A collection of Things.

I have horrible writer's block. Absolutely horrible. Lucky for me Blogger saves every blog I've attempted to write and stores them as drafts. What follows is a weird collection of thoughts, sometimes about Brooklyn, sometimes not. Yeah, it'd be nice to have a photo montage of Brooklyn, but sometimes this blog is as much about Brian as it is about Brooklyn. Hopefully the little bits of my brain I can commit to words will be entertaining.

Titled: What we owe to the people we love, or don't love, or even barely know.

This has been a busy month for me.

I had a short trip on my birthday weekend which was spent celebrating the nuptials of my cousin in Vermont. It was a fantastic time. The first time we had the majority of all the cousins together for something joyous. Vermont is also absolutely gorgeous. If not for the repeated failure to deliver on the promise of Moose crossing the road and the absolute crap cell phone reception, I would consider living there.

Because of the wedding and because my birthday fell on a Monday this year I pushed the celebratin' forward to the Saturday after. It was likely the most ridiculous birthday I've ever had. a bunch of my friends and my sister met up at the Brooklyn Brewery to do the tour (which literally last 10 minutes) and to imbide in the endless supply of cheap, delicious and potent beer. We're talking $3 8.5% beer here folks. I could barely stand by 3 pm. Mission accomplished.

The one awful bit of the day was the ridiculous heat. Besides having to ride the shuttle bus and getting the seat that I'm fairly certain were actually part of the engine manifold, that literally gave me burns on my back and butt, the day was burning hot. After the brewery we all stumbled onto the L and made our way to a lovely and cheap sushi place ($55 fed 6 people). Getting there, it literally felt like someone was flaying the skin off of us with a hot butter knife. SO HOT. Even so it was so much fun and is likely one of the best birthdays I've had in a long time. Hurrah(?) to 25!

Titled: Summer in the City is full of Cleavage, Cleavage, Cleavage.

I was wandering across the internets and happened upon a discussion abotu winter boots in Montreal. Don't ask. Wikipedia probably led me to it, and lets face it, when you enter the wormhole that is Wikipedia, you're lucky you end up still on the internet and not trying to hunt some rare pygmy bird on Mt Kilimanjaro. Anyway, the general consensus was that in the winter time it is so cold, Montrealers wouldn't care if you had oven mitts wrapped in tinfoil on your feet, because it's winter and anything goes. Well, New York is basically the same way when it comes to heat and clothing (or lack thereof). For the love of christ, I can't even begin to formulate a number that would adequately give you even an estimate of how many bellies, boobs and muffin tops I saw running loose in the streets of Brooklyn and New York these past couple of weeks; there were that many. It really sometimes made the beaches of Jacob Riis look like a national Burqa convention. Now that's not to say I've suddenly adopted tube tops and daisy dukes to fend off the brutal heat (spans of days over 95 degrees), I'm still clinging furiously to the cliff of good fashion sense, albeit often soaked with sweat. Ah, New York.

Titled: The Finer Points of Gentrification.

When I first moved in and until recent days, I had concerns about whether you could consider my square inch of the Clinton Hill Neighborhood an up and coming place. Now, absolutely it was not "real-estate" Clinton Hill like my old place, (which p.s. I'm now too afraid to go there at night), but I still have my concerns. You may ask yourself, Why? Well, it could have been the crazy lady who no joke, lives on the roof, or the "Candy Store" across the street that is never opened and definitely doesn't sell candy, these are both glaring reminders that Brian, you don't live in an effective gated community anymore. In recent days though it has become more and more obvious that my neck of the woods is becoming a lovely piece of heaven! First a pretty awesome hipster yuppie bar has opened literally across the street from me. It easily has 10-15 quality beers on tap for cheap and it's a diamond in a stretch of closed commercial store fronts. What is even more exciting is that the future home of the Greene Hill Food Co-op is nearby too! Modeled on the thriving Park Slope Food Co-op, this will bring some much needed produce to a neighborhood sorely in need of some good eats. I'm real excited.



That's about all I can muster. Apologies, I spend most of my free time now reading the pile of books that the New York Public Library has waiting for me, hoping to prolong summer and push back the beginning of the Fall Semester.