried them in the sun rather than the laundromat. How I’d slept. Continue Reading →