So Many Vignettes So Little Time.

“Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto. I’ve lived all over this town.”

Apologies for my absence, but I’m having a little trouble staying on top of everything right now. Among other things, Deborah and I signed a lease for a new apartment on Friday. The application form provided a single line to explain “reason for moving” and although we would’ve needed to attach an extra page to list everything — things that, if I were 22, I might count as “reasons for staying” — we kept it simple and merely said: “Don’t like the neighborhood.”

It’s an over-simplification, of course. There’s plenty to like in the around here — enough that we even looked at a few places in the area — but the more we looked outside this little art-ghetto enclave, the more “right” it felt to leave it. And anyway, I’m sick of talking about “how much the neighborhood has changed.”

Of course, in a place like New York, there’s no way to escape changing neighborhoods. Nothing stays the same for long. I probably talk as much about living in Chelsea in the late 80′s as I do about living in Bushwick at the start of the new millennium. “This used to be that and that used to be some other thing.” It gets tiresome.

“I want to move to a neighborhood where the topic of conversation isn’t constantly about the neighborhood,” said Deborah.

When Deborah goes home to her parent’s house in rural western PA, “back to the farm,” as they say, it’s like stepping into a glue trap in time. Nothing ever changes. Her parents are older, of course, but their house is the same, the neighbors are the same, the street is the same, the town — if you can even call it that — is the same. It’s extreme in the opposite direction and she gets absolutely stir crazy when she spends more than a few days there, but at the same time, she envies the stability and would love it if she could inject a little into her own life.

I’m not sure she’s going to get her wish since the neighborhood we’re moving to — Wallabout, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard — is another one of the many Brooklyn neighborhoods in flux, but hopefully it will be enough to simply have a lease to a legal apartment with an actual C of O.

In the meantime, we’ve started to pack. In a move that will break the hearts of some of my friends (Crys and Travis come to mind) I gave away all my old vinyl albums — many of which I’d had since high school. A few even dating as far back as middle school. I offered them to a guy I worked with during the Stephen Sprouse installation. It was just an off the cuff offer, made before I knew I was moving, but once I started packing and felt the weight of my possessions, I made the decision to jettison the heaviest of the lot.

“Still interested in my records?” I asked Paul.

“Sure.”

My friend Brandon helped me load the eclectic collection into the back of my truck and I drove them to Paul’s loft. I rang his buzzer and he came outside to help me unload them and we piled the three heavy boxes one on top of the other in his hallway.

“I hope you like YES.”

So many vignettes so little time.

Deborah has been after me for a week to write about our new-sneaker adventure (Funnier than it sounds) and believe me, I’d rather be writing about things rather than writing explanations about why I haven’t been writing about things, but I can’t keep up. Oh well, it’ll all settle down eventually.