The Brooklyn Lady Bloggers

To be clear, in the sex dream he had about the Brooklyn lady bloggers, he only had sex with one Brooklyn lady blogger, and it was in an implausible sex position, and yet the sex had been good enough that she subsequently chose to not blog about it.

But aside from that one (and it is not the one you are thinking of, probably) there were all the other Brooklyn lady bloggers in the dream, including some that were just made up for the dream, and were just representative of as-yet unknown Brooklyn lady bloggers. There was that one from Fort Green, and that one from Carroll Gardens, and that other one from Carroll Gardens and that one from South Slope, and then some unspecified Brooklyn lady Bloggers.

After the sex part, the dream shifted to a general appreciation of all of the Brooklyn lady bloggers, and the “plot” of the dream was that he was in the initial stages of dating one of the as-yet unknown Brooklyn lady bloggers, but this dating involved hanging out with all of them, as they traveled in a group. They were not individually solipsistic but if considered as a collective noun, then they were (in the dream).

In the dream about the Brooklyn lady bloggers he got off a few good bons mot. One was about how he was trying to sit next to the Brooklyn lady blogger that he was just starting to date, but this necessitated moving the other Brooklyn lady bloggers around to other chairs. But the Brooklyn lady bloggers were subdivided into groups of BFFs, so he had to shift these concave polygonal groups of Brooklyn lady bloggers around in a way that was partly like a sliding tile puzzle and partly like getting a couch into a small apartment. At the resolution of the problem, when he at last sat by the Brooklyn lady blogger that he was in the initial stages of dating, he said something funny about chess that all of the Brooklyn lady bloggers thought was quite good, although he does not play chess in real life.

Later, he and the Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating, and the other Brooklyn lady bloggers, including the one that he had had the good sex with in the beginning were all at an AIDS benefit. That was a weird part! What was that about? Shortly after, he was in the lobby of his office building, trying to convince his manager to get the law firm where he works to give a corporate donation to the AIDS charity, so at least you could say there was a call-back to that weird part of the dream. The Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating hung back by the revolving doors while he discussed this with his manager. In retrospect, this was the only time the Brooklyn lady blogger he was dating was separated from the other Brooklyn lady bloggers. Maybe it was because his subconscious was making him choose between doing actual work when he was in the office and surfing the internet all day. Oh man, nobody likes a preachy dream! Let’s get back to the sex part!

But just kidding, because the vast bulk of the dream took place after the sex part, and the Brooklyn lady blogger with whom he had had the sex was a minor character for most of the dream, and honestly the truly pleasurable part of the dream was the part where he was in the initial stages of dating the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, and it was that feeling when you meet someone new and it seems like: OK everything can just stop changing now and we’ll just stay like this because nothing about this person is annoying me yet.

But the introduction of a real person from his life (the manager) seeded the clouds of reality and he started to remember pieces of his actual life that formed a mosaic and the mosaic said that he could not actually date the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, since in real life he had been married for some time, and had an eleven year old daughter, whom he loved, God he loved her, but who at age eleven was probably perilously close to becoming a blogger herself, though not in Brooklyn (they live in Norwalk). How would he even know for sure? He uses the internet but he is not good at it.

At this point he woke up, and despite the sort of abrupt ending, it was some time before the overall pleasant feeling wore off and during the next few weeks he could recall most of the details of the dream. The sex part of the dream seemed increasingly preposterous with the progression of time, but made sense in a way because it had been with the Brooklyn lady blogger of whom he had been the longest aware. It was like a Farewell Sex Act immediately prior to the onset of the new relationship with the lesser-known Brooklyn lady blogger, and the fact that it had not been blogged about made all the other Brooklyn lady bloggers think, “That must have been some good sex!” and this open secret inside the collective gave him some confidence with which he was able to pursue the lesser known Brooklyn lady blogger, and to state it again, there are some feelings that maybe can be summed up as “confidence” although that would seem to be selling the feeling short, feelings which his brain has tenuously correlated to post-thunderstorm sunlight, bourbon, certain bacons, the album “Star” by Belly, the smell of the inside of the cabinetry in the kitchen of the house he lived in during the mid-80s and the “good” caramels his mother kept there, which he was not supposed to eat, some feelings related to just getting to know someone that still seems amazing and brand new to you like an unscratched scratch-off card, that is like the light violet color of rubbing alcohol on fire, the way it burns but does not hurt you: that feeling stayed with him for several weeks afterward.

Let Your Conscience Be Denied

I miss Brooklyn when things like this happen (also when I read Knufflebunny to my kids); not living there, I don't feel qualified to comment on it anymore (actually I think there’s a rule that once Choire Sicha has commented on it no one else should bother?) (wait, did I just miss the whole point?).

Except to say:
The article could have used a second "Yeah, we know." right after "And so Jessica Roy will depart for a semester abroad in Paris in September. "

but also:
The whole thing reminds me of 2005 when Neil Pollack (I'm relatively sure I'm qualified to quote Neil Pollack) was responding to a Nerve.com essay about the Boys of McSweeney's:

It's hard to deny that the twee, detached men Calhoun describes in the piece existed. They certainly did, and such men still exist today. They're called Men In Their 20s.

and also that when I read that in 2005:
I was reminded of the great great great Delmore Schwartz short story, "The World is a Wedding", published in 1948 (1948!), inspired by Schwartz's being simultaneously daunted and unimpressed by Paul Goodman's insular Clique of Literary Intellectuals. (Now that was a blog post.)
And also a lesson for everyone? Because who knows who the hell Paul Goodman is any more? (except Keith Gessen who has a tattoo of Paul Goodman's name crossed out with his name right below it).

But 1948 = Makes me think going forward that when we read something like this, until we’re proven otherwise, we should just assume that the author is writing genre fiction?

That's my advice!

Take it with a grain of salt, though. I live in Chicago, so I may not be understanding everything.
Do you need to borrow a grain of salt? We have a lot of salt here because it snows for seven months of the year

OK, so hey wait, I thought of another reason I miss Brooklyn.

v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^
Update, 7.21.08, Above Proposed Postulate for Rule of the Internet w/r/t Choire Weighing in on Something: VERIFIED.

Find Patrick

Chicago - Schuba's 2
Originally uploaded by jcoulton

Hint: he is blurry.
This was a good show, although going into it I sort of imagined a couple things that didn't pan out; viz.--
(1) I fully expected "Podsafe Christmas" with Coulton, Paul, Storm, and several helium balloons (it is only OK to abuse helium if you are a professional entertainer, my mother taught me); and
(2) When I talked to Coulton after the show and said I had just moved here from Brooklyn, the correct answer from him was not to disparage the South Slope, but to say, "Oh, hey, shortly after you left, we devised a technology that will allow you to afford to live in Brooklyn with adequate space and spare money at the end of every month for trips to the cheese store on 7th and the entire Criterion Collection and providing for your kids &c.; so, you can come back."
Since this did not happen: everyone in this picture, please hang out with me and/or babysit so I can do more things like this, only this time with my lady friend.


Except that one drunk girl who was sitting in front of me.
I am sorry: you are a mean drunk.

Back off, Lethem

Sara Gran totally stole my idea of writing about Vinegar Hill, so I had to build a small cardboard house out of the box the office chair we just ordered came in, in order to stake my claim.

Let the word go out to everyone:
I call dibs on writing about one-room cardboard houses on fourth floor walk-ups in South Slope.



N.B. Before any Architectural Critics (or “Snarkitects” as Heidi Julavits and I like to call them whenever we’re hanging out) raise the issue that I have assembled the bricks as if the house were constructed within the game “Breakout” (or “Arkanoid”, for you youngsters) as opposed to traditional staggered brick format, and that my method lacks “basic structural integrity” and is “doomed to collapse even more spectacularly than the downtown office complex project at 34th St. and Oak”, please note that the house is also assembled with a total of 407 Hurriquakes.

So shut it.