#take me baaaack to january 2020 when i read it for the first time | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

reminiscences · 4 years ago

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another attempt at blogging

i started this tumblr a couple years ago at the same time kate did. i can’t remember why—i’m sure tumblr was in the news again for some reason. i guess it was before the great porn purge. i was talking about blogging again this week with my friend daniel, and i woke up this morning and he had sent me a blog he wrote on a new tumblr account early in the morning, so to continue my regression to the early 2010s, i too have rebooted tumblr, given it an era-appropriate name, and decided to give it another go.

the problem with having a newsletter is that i don’t think anyone wants to hear from me in their inbox daily, so i’ve become very precious about the things i write there. it feels like it has to really matter. i like blogs because they’re disposable and can be dumb and not your best writing. how many two-graf tumblr posts did i write in 2011 that were just thoughts i idly had during a statistics lecture? anyway, here’s the first blog, they won’t all be this long probably.

When I think about eventually looking back at this year I think about what I want to remember from it. I will remember the first week of March. I’ll remember the last birthday party I attended in person at Branch Ofc, a perfectly serviceable Crown Heights bar that was very full of people. I’ll think about that night and how I showed up to the party with a Ziplock full of homemade salted chocolate chip cookies in my purse, how I shared them with a table where the birthday-haver and their friends sat. Breathing in the same air as the four dozen other people crammed into the bar. I can’t imagine it now. I like Branch Ofc because it is unpretentious without pretending to be a dive, unlike Sharlene’s, which tries too hard to mimic the aesthetic trappings of an authentic dive bar but is really just a normal Park Slope bar. Branch Ofc is just a bar where you can buy drinks, and it was an eight-minute walk from my old apartment. It used to be a bar with a photobooth and Big Buck Hunter but I think both of those are gone now.

For a few days in March, it felt like people were preparing for a snow day. Everyone was slightly more on edge than giddy—but only slightly. “WFH but make it a coffeeshop” I saw on someone’s Instagram story, a selfie with four of their friends coworking somewhere in Bushwick, completely nullifying the point of a work-from-home edict. I ran into my friend Maddie at the renovated Key Food on Nostrand the next week. Maddie, her roommate and I were in the aisle with the Pop Tarts and the Oreos. “I feel like I should get those?” we asked each other, pointing at junk food. I wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves; nobody was. Some guy wearing a Cornell University Sigma Chi tshirt walked by us with the largest bag of dried beans I’ve ever seen in my life slung over his shoulder. That was a man who had never soaked dried beans in his life. I wonder if he ever ate the beans. We were a bunch of idiot 20-somethings blindly grabbing for cans of soup and Fritos for the end of the world. What were any of us doing there? Why was it imperative that day that I make and freeze a lasagna? Maddie’s roommate had fresh lasagna noodles from Eataly she wasn’t going to use before she left for her parents’ house, and she said I could have those. She brought them over for me and I idly wondered if you could get Coronavirus from someone else’s fresh pasta noodles or if the heat of the oven would kill the germs. I made my lasagna.

I’ll think about how March-to-May is just one long gray blurry streak in my head. I baked, I got into running, I said “running with a mask? No thank you, no more running for me,” I got a job, I felt bad about getting a job when everyone I knew in journalism was getting laid off. I did a lot of Zoom Zumba. At first I slept terribly, and then I started sleeping too much, and then I stopped sleeping again at some point during that stretch. There was a novelty to suddenly being inside all the time that made it feel like an excuse to get “really into martinis.” I got really into martinis. Then I stopped drinking for a couple months. Remember “Zoom happy hours”?

The thing I use most as a means of setting apart different eras in my head is the music I used as a soundtrack at the time. I rang in the 2014 new year in my cute apartment on Westcott Street in Syracuse with my college boyfriend, drunk and blaring Cold Cave, before we walked down the street to Alto Cinco and got Mexican food and passed out. It was my senior year and I only had a few more months of living like this and I loved the small life I’d built for myself there. Of course, it couldn’t stay. When we broke up a year and a half later after he moved to New York, where I had been living for most of a year, I walked around the neighborhood near the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop, close to where we were living together, listening to Mitski’s 2014 album Bury Me At Makeout Creek. I sat in Maria Hernandez Park and watched a bunch of kids play Red Rover. I didn’t especially want to go home because I hadn’t taken an escape route into account when we broke up and somehow timed it out so that things ended after the first of the month, leaving me with three-and-a-half weeks of continuing to share an apartment with someone whose heart I had just broken. In retrospect it’s clear to me that I had just outgrown a relationship with someone five years older than me who hadn’t grown up at all, but I hear that Mitski album now and all I think about are the cold early April days of 2015 when no place and no person felt like home. There’s a line in First Love/Late Spring, by Mitski, where she sings “胸がはち切れそうで,” which translates to something like “My chest is about to burst (with grief).” My advice to recent college graduates moving to New York is to simply not do anything the way I did it.

So when I think about 2020, I do not want to associate any music I previously had fond memories of with this year. This is unfortunate because every musician I like who produces sad music has nothing but time on their hands now and they’ve all come out with new songs and albums. My recently played selections on Spotify look like a cry for help: Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, even Tigers Jaw.

On Saturday I couldn’t sleep in. I woke up at 5:30 and watched the sun appear through my bedroom windows. I kept rolling over, trying to sleep again, but it was futile. Eventually I got up and got dressed, and left my apartment on foot. The walk into lower Manhattan is a few miles from my new place in Fort Greene. I walked west on Fulton, and then down Flatbush. It would have saved me ten minutes to take the Manhattan Bridge, but I’ve always regarded it as the ugliest of the bridges to cross on foot or on bike—last fall, I would walk home from Ben’s apartment over the Manhattan Bridge, and it was just so grey. You get an okay view of Dumbo, I guess, on the walk east, but it isn’t much to look at. When I got back to the Brooklyn side on those walks, I’d get on the A at High Street and take it back to Nostrand instead of walking the last couple miles.

So I chose the Brooklyn Bridge this time. It was as busy as you’d expect it to be in a non-pandemic event. Instagram boyfriends took pictures of their girlfriends, who took off their masks for a few seconds for the right shot. I saw a couple taking engagement pictures in front of the lower Manhattan skyline. It felt so normal, pedestrians and bicyclists squeezing past each other at the narrow points.

I was listening to Saint Cloud, the Waxahatchee album that came out a few months ago, turning it over and over in my brain like a rock you pick up at the beach and end up carrying with you on a long walk. The album, outwardly, has this gauzy blue-sky Americana vibe but when you listen to the lyrics of some of the songs it feels like peeling back layers of skin until you hit a raw nerve ending. Every song feels like a eulogy for this year. “You might mourn all that you wasted/That’s just part of the haul,” Katie Crutchfield sings on Ruby Falls. I got to the title track, which closes out the album, as I ascended the bridge. When you get baaaack on the M train, watch the cityyyyyy mutaaaaaaate, she sings. I guess she’s singing about New York. Is there another M train somewhere? I don’t know. I’m going to think about this stupid year whenever I listen to this album, I thought.

I got off the bridge at City Hall, surveyed the ongoing occupation movement there and the literal dozens of cops that had seemingly been deployed to stand there and, at best, do nothing. I walked down Centre Street, eventually winding through the little park by Baxter Street where two adults were playing ping pong, which felt like a socially distanced sport, all things considered. I walked down all those side streets in Chinatown as the sun struggled to break through the oppressive clouds. I walked by Nom Wah, past the salon Polly taught me will give you a very good $12 blowout, past that annoying bar where the bartenders are dressed like scientists, past the place where Kate and I got our auras read on her birthday in January, and ended up at Deluxe Green Bo. I ordered my spicy wontons in peanut sauce and ate them right there, the hot plastic container burning my knees as I sat on the sidewalk.

Afterwards I walked by all my favorite places—the skatepark under the bridge, Cervo’s, Beverly’s (RIP), Little Canal, Jajaja, the Hawa Smoothie near the East Broadway F. The skaters were hanging out in Dimes Square. Everything had changed but standing outside Kiki’s, it felt for a second like almost nothing had. It was almost a normal Saturday on Canal Street. The sky stayed electric blue until I got back to Brooklyn.

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