Dude Land / We're Shooting a Car Commercial / A Commitment to Manhattan (Catholic)
I work in Red Hook for two days. It’s dude land. I have to go to like 5 different coffee shops. In every single one of them there’s a middle aged man dressed like santa’s helper who has something witty to say about the gigantic coffee orders that I’m placing. What’s cute is that Red Hook looks like a town by the ocean, that people are playing chess. It feels like a neighborhood. It’s just that every way you look there is a bald dude in khakis and an unbuttoned light wash blue jean shirt with a hanes t-shirt underneath. He’s crossing the street with a serious face on. Sometimes a beanie.
Some days there’s a cutie on the G train, like a woman in a well fitted winter coat with just the right amount of fur, or a guy who moves nicely and looks like he needs a hug. Those times I think that maybe there’s something cute about Brooklyn.
But on the next subway stop, a man reading a book about Elvis hops on. Or there’s a 50 y/o man with toe shoes dressed for the amphibian apocalypse with edm in his headphones.
Red Hook is like a dude moodboard because everywhere you look there are places called like golden dolphin, or maybe it’s black flamingo? One place was called Fort Defiance, a name that reinforces this kind of post-brooklyn brooklyn mood that a thriving neighborhood is defined by the resilience of it’s newly opened local business, owned by liberal arts educated gay men from vermont. ”Ingredient-based” concept restaurants. A restaurant ruled by ingredients. May the best concept win. The people who make up these businesses are not merely chefs and cooks, they are coffee conneisseurs, food scientists, distillers of essence. They are bisexual cheesemongers, newly immigrated from Switzerland. Here’s the new expert that your neighborhood needs. Your “neighbor”. Right on your corner, concept sandwiches at the rocking price of 15.99. Every new gentrifying business fills a need in the neighborhood, as if there was an absence before it’s arrival.
”What’s wrong with picking up a great bottle of natural wine on my way home from work? That I’ll enjoy at my house that same evening. What’s so wrong with that?” This divorced woman asks me. I look at her and just shrug. There’s nothing wrong with you
In the coffee shop again, third run this morning. In every coffee shop, there’s also a girl with a dog who mentions her boyfriend.
People talk a lot about girl math recently, let’s talk about dude math. Young, newly graduated middle class men come to new york with loose ambitions. A few years later, they don’t really achieve what they set out to in their career but they get by and get their bills paid. They end up working some job. They drink a lot of beer. They start to find the cost of living too expensive and this perfectly coincides with them meeting a woman who is far more beautiful or successful than they are, at least more ambitious. They have an on and off relationship for a year, in the name of modernity. After a year, he starts thinking that rent would be so much cheaper if they just moved in with one another. She makes up most of his free time anyway, he doesn’t really see his friends that much anymore. After some back and forth, they get serious about it. The girl moves from Manhattan to a loft in Brooklyn. They drink craft beer to celebrate. She becomes enmeshed in the dude moodboard.
Their life together takes on a banana curved shape.
They have a taller roof, a big floor. Bigger windows. They become better at compromising and the compromising hangs as a curtain across their life in the apartment. They have no clear picture of where the compromise begins or ends. What is Us and what is Me? Is this on Me or is it on Us? They just started doing it, the compromising, because that’s what a relationship is. If you ask her, she’ll say that life is a compromise, in general. “Maybe things didn’t turn out exactly the way I expected.” but we have, tall windows, a big floor and each other. And a great bakery and a swiss deli around the corner.
Dude math: girlfriend moves in = I moved up in life
Then of course there are bigger things that can truly transform your life and the way you look at it. You could have a child together. That will flip everything around, I imagine. Or I can almost imagine:
You have a child and you are just deeply humbled and fascinated. And you feel love for the first time. And this child becomes everything for you because that child is you, but the child is stranger than you because a child is stranger than life. And from day one, the child grows. And that fills you with responsibility. Absolutely everything becomes filtered through this lense. Your romantic relationship becomes secondary in meaning and significance. You and your child share a world now, with its own language and sleep schedule. And everything takes on a different shade, your life lived in different colors.
If I had a child it would be with Manhattan.
Manhattan shines in all different colors. This is where I feel my body relaxing. I want to sleep under the red blue and yellow lights and I want to wake up and be close to everything. I want to find new things every day and I want to be constantly surprised. I want to celebrate myself when things go my way and when I have breakthroughs and I want to keep on finding direction here because it makes me happy. Every time that I understand a bit more about how to get where I want to go, I feel so happy. And things that usually bother me don’t bother me anymore. That is it, really. Everything is so beautiful, every day that I am on my way home I feel so grateful. For the small things, for the fact that I can feel good in a place without even knowing why. Just a feeling in my core that I’m at home and that I’m in control. I love meeting my friends here and eating something nice at varying times of the day and night. I love kissing in the city. I love the morning in the city and I love the diner. The diner fills me with fats and bread and syrup and coffee and afterwards I feel like there is nothing that I can’t do. There are all these places in the city for me now and that’s my little spider’s nest that keeps growing. I do things for myself and I do them without telling. It’s our little secret.