Posts tagged ‘ditmas park’
[in your best don lafontaine voice]
In a world long forgotten. In an age of darkness. . .
One man took a stand to stop a war that should have ended long ago.
Get ready for action. Prepare for excitement. And hold on for the ride of your life.
The Big Dogs of Cortelyou Road.
Starring John Goodman.
Coming Soon.
back in high school, i drove a third-generation black chevrolet camaro IROC-Z with a 5.7 litre engine. that was when gas was still a dollar and i lived at home. i didn’t get any chicks with the car and that part kind of sucked but the car was solid. when i turned that thing on, birds flew out of the trees. when i was stopped at the red light, people were afraid to look over at me. and when i floored that thing, my head snapped back like i was on star trek or something.
but i sold that car before going to college because what was i going to do, ship that car to a small town in upstate new york? so when i’d come home for the summers, i’d shell out $1500 to buy a car just for the summer and sell it before going back. i had a rust colored chevrolet cavalier that first summer. then a faded blue ford taurus the second. and i can’t remember the third or fourth cars, but i know for certain that one of them was picked up by that kidney foundation that tows your car for free.
then in law school i leased a car because that was the sensible thing to do. so i leased a smart car at the time, a nissan altima. and then when i moved to the city i thought what the fuck am i going to do with a car? so now i take the subway and the bus or I just walk everywhere even when it’s cold as all hell and when i have to go somewhere else i rent a zipcar from the local target here in brooklyn. they have all sorts of smart cars with funny names. like their ford focus is called inertia. and their ford explorer is called elvis.
what do you believe in?
three words to the whack: step yourself back.
people tell me i should just breathe another day.
keep going and don’t look back. i think i’ve heard or read that quote in one guise or another since the early 1980’s, you know, in graduation speeches, tea bags, shit like that where you were supposed to feel inspired. it advocated for thinking about your future and making the right choices and living with the consequences and becoming independent and other yada yada bullshit. but come on, is it really like that? i think most people, if given a chance now, would have remained attached either to their mother’s breast or a BPA free nipple while a nice steady stream of raffi and pureed sweet potatoes floated overhead.
I’m not so much into crazy shit talk but sometimes I think people are watching me. Just the other day, I was walking down Ocean Avenue and for whatever reason I looked up and there was this Caribbean guy about six floors up taking pictures of me. I thought maybe it was a coincidence that it was the third time that week that I caught someone taking pictures of me with a long lens. But when I crossed over Newkirk, one of those dollar vans pulled up next to me on the sidewalk and tried to offer me a ride. The guy kept saying, “No really, it’s my pleasure, really,” but his teeth were all nasty and there were bits of meat inside and meat makes me feel really uncomfortable. So I jumped over the fence and then through the basement of the church and then I climbed up a tree and then jumped onto a roof and then slid down into the yard. I don’t know whether I had broken anything but at least I knew I wasn’t being followed. I don’t know how long that was going to last so instead of getting up I crawled through the yard, past the sidewalk, underneath the car, and down into the gutter. I thought it was going to be a lot nastier than it was, and if you haven’t tried it, I really suggest it. It’s warm and moist. That’s good things to have IMHO when you need a hideout during the winter.
i remember those saturdays when my parents knew not even to try and wake me up before two o’clock in the afternoon.
if i had to describe it in a few minutes, i think the real difference between manhattanites and brooklynites comes down to movie theatres. in manhattan, when something goes wrong with the movie in the theatre, everyone gets all serious and they won’t leave the place until they get a refund and free drink or something. and they’ll be pissed and make sure everyone hears them say that “they’re never coming back to this place ever ever again” and that they’re going to lodge a complaint with the city on the new 3-1-1 app for iphone. they all then start yelling with one another and then after five or ten minutes everyone starts blaming bloomberg or newt gingrich.
but in brooklyn, when something goes wrong with the movie, everyone just kind of shrugs and laughs quietly to themselves.
it consumed me
e v e r y d a y aperture 