DRDB! 32: Ex-Brooklyn
“Finally, I don’t have to deal with Brooklyn and New York City nonsense,” he says, “I don’t care that my plane was delayed six hours out of Newark. I don’t care how tired I am, how disconnected I feel, how aimless. I’m free!” So of course four days later when "A Class Riot at Grace Church's School" shows up in Nicole Cliffe’s excellent newsletter, he hate-reads the whole thing. It’s iconically modern Brooklyn, like bodegas selling $9 cayenne lemon water, like a Williamsburg White Castle being torn down the build condos, like the 2012 live-tweet of the Park Slope Coop meeting. It’s magical, heady stuff. One hell of a drug. “Now,” he whispers to himself, “I can tell people this is what I chose to leave.”
Hours later, walking past a place in Chicago named “NYC Bagel Deli,” he tries to remember the last everything bagel he ate. He ate so many, and they were good even when they were cheap $1.50 bagels from a street cart. It turns out they have only existed since about 1980, and of course some jerkoffs in San Francisco wrongly put sunflower seeds on them. What monsters.
“At least I’ll never have to live in San Francisco.”