This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Will It be the Bike or the Train? Who's My Ride or Die?

 Are there any other New Yorkers out there who seriously, no-joke, "dead-ass" wonder if they are going to die today every time they get on the subway? I have tried biking, busing, and scrapped all kinds of plans to avoid the trains over the last year or however long it's been since the new normal. This is because, outside of the daily reports of stabbings, hammerings, shootings, pushing onto tracks, and all manner of random, unprovoked savagery, I have been approached now three times by crazy people who for whatever reason find me threatening so they just walk up to me and try to provoke some kind of exchange. And I never even say a word. Often it has something to do with my "big muscles," which aren't even *that* big. (Apparently, on top of my other woes, I look like a 'roughneck' to people.) Well, I did not discuss this on Facebook for whatever reason, but about a month ago a crazy dude got on the train blasting and mumbling along to his violent rap music on one of those little canister stereo things and decided that he didn't like Dominicans and that I was Dominican (I am not) and after a long rant about "fuck them Dominicans," and some other madness, he looked at me and threatened to shoot me. I'm not joking. For nor reason. I didn't look at the dude, I didn't say anything to him, and I am not and nor do I think I look Dominican. (And even if I were, so what? What's wrong with all these crazy black racist fucks attacking people for being some other race or another?) Luckily, the train (the 1) was pulling into 66th at Lincoln Center, which is one of the most culturally dignified neighborhoods in the city, and people emptied the car and ran up to the conductor, some even faster than I did. The train stopped, police were called, I was shaking but had an appointment (with my therapist) and got on the bus at Broadway and walked into her office explaining what had just happened and apparently I was so shaken up my nose started gushing blood. For a moment, I thought I had been shot. It was crazy. The next day I went out and spent over $900 on a bike. I've ridden the thing twice. I love it in the Park or along the water, but on the streets I just feel like I traded one bullet for another. Most of these city street bikers, frankly, are entitled and crazy. How one isn't wiped out every day is beyond me. I'm more afraid of them than the cars. Which aren't much better because no one is looking at the road. All the Lyft and Uber drivers are looking at their GPS systems. Anyway, this week I'm back on the trains. So far so good. The A/C/B/D trains are roomier and people appear to be more civilized. Except the station platforms are a little scary. A lot of loiters and scary hominids just lingering about. But the ride isn't as populated with lunatics as the 2/3, which is basically a moving insane asylum. The 6 has always had the ugliest people even pre-pandemic but since the east side buses actually arrive and move on time, I tend to just bus it on that side of town. Anyway, today I need to get on the crazy train and I'm pondering my mortality the way one might before going under anesthesia for the first time. Anyone else get like this or is this just me being...me?

This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- The Local News Needs an Update

 The local news paradigm needs to be updated badly. First of all, let's chill with these weather forecasts. The weather does not need to be discussed, it just needs to be noted. And any meteorologist who does not like rain or anything other than sunny and warm weather just sounds basic AF. How do you get a degree in this meteorology and only like the same one type of weather system that any rando visiting Tampa in February would like? (Actually, how the fuck does anyone get a degree in meteorology period? Can you imagine the small talk?) Also, let's end sports. There is nothing more culturally residual of the Eisenhower era of patriarchal dominance than the fact that sports is reported on the local evening news every night. I don't know if this is a gay thing or an artist thing, but nothing bores me more than hearing a bunch of dudes blab about a sports game to no end. I grew up having to listen to my friends talk about that and having to sit with the men in the living room on holiday gatherings watching them somnambulantly grunt and mumble about touchdowns and field goals and all I saw were a bunch of bubble butts and helmets bopping around and stopping suddenly to regroup for no apparent reason and I would just check out of the room like someone who suddenly stopped understanding our spoken language. If you want to kill me, talk about sports for longer than two minutes and I will die of boredom right in front of you. I'll melt. Might even start crying. Goddamn, that shit is boring. Moving on, and this is probably a gay thing (and perhaps a son-of-a-hairdresser thing), these wiggy hairstyles on the lady anchors! Why does everyone's hair have to be so stiff? A woman with hair volume should have hair that moves. That's such a terrible look. Anyway, any news producers out there? May want to consider some of these suggestions. And lastly, stop not saying the "race" of the perp in a crime story. Saying, "the suspect was described as six feet tall and wearing a purple du-rag, a black leather jacket, and sagging pants." I mean...just say it, already. You know? Evasion only makes it more pronounced. Well that's it for me until I find something else to complain about.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Coziness of Quiet Desperation

 In a world of romantic booby-traps, disconnection from the cultural Zeitgeist, abandonment of youthful aspirations in favor of midlife comfort -- the survivalist pragmatism of settling and selling out -- my job has become the most centering and validating part of my life. Which is not something I have ever felt before. Now I understand that 50something year-old man who lives and breathes for work. The friend's dad who drove us around but never really talked. The persnickety middle-manager who didn't have a life. The guy who pays for whores he may or may not be able to get it up for but who's always a good listener. The man at the end of the bar who reads his paper with bifocals, confronting daily on some soft, unspeakable level the astonishing realization that no matter how self-sabotaging or destructive he may be, he's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. The guy, at last, who looks at young people and their styles and ways with equal derision and disorientation and, thankfully, not one ounce of envy or empathy. And on Sunday as the sun goes down and shift back to accountability and duty is so embedded it's part of his circadian rhythm, he can't wait to get up and go to work on Monday.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Will you regular me?

 Something was bothering me about a recent "encounter" I had with someone but I couldn't put my finger on until now. This person, for whom there was a mutual attraction and a short history, asked me to be their "regular." Now, I have probably been this and others have been this to me before. But I had never been proposed such in a way that, in the excitement of imminent intimacy, sounded like a good idea. Well, it was a clumsy exchange ultimately and now I realize what bothered me about it all along. That being, a regular is someone you fuck until someone you really like comes along. And that regular will invariably end up being hurt -- unless it's an equal exchange, which these things rarely are. I will never be someone's "regular." We either go to Disneyland and go our separate ways after the trip or we get to know each other and develop a relationship of some kind. But in this age of hookup culture anti-romance fickleness in a notoriously shady lifestyle I already inhabit, I'm not signing on for an even more embedded no-accountability sex trade-off. A regular is a person who goes to the same bar after work every day. Not someone you make love to when you get lonely and tingly and no one better is around. I can't imagine anything less sexy or romantic than such an offering. "Will you be my...regular?" I'm glad I realized early what was jangling and rattling in the back of my mind about an encounter with someone I was genuinely excited about. I was dumped before it even began. #dodgedabullet

This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- On the Anniversary of 9/11, Thoughts on a Fucked up New Century

This century started off like a bed-shitting, head-splitting cocaine hangover 21 years ago today and never regained a scintilla of the normalcy those of us alive or old enough before it remember. Since the still shakily explained terror attacks of 9/11, we've had two long wars of dubious justification and consequence, an historic presidential election that validated one half of the country and infuriated another into a psychological apoplexy, leading to the presidential election of someone almost anyone who read newspapers, magazines, or ever lived in New York since the 1970s knew was a crook, a con artist, and a gauche, self-deluded fool. The wake of his influence leads to the most egregious act of domestic terror by the most privileged Americans in the country and yet people that look like me can't even go take their garbage out without remembering to bring identification a step away from their own residence. And then a pandemic that killed I don't even remember how many millions that some people don't even believe is real. That, on top of all of our individual burdens, losses, crises, has made the last 20 years almost not worth preserving myself for. Terrified of AIDS and naturally risk-averse, I spent the great part of my 20s doing every thing in the world to live a long and healthy life. Even in my wildest party-hearty years, I was the most conservative and lightweight participant of recreational drugs that I've ever met. And for what? Some great reward its been. That said, others have lived through far worse. I guess the fact that I had 28 years before the beginning of this apocalyptic epoch is something I will always be grateful for. It wasn't always easy, but it wasn't this. This century was supposed to be evolved, futuristic, magical -- and in many ways it has been: we've evolved to the point of being satellites of technology; our curiosity about space travel and cryptocurrency has replaced our interest in regional crises, the suffering of our fellow humans who are starving and trafficked and raped and all manner of hell across the globe; and, most curiously, no one seems to make a lick of sense anymore. Suddenly, people you've known for years have values that are either so remote or diabolical that you wonder if you are capable of truly knowing anyone at all. The contradictions in ideologies you were once so impenetrably sure of make nothing to the intelligent among us seem certain at all, and are given to blind leaps of one-sided, black-or-white credulity to those of us less nuanced in that department. We've come to a point where it's perfectly normal to send a complete stranger a picture of your dick or you ass and it's harassment to flirt in the office or at the grocery store. I'm supposed to believe a man is a woman and a woman is a man -- or some unverifiable but suddenly legitimate space between -- and that a child is not the sex on their birth certificate because at 8 years old said child says so and when I introduce myself I have to qualify my pronouns. And if not, I'm an anachronistic bigot. Oh, and after 40 you become a celiac -- or that's what your waiter is supposed to think when he orders your food. I don't about you, but I won't miss it if this is where things are going to keep going for my next score and ten. I'm not saying I'm ready to meet my favorite rock stars, rather I'm just here because I am. But I canceled my colonoscopy, probably won't quit drinking or smoking cigarettes any time soon, and am frankly doing my best to simply hope I'm young and able enough in heart, mind, and physicality to enjoy the end of this nightmarish early 21st century in the hopes that some semblance of decency returns. Otherwise, I could honestly take it or leave it.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- Is Racism Rational?

 Muggings on Fifth and 86th in front of the Guggenheim and on West 23rd. Stabbings on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea and in the long-since hypergentrified East Village. Flash mobs in Soho boutiques. And that's to say nothing of the regularly scheduled programming in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. (And Detroit, Baltimore, Altanta, D.C., etc.) And what do ALL of the perps look like? Me! They look like me. How can we BP speak to police brutality and profiling and say NOTHING about the epidemic of violent crime offenders that almost characterizes the essence of our entire community? How do BLM again? How can we expect anyone to take us seriously -- beyond the contributions to music and sports that, together with the depravity, only serve to reinforce the idea that we're not quite working with the same materials as everyone else? Because even I'm starting to wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with most of us. Yes, I said most. This is just beyond out of control. I'm tired of wondering if I barely genetically escaped being a savage unfit for the civilized world. And yet I feel like the only BP who actually thinks this. (Any BA who has never had this thought is either lying or an idiot -- or one of the people I'm talking about.) Well, I know what I'm going to get from some folks, but I don't have the energy to pretend that I can't empathize with racism to some degree at this point. And that's not a nice feeling.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Woke Yourself to Sleep

 

Miss the old days of pre-woke Vanity Fair edited by Graydon Carter? Subscribe to Carter's Air Mail, it's online equivalent. I'd love to write this kind of content, even though there's no glamour or prestige to me in writing for an online magazine, and probably not much more money. The evolution of Conde Nast from nepotistic, thoroughbred white country club to a company so desperate to stay relevant that it's collective output these days is almost indistinguishable from the looks of Ebony magazine with an HBCU ethos has been one of the most whiplashing wonders of my lifetime. (I can say this from the inside out, as someone who has been reading their magazines since I was as young as 12 and who eventually briefly worked there.) Yet, as greatly as the long overdue representation is appreciated on one level, the seriousness of the current moment's voice when it comes to culture (see the current VF under editor Radhika Jones whose issues will woke you straight to sleep) has taken over the palace and replaced the once playful, sometimes ironic tone and louche, jet set glamour of Vanity Fair and Vogue with the deadly serious and censorious anti-fun that characterizes hyper-feministic, pronoun-obsessed, inclusive to the point of editorial absurdity diversity diverticulosis that has taken a diuretic to everything fun and sexy today. You couldn't even publish a magazine like Details today. I'd give anything to go back and point out all the things published there just a decade ago (before it shuttered) that could never even be printed today. I guess that could be because irony on top of irony cancels itself out, like double negatives. Which is something I've always found so odd: if it's black, it has to be either serious or wildin' out. There is very little life in between for POC in media. In fact, it's never about the person, it's about their color. So you can't have a woke Conde Nast and keep the winking irreverent attitude at the same time. Anyway, if you miss the old Conde, Air Mail is worth a shot. Because let's face it: there's nothing more outrageous and entertaining than the foils and foibles of the rich, beautiful, and fucked up.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered: SATC and the Glory of Irreverence in Humor

 Decided to revisit the early seasons of SATC, which is so uncool to like these days. Well, sorry. I'll take Cool New York over Woke New York any day. Give me cigarettes, politically incorrect witty repartee, coke in bathroom stalls of chic boites, and blackout sexcapades with blurred lines. That's real life, which should be the main ingredient in any recipe for great drama and comedy. The show was witty, smart, groundbreaking, and not nearly as racially or culturally homogenous as it is so roundly accused of being -- in fact, this overcorrection on the newest incarnation is almost unwatchably forced. If you want to attack a show for being "too YT" from that period, go jump on "Friends," which is one of the most boring sitcoms I've ever almost never seen. But back to SATC. As one who longs for the period that the show depicted in it's earliest seasons, it's really nostalgic to see the streets of Manhattan in the mid-late 90s and early aughts, especially since I lived and worked and ran in a lot of the places featured on the show in those days.

 30 years ago, I was in a fraternity at the University of Michigan. For two of the three years I was part of that house (TKE), I was the only black guy and I can honestly say that I was never once alienated, left out, discriminated against, or in any way socially maligned. On my junior year of college, I realized I had to finally come to grips with the nagging stirrings of sexuality that were not in line with the culture that I worried that I was posing in, so I dropped out of the fraternity and later that year, out of school for a brief spell, to confront and contend with what I had suspected was different about me all along. For the vast majority of my frat brothers and lingering friendships from high school with all straight friends, I was supported and encouraged and in every possible way helped along in my new and unfamiliar social habitat, which back then revolved around the Necterine Ballroom, Backstreet and Menjos gay bars. I was the wallflower who stood in a corner, not sure how to strike up conversations that didn't involve books or sports or alternative music or mutual friends. I had no idea what I was getting into, but I had my straight friends when I left that bar and even a couple of straight friends who went with me when I was tired of going alone. I didn't have any problems getting laid, thank goodness. In fact, I didn't even know if I was good looking or not before I came out because it wasn't something I spent a lot of time thinking about. (I honestly still can't tell if I'm good looking or not LOL.) I knew I was smart and artistic and a little goofy and nerdy, but I quickly realized that, in this milieu, none of that really seemed to matter. Because I had an athletic body and I was considered "masculine" and that was what people wanted to go home with. The first guy I ever slept with was a guy whose beauty I admired at the Central Campus Recreation Center (the gym) for years before I had any idea he was gay. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen and I went home with him on my second night going to the Necterine Ballroom in Ann Arbor. I'm not so sure it got much better than that guy, at least not until I moved to NYC, even if he wasn't ready to settle down and I would later realize I was just one of his lucky guys. After sex with subsequent hookups and suitors became de rigueur and expected and even banal, I was in a relationship with one particular guy who pretty much lived up to every single stereotype of gay manhood that I had ever encountered. Unknowingly racist, deceptive, over-the-top, possessive, and fetishizing, I dated a guy for two years who really believed he loved me but I'm not sure that he ever regarded me as a real person. He was in awe of me in a way, and perhaps I was flattered by it. We had a violent, tumultuous three year relationship and I have always been weary of anything that gave off the same scent that he did: forward, possessive, predatory, jealous, envious, profoundly materialistic, devious, deceptive, catty, arrogant, obsessed with his own and others' appearances, and generally unstable as hell. Meanwhile, he was also considered one of the most desirable men in town and I was supposed to feel lucky to have him. I was actually lucky to leave him. But yet...I continued to meet men like that. After 27 years, I am tired. If that's the best there is to offer, or the best the I can do, I have resigned that the safest thing for me is to be alone. I have fallen in love with users, abusers, addicts, rich men, poor men, black, white, artists, professionals, and everything in between. And every single one of them is in some way a reshuffled version of that first lover. Well, I'm over it now. I will not accept this way of life as the only way to live. Thank you for enduring what amounts to reading my journal. It is helpful to me to broadcast these feelings so if that annoys you...well, there is a button for that. At the very least, I'm glad I never abandoned my old world completely. I still have my "brothers" and my high school friends and I still listen to the Smiths and the Cure and the Pysch Furs. I'm still Brandon. Thank God.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Reading the Sunday Times

 Something Facebook reminded me that I wrote a year ago today: 

Decided to take a rare leisurely look through the NYT for nothing specific, but to just gallivant through it like someone might walk around the Met on a gray weekday afternoon. These days I usually read the Times with a quick and swift purpose, the way a prisoner eats: taking in just enough sustenance to keep me alive and then using that fuel for my humdrum in-the-know life. But today I wanted the indulgence of the NYT, which is how I have read it for most of my life, primarily when it was on paper and just turning the page could find you someplace unexpected that you would never have normally navigated on purpose. I learned a lot on my way from Arts and Leisure to Dining Out. This is how I used to read it before it became this practical-serving resource of reliable views and thoughtful perspectives on news I'd find scrolling down my Timeline or hearing in chirps on CNN and MSNBC. This is the way I used to read the paper, when I read it on paper. Especially on Thursdays and Sundays, when some of my favorite arts, lifestyle and culture sections were featured. Today I started with Magazine, a regular part of my weekly culture diet from college until about the last four or five years (blame digital), and realized I don't know who the hell anyone is anymore. Seriously. All these people, these Dippas and Duas and Twigs and Lil Somebodys. Who the fuck are these people? They might be timely but they didn't seem very Times-y. The only person I recognized was Philip Roth and he's two generations before me. Glided over to T Mag and there was a Zac Posen cooking video (talk about someone who's won the life lottery...) but I haven't cared for the style world since the mid-aughts. Btw, does Sunday Styles even still exist? I skipped the Books section of the paper because I could build a whole separate library of books I bought over the pandemic that I haven't even cracked open yet. Just so strange because I used to get so excited reading these sections of the NYT and now I'm one of those people I used to pity, despise and look down upon: the person who doesn't know what's up. Over the last few years I've often lamented 'le mort de cool.' But maybe cool isn't dead. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, I'm just not cool anymore? #cuesexandthecitymusic #myinnercarrie

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - My New New York City Neighborhood Crush

 Taking buses everywhere now, instead of riding the crazy trains with the local bat-eating Ozzy Osborne lunatics that now run the streets and subways of New YUCK City, has added hours to my travel time, but it's also forced me to explore neighborhoods that I never really spent a lot of time in. Of all the years I've lived in New York in three different "tours" over the last 25 years, one area I never really spent a lot of time in is the Upper West Side, which may surprise some people. I had one good friend who lived there for many years, but I didn't really get into that neighborhood, or anywhere in Manhattan above 23rd Street, for a really long time. Like many over the last decade and some change, Hell's Kitchen became a destination. And then a few years ago Harlem became a home. The sturdy and adult Upper East Side just south of my former East Harlem residence was a place where my dentist once was and the museums are, and a lot of restaurants that I like. A good neighborhood for jogging along Fifth Avenue. But the UWS was kind of at once a place I felt like I knew well enough (from films and books) but didn't need to really know. I never spent much time there. Some good bookstores, my ex-therapist's office, that was what I went over there for. But now that I have to transfer from the M60 to the M104 to get to my "nice gym" (as opposed to my neighborhood gym), I have fallen in love with this neighborhood. And I have not fallen in love with a New York neighborhood since probably 1999, when a 'wild-child' lover introduced me to the world beyond the obvious attractions of the East Village. Now I'm crushing on the Upper West Side for its diners (I love diners!), it's really good looking and well-dressed people (in a grownup way, as opposed to a rock star/model Soho/LES/West Village way), and it's general sexy intellectual vibe. It's nice to walk around the city and feel relatively safe and not have to look over your shoulder for thugs and lunatics between keeping your eye on the ground for dog crap like I have to live in my new neighborhood, Central Harlem, which was once a really nice part of the storied uptown village. I can't afford to live on the UWS right now, unfortunately, but for me that's one of the things I have never stopped loving about New York: where you live and where you sleep don't have to be the same place, or even anywhere near one another.