“Sex and The City Without The Fabulous Cocktail Parties and a Lot More Facial Hair.”

I had actually started this blog over a year ago as a means of churning out fictional life of a New York City art handler who’s trying to make ends meet along with his three other drinking buddies with similar degrees in the arts who have to work shitty jobs in order to make ends meet while trying to attain their creative goals. Right. For anyone who knows me and what I do, I wouldn’t have to stretch that far for research, but I had it in my head as the antithesis of Sex and the City without the fabulous cocktail parties and a lot more facial hair.

Unfortunately, I’ve been sitting on this for over a year now without anything to inspire me up until a few weeks ago when it dawned on me that pretending to write a “creative non-fiction” blog through a fictional character would have seemed, I don’t know, insincere. It wouldn’t have felt right to make up the absurd of what I see through this city, this job along with the stories from those whom I’ve met over the years. Besides, blowing off steam through mad shit talking and naming names is a lot more fun than making things up.

The other important factor in said hold up (and I know you all were on the edge of your seats waiting) is that I no longer live in Brooklyn as of three weeks ago. Nothing dramatic, although I can honestly say that I officially got priced out of my neighborhood. Now I don’t know what gets under my skin more: The fact that landlords in my old neighborhood are charging over a thousand dollars a “room” in a section more polluted than the Exxon Valdez shores of Alaska circa 1989, or that the rich kids whom they cater to are renting them up in bulk. Either way, I knew my time was up when a two bedroom apartment right around the corner from my prior residence was available for $3,000 and I didn’t know how to break it to my friend that this was grand theft as she looked at me with what an exciting deal she offered me.

It’s moments like this that make Queens look like a lottery winner. Sure, the commute’s unpleasant and the isolation of not knowing anyone within several subway stops can turn one into a homebody, but the cringe worthy rent is no longer a monthly feeling along not having to share my living space –particularly the shower, with an array of creepy crawlers that I once might have inhaled one of them in my sleep a couple years ago; telling myself it was just a dream kept me from shrieking like a hysterical thirteen year-old girl.

Anyway, it is also false advertising to have “Brooklyn” in the name of a blog that’s written by a guy who now lives in the borrough next over (I thought about renaming this “Queens is The New Black,” but I didn’t want to take up another URL and branding anything “as the new black” already seems dated). “Brooklyn Drinks and Goes Home” is a very sudle nod to the one writer who got me back into reading years and years ago by the name of Ben Hamper –most famously known as the crazy guy who has a nervous breakdown in the beginning of Michael Moore’s (this was all I could find) “Roger and Me.” He also wrote “Rivethead,” which was an autobiography of growing up in Flint, Michigan under the shadow of GM before, working an assembly line, dealing with the monotony of said job (mostly through getting sloshed on his lunchbreak) and eventually having a nervous breakdown –heck, Matt Dillion was suppose to star as a more good looking version of him in the movie adaptation. These days as far as I know, he happily lives in Suttons Bay, Michigan, drinking copious amounts of rum and coke while living on some sort of GM pention, at least what’s left of it. His second book was suppose to be titled “America Drinks and Goes Home” which as far as I know, will come out sometime around never. Not that I knew this title was originally taken from a Frank Zappa song until after I registered the name, but at least to me it’s still my own personal hats off to a guy who made fascinating stories about the small world around him.

So here goes nothing: Another blog that’ll instantly lead to a book deal and an interview with Terry Gross in less than a years time. What Diaryland, Livejournal and Myspace couldn’t do, this will, right? Right!