So it looks like I’ve moved to Brooklyn, land of 10,000 messy confrontations. Nobody seems to have the energy to make any sense here. Everyone is constantly prepared to assume the worst, and always ready to let you know what that worst is. We’re all training each other to glare and frown, pushing and shoving and getting in each other’s way just enough to make you wonder whether it’s personal or not. This is a place where the one mortal sin is a lack of certitude in yourself and your superiority. An empire of the extrovert. Basically it’s prison rules. The other day at the Food Bazaar in Bushwick, me & Caitlin saw a bored-looking girl leaning over her cart (or “wagon,” as they call them here) saying “es-CUSE YOU” to everyone in her path.

And meanwhile, in every bodega, grocer, diner and department store they’re belting out a catalog of songs glorifying New York. I seem to hear the words “New York” or “Brooklyn” blaring from the ceiling every time I leave the apartment. I mean, New York’s alright and everything — but is this soundtrack of self-tribute actually contributing to Brooklyn’s earth-salting war against itself? We stand United, sure — united in a mandate to use each other’s faces as stepping stones, stampeding after that scummy will-o-wisp towards the shadowy, vague promise of “making it” in New York. What does it mean when the myth you’ve created about your city, from Rockefeller to Woody Allen to Biggie, is that of a frothing, gilded cesspit of disaffection and overstimulation that pits human against human in a balkan no-rules cage match to win the best tenament on the best block of the world’s best pile of toxic waste?

These days, I find my mind often drifting towards a contemplation of the man that has, to me, always personified the smug, solipsistic, mercenary neo-Noo Yaw-wuck attitude: Derek Jeter. Now, I know this isn’t going to win me any fans in my new boro, but to me this guy basically looks like walking date rape. Just imagine him in a crisp soldier’s uniform, mauser slung across his shoulder, laughing as they sic the dogs on you. He looks like the kind of guy who’d fingerfuck your wife just to make you smell his finger. He’s a modern-day Achilles, grown spoiled on the chorus of tributes hailed at the banquet by the acolytes of Success. A groomed horse. An uber-mook. A bronze statue in a shitty park somewhere in East Jersey. And don’t the ladies just love him.

And now that I find myself a freshly conscripted resident of Brooklyn, I must take it upon myself to gaze into the eyes of this baby-cheeked sadist, to really spelunk down into the core of his heavy-lidded leer and feel real love. I must understand Derek Jeter. Relate with him. Make my peace with our respective positions in the merciless natural order of things. Come to terms with the vicious pathology of urban survival here in the epicenter of this post-9/11 farce. I must leave off my search for humanity, clarity, insight or reason in my neighbor, let my succor remain denied, and just melt into this fruitstand-strewn hades with the rest of the doomed $10-a-drink sinners. I will make ambivalence my enemy, pinch off my wavering sensitivities, and cure my psychic skin into a jerky tough and nitrite-laced enough to withstand the ammunition of the eight million other damned souls who wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. This is my oath and my promise. To merge into this congealed stream of ‘roided antipathy. To learn to breathe, drink, and bathe in the poison. To creep through the smutty labyrinth of this wasp nest until the pheromones transmit and I can pass for normal. Maybe by then I’ll be able to take my newfound asthma/colorectal cancer/hypertension out for a walk in Prospect Park in the spring.

EDIT 2/11/10: Jesus, was that morose! I assure you that things are not really all that bad, and that the blame should like at least partially on my own perennial bouts of severe depression, an affliction under which even Shangri-la itself would probably get on my nerves. Stay tuned for my next blog installment, when Gabby’s Playhouse examines the Not So Shitty Things About Brooklyn (and tries really hard not to insult anyone else).