In Williamsburg Proper…they call East of East Williamsburg…Bushwick…
I was reminiscing about last year and the quality in unholiness of greater Manhattan.
One can imagine I might love where I live today, despite CHUMP, after Bushwick. I have really great roommates and a room with a door and no rats. The building shakes when they run the trains through too fast (which is frequently) on the “1” elevated 125th adjacent to us. This several times an hour, into the wee hours, event also brings down the internet, both wired and wireless. The shaking is the most unsettling because we are on the top. There is the chump downstairs with cig cartons and dry martinis. We have tons of parties here. I like it. Columbia and Barnard and Manhattan School of Music are just a few minutes walk up the street. The Cotton Club and Riverside Church (highest point above sea level in Manhattan and the largest carillon in the world donated by John D. Rockefeller) are just around the corner. I might be opening my studio to the Harlem Open Studio Tour in May 2006 this year if I can get the chump matter resolved. I hope so, it sucks to have to move.
Previously, I lived in the part of Bushwick known to craiglisters as east, east Williamsburg for about a year. There were alot of nice things about it. $300 a month for rent. A factory full of musicians and art students and artists. 24-hour parties, you want to party? you are invited.
At times life there would get scary. The guy who put the flyers on the building about a girl who was intriguing. We all thought it was sort of romantic. The flyers kept changing every day. With enough flyer facts I realized the girl was me. Yipes. Then there was the detergent drawing in the laundry closet (see above). Yipes, that was my detergent. Finally, the guy on the way to work that wanted to hurt me.
I still think the worst was the rats. When I found out they were crawling over me at night I managed to move out. It took me a month to find the place I live in now.
Rats [<<–npr link] are interesting. So are Chumps. They can make or break you in this city. The Brooklyn rat is distinguished with ‘no other kind of boro, city or country rat exists like this’, ‘the rat with the wrong attitude’. This wrong attitude rat (W.A.R.) uniquely keeps its roommates as prisoners each night as it parties hardy on anything that is not attached. “Should the roommate mumble, could you please turn out the light?” 
Once I came home for a surprise lunch to a better part of Brooklyn, Park Slope, to my lovely, little, love nest. I caught the Brooklyn rat or did the rat catch me? The Brooklyn rat was snacking on electrical wires at the refrigerator. “What are you doing here, go back to work! “
o0ops backtrack, I think that electrical wire business was at my Hell’s Kitchen apartment in Manhattan. …those rats in Park Slope were hanging out in the drummer’s room. Another story… There have been so many rats in so many places.
I really am talking about a rat. Not a mouse, for mice you have to pay $5,000 a month, not the measly $2,000 a month I pay. You have to pay upwards by the month, if you want to move up in the varmint world. Everyone wants mice. Its hard to get an apartment that has mice. They are all taken. My friend had nice mice at her Montana apartment years ago. She explained, “They are very tiny, they come through the walls. “
So far, there are no rats or mice here, its middle-class rent, you don’t get any interesting characters with that kind of rent, except the Chump. So much good and so much bad. The push and pull of living in the City.
See Also:
If Your Grandma asks…do it…Free the Chump
When the City meets Urban
Tagged!
Bushwick, Chumps, Rats, New York City, Harlem
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