Often I divert conversations from questions about living in NYC because even mentioning living here, you get judged. Conservatives outside NYC judge you as a liberal elitist. Liberal elitists judge you as a poser conservative who didn’t grow up here. NYC conservatives judge you as not war-hardened enough and liberals outside the city judge you for staying this long. Writers judge you for living in an expensive place. Rich businessmen judge you for writing and running a nonprofit in NYC (for instance, one application for authority for our organization has been rejected by Albany over twelve times — once literally because of a semicolon). Everyone thinks they’re God and have a right to dictate what’s right and wrong about your passionate, sincere existence — or have their ideal of how your life goes or should go. Almost no one is interested in the reality of it. I’ve also had telemarketing and business calls where folks perk up and lean in the second they learn I live in NYC. 

None of it’s consistent, but it makes it consistently hard to talk about living here in any sincere, sustained way that shows what it means to me and Tara. I’ve done it now and again talking about the foster to homeless pipeline or when Eric Garner was strangled to death for selling cigarettes or posted videos of Tara whilst pregnant:

…That her Aunt watches every day to my infinite delight.

Most of the time I’ve restricted sharing my experience here to close friends and even now and again to my mailing list. Honestly, I’m not a fan of mom bloggers, fashion bloggers, lifestyle bloggers. My bride loves these things, they seem fundamentally shallow to me. The cognitive dissonance of that statement comes from the fact that my wife isn’t shallow, but a very deep person, so… there must exist some value to these things. That said, if there’s anything I abhor outside of hypocrisy and gossip, it’s shallowness. I abhor shallow people who don’t help their neighbors, who don’t read and watch reflectively, who get mad at other people for being booksmart which is another way of saying you’re too lazy to read great books you have every capacity to read, but that the poor grow up without access to the way that I did.

The person who does not read
has no advantage over the person who cannot read.

Mark Twain

And yet.

I for years have wanted to write some posts about some harebrained experiences I’ve had here that sort of summarize what it feels like living in NYC through several waves of folks coming and going — businesses, church plants, artists, neighbors, friends, mentors, etc. This coupled up with the emergence of “How To” with John Wilson and “Pretend It’s A City” with Fran Lebowitz. They’re more… honest about what the city’s like and it paints a very different picture, almost a quaint picture, of the city I’ve come to love and respect and for whose future I hold absolute unconditional confidence.

Whether I like it or not, I’m a deep rooted New Yorker now. That was the goal. Not a transient, not a commuter, not a tourist. A native. I’ve lived here longer than any of the folks I considered “deep rooted” when I first moved. That baffles my brain, but it’s true. I’ve also met more deep rooted New Yorkers and become a regular in more places than many, many people who claim to move here to do the same, but left one by one over the years and then en masse during the pandemic. I’m not judging them so much as distinguishing what I’m aiming at and whether I’ve hit the target.

I wrote a poem not long ago entitled WHAT’S IT LIKE LIVING IN NYC? And the first two lines go:

It’s not as bad as you think.
It’s not as good as it sounds.
It’s just an archipelago, see?

That pretty much sums up my whole response. 

What follows in this category is stuff that shows living in NYC is not as bad as you think.

And it’s not as good as it sounds.