As I sit in the sunny morning window of Hamilton Heights’ newest independent coffee shop noshing on a chocolate almond pastry and sipping some dark Italian roast I start to wonder should I really venture into a life in the Brooklyn. Albeit, Carroll Gardens is quite beautiful but in a way Harlem is just as beautiful if not more so and vibrant. It’s almost as if I feel I am putting myself out to pasture, fucking knife and fork, done. I think ultimately I would be happy to move back to the East Village but I’m there all the time anyway, do I really need to live there again? Is that convenience or laziness?
Putting some distance from Manhattan and myself is seemingly scary, okay, not like the clown from IT scary, but almost a foreign concept to me, for years I championed the navigability and supremacy Manhattan has over the outer boroughs and now, now I am on my way one storage unit at a time to Brooklyn. Weird. Sell out. Eating my own words. For as much as the city is dead and gone, isn’t Brooklyn too, aren’t I too late for all of this New York shit, the 70s are over. Fuck this city. New York if I could I would break your heart just for spite even though I’m not even sure how to break a heart, I’d fucking try, just to try.
Leaving New York is like a break up, a torrid teary-eyed event that slowly dries and leaves it’s remains on your face and heart. New York is my home and the only lover I’ve ever known so exasperatingly well. Even though I haven’t been able to turn my back on this lover even after all these salty-sweet years I have close friends who have chosen to stretch the umbilical cord to San Diego, Austin, Boca, and beyond. I greatly respect them for their endeavors but also understand that there is this voice, this staunched but restrained voice inside them. And that voice is a fucking New Yorker kvetching. And it’s lovely.
I sound as if I’m leaving the city altogether and in a way departing from this island for a technical part of Long Island is leaving enough for me. Manhattan is the one I’ve been holding out for, the one whose bed I’ve woken up in so many times for so many years yet have never been able to leave more than just a tooth brush in the medicine cabinet. Because I’m not permanent. I am a wanderer. The boy who consistently craves something new and unknown and one of the most beloved parts of my fair city is that if one chooses to move a block, let alone a neighborhood away, one’s whole world changes. Newness abounds in the cafes, wine bars, and in the men.
So I begin the process, almost like manifest destiny, it is my god given right to live in Brooklyn. And of course it is my neurotic New Yorker right to come running back to Manhattan (should I choose) to feel the pulse of downtown and taste it’s many wares living alongside the mayhem. But in the interim I look forward to the new faces and new places of sleepy Carroll Street where the townhouses are perhaps not as majestic as the Village, UWS, or Sugar Hill but still boldly beautiful and reasonably attainable for a Joe like me at $2.5m.
I am the perfect juxtaposition of town mouse and country mouse. A simple fuck who always get’s his cheese. Assorted Gouda.
manhattanrambler 