New York City, Week One

Well, here I am.  New York City.  I don't even know where to start.  New York City is fucking BIG!  There are a lot of things happening.  But for a little guy like me with no money and just a couple of friends, it can seem a little too big.  I'm out of shock mode.  I can believe what i see.  I can ride my bike on the streets ok.  I'm starting to understand that although a lot of people are dressed very fancy, they're all just people like me.  And a lot of the people in the hip parts of Brooklyn, I'm coming to realize, are very much like me.  They're all from Indiana or New Mexico or Minnesota or wherever.  And when I talk to them, they understand where I'm coming from and wish the best for me.  I just need a foothold.

First up, let me lay out the circumstances:  I graduated on December 20th from Colorado State University.  I'd been planning to 

go to Paris in April for months, where my very good friend Aaron Hegert is living.  My friend Brandon Trujillo would fly from San Francisco, I'd fly from Colorado, and we'd convene in Paris for some vacation and a little bike tour.  

But I wasn't sure what to do during January, February, and March, though.  I knew I wanted to leave Fort Collins right away.  It wasn't because I hated it - in fact I was really beginning to love it by the end.  I think that I just wanted to be moving on.  I'd been planning to move away after getting my degree from the start.  So I guess I had to go, right?  

I'd planned on going to Denver, even though I wasn't entirely enthusiastic about it.  My time in Denver was the worst time of my life.  And Denver just seems to have this heavy, grey energy for me - even though it's usually sunny out.  

Then my friend Alea offered me a place in Brooklyn for $285 a month - which she assured me was an incredible deal.  She even called me a couple of days later and offered me the place for $250.

I've always thought that New York was the sort of place that I didn't really have any interest in living.  It's just this fucking gigantic mess, right?  With no end.  No mounta

ins.  No grass.  Not a nice ci

ty like Portland or San Francisco where you can ride your bike out of town and go on a picnic.  Just this giant, vague idea of a jumble of skyscrapers somewhere on the East Coast.

But I was in this really awesome mindset of possibility and confidence.  I was graduating college.  I wasn't locked into anything.  I'd just quit my job.  New York City is this cultural center.  The capital of America!  And above all, I wanted to be cool and live in Brooklyn, the cool thing to do.  

"Yeah, I lived in Brooklyn for awhile," I'll say one day, nonchalantly, when I'm back living in a smaller town where I can be a comparatively bigger fish.  "It was ok.."

OK, here it is in real life.  I'm here in Brooklyn.  I have $50.  I'm having a very tough time getting a job.  I'm very uncomfortable.  I have this sense of being in over my head.  I'm afraid that I'm not cool enough.  I'm afraid that I'll never get a job.  I'm afraid I'm gonna fuck Alea and her roommate over.  I'm afraid that this is a harbinger of the rest of my life.  This is real life.  Now I just get fucked.

Alright, alright.  I gotta chill out, man.  Let's get started about New York:

I live in the neighborhood of Brooklyn called Bushwick.  I heard that Bushwick was a "cool" neighborhood where "hipsters" lived, but when I first got there, it sure didn't seem like it.  I rode in on a bus from downtown Brooklyn and I was the only white person on the bus.  I had a hige backpack on my back and a smaller one, German tourist-style, on my front.  I had a Macbook, an ipod, and $270 cash on me, and I was visibly sweating it.  Things just got ghettoer as I got near my house, and I remembered Elena's refrain: "stay off Myrtle Avenue."  I was riding down Myrtle.

The funny thing is that since then, my neighborhood hasn't ever seemed nearly as menacing.  But I direct my travel away from downtown and toward the downtown for white people in Brooklyn: Williamsburg.  Here's what it looks like:

You have to see and understand Williamsburg and then East Williamsburg before you can understand my neighborhood, and what's going to happen to it.  I live a ways from Williamsburg, but not that far.  It takes maybe 20 minutes on a bike.  And the L train - which runs out of the East Village in Manhattan one stop to Bedford and 7th, the center of Willia

msburg - continues East further into Brooklyn, dotting the neighborhoods with new hipster outposts.

It's interesting to see the gentrification happening, practically before my eyes.  Since I moved into Bushwick from the "wrong" direction and didn't know what was happening right away, I am seeing these signs of white people/hipsters popping up everywhere as I commute between Bushwick and the Williamsburg/Greenpoint hipster highway of Brooklyn.

Here's what my neighborhood looks like, by the way (and we AIN'T near any waterway):

Anyway, there are several stops on the L line before the area near me and each has more and more coffee shops and interesting restaurants.  My house is not close to the L line, though.  We're on the J-M-Z line.  Genitrification rides the L, not the J-M-Z.

But I found that if I ride my bike up Knickerbocker across Flushing for about 20 blocks, I get to the very first outpost of East Williamsburg.  It's in this warehouse area next to the Morgan exit of the L line.  "Mainstreet Morgntown," they call it.  Bogart St.  (JP, if you're reading this, this is where you'll be riding your bike to to get coffee)

Anyway, it's wild to see shit like this just popping into a dead block in the middle of stuff that looks exactly like the last photo.  But there it is - and thank God for a nice, white college boy like myself.

Another rad thing about New York is the internship that I'm working.  It's in the pencil building in Greenpoint, a building that's literally bioling over with artists and ganja smoke.  

The team of interns and our boss Will are working on making the Arthur website good enough that it can sort of stand in for the magazine until the funds to publish it again show up.  Working for Will has been fun, although it takes a lot of my time that I would be otherwise using to find a job that pays me in money.  I might have to bail out on them if that's what it takes to get a job, but for now it's something interesting to do - even though it's strange that I'm blogging for them about events in New York when I just got here...

The people here in New York have been surprising in a variety of ways.  First: I expected people to sort of look like the hipsters anywhere else, just way more extreme and unrealistic.  But that wasn't really the case at all.  In fact, everyone here is mostly just sort of fancy.  It's strange.  The "hipsters" aren't very bohemian, not ore they very "artsy" looking.  They mostly just look sort of rich.  This is a bad generalization, but it has a lot of weight to it.  I'm looking really shabby out here.  Everyone is sort of dressed in black with sort of fancyish leather shoes.  And glasses.  It's interesting.  I kind of feel like I showed up at a restaurant with a dress code that I didnt know about, and they let em stay but we were all a little uncomfortable.

Oh man, there's SO MUCH more.

I'm just sort of spending my time riding my bike around and going to coffee shops and looking at the internet.  it isn't really what I wanted, but I had unrealistic expectations.  I need a job and some friends (and maybe a girl to spoon with) and I'll be back on top.  Anyway, I really miss Colorado and question my sanity for coming here at all.  I don't think it's really the right place for me, but it's only been a week.  This is quite the experience no matter how it goes.

Oh, also I got a ticket for riding on the sidewalk (NYC cops are total assholes, make no secret about being corrupt bullies, and are almost reason enough to never come here.  I mean, you'll get your ass thrown in jail for some TOTALLY unreasonable shit!)