As has been previously discussed, your mom moved to Williamsburg and it is soooo embarrassing. It’s like, can’t we just put old people on ice floes or something, so that we can sext each other our e-genitals without them freaking out about it. Well, good news young people! The combined powers of your hostility to anyone with wrinkles and your parents’ friends not wanting to come here at all could be sending olds who move here right back across the East River. At least of one woman’s harrowing story is to be believed.
A woman named Nellie Alexander, who proclaimed herself “bored” with her Ambien-haze life, decided to pack up and hit Williamsburg with her husband. This, despite her teenage son warning her she was too old. At first, it was the paradise she wanted:
“Those first few weeks, we loved the neighborhood as much as we thought we would. The streets and shops and subways had that restless hipster energy…It reminded me of the way the Lower East Side felt when I was in high school and my friend Edie and I would each tell our parents we were going to the other one’s house for a sleepover and then take the PATH into the city with our fake IDs to go to CBGBs”
But the bloom came off the rose quickly. “I found myself getting annoyed by the hipsters I once thought were so cool,” Alexander wrote. Her friends wouldn’t take the L train out to see her and her husband. She found herself the recipient of mean stares at Pete’s Candy Store when she brought her friend who wore a tie here (doesn’t he know Williamsburg is a no-tie zone? Sheesh). All the hairstylists had tattoos and purple hair, the nerve!
It finally came to a head one night at Brooklyn Bowl, when Alexander and her husband went to see Questlove at Bowl Train. Not only was it crowded, and people stepped on her feet, Alexander decided to go to the bathroom before leaving, and that’s when the young people there unleashed their greatest weapon of all: callous disregard for everyone who isn’t them.
“No sooner had I shut the door behind me when two girls walked in. ‘I don’t get it,’ one said. ‘Why don’t they just stay in Park Slope with all the other stroller people, where they belong?’ ‘If I see one more suit in my building, I’m going to throw up,’ said the other. ‘If they’re trying to prove to the world that they’re still cool, it’s not working. I mean, last week I saw a fucking gray-haired grandma at Pete’s. Do they not know how ridiculous they look?’
I waited until they left. I practically ran out to the sidewalk and by the time I found Hank outside, I was crying. ‘I’m just tired,’ I said. ‘Fed up and tired.’ I was so humiliated, it was days before I would tell him the whole story.”
Instead of moping about listening to The Smiths to get over it, Alexander and her husband left before the year was up. Now look, as funny as we think this is, we’re not idiots. We understand that we’ll be old and out of touch one day. But we also like to think we’ll be self-aware enough to not write about how hard it is to live in a neighborhood we moved to because we thought it was cool only to find the cool young people there didn’t think we were cool, with all the self-pitying regard of a stereotypical Millennial. Huh, now that we think about it, it sounds like Alexander was learning how to be young again. Maybe she should have stuck it out.
Related Articles
Brooklyn’s Wegmans will open October 27th, hiring now
Wegmans, the upstate New York-based grocery store will open its first Brooklyn location this fall.
Get groovy at the Greenpointers Flower Power Spring Market (Sun, April 7th)
The not-to-be-missed Greenpointers Flower Power Spring Market is this Sunday on the Brooklyn waterfront.
Apply for the NYC affordable housing lottery at these Brooklyn buildings
A number of new Brooklyn buildings currently have “affordable” units to apply for under the NYC housing lottery.
7 Comments
Leave a Reply
Anyone who gives a hot damn what anyone thinks about them is indeed weak and sad. I go where I want, do what I want, whenever I want and if anyone doesn’t like it…I COULD NOT CARE LESS. I live MY life. Get some balls people.
Yesterday morning this middled-aged man got on the L train at Bedford — morning rush hour — pushing a toddler ahead of him as though for some reason he deserved extra space and everyone should get out of his way because he had a kid with him. There was a brief kerfuffle when someone told him he was being irresponsible pushing his toddler onto the crowded train; apparently middle-aged man didn’t like being told what to do because Gen-X is super rebellious. From deeper in the train, someone — okay, it was me — yelled “go back to Park Slope.”
So wait, you just moved here from NJ, and you’re telling other people they aren’t allowed to live here? Nice, hypocrite.
You burned me so good.
You can read the rest of the story here:
http://thebillfold.com/2014/03/long-days-journey-into-rent-stabilization/
Now this is how you hold a grudge. Seriously, I’m impressed.
That’s an old photo of Chris Masterson, current guitar player for Steve Earle;
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/chris-masterson-mn0000315516/credits
he also played guitar for Son Volt
well, if you’ve come to seek the cool party, its gone – and has been replaced by the younger and even cooler party (so they think, as did we) – who doesn’t want you around any more than you wanted your parents at your new scene. Moral of the story: get over it. Why would you want to go back unless you have missed something? Its the people, not the activity that made you love the past. These are not the same people, these are young people who hate whoever is not them. Getting old and still trying to be a scene follower reeks of desperation.
So why not create their own super-scene replete with what you know is cool from today combined with what was truly cool in the past? Oh yeah, because we don’t have boundless and pointless energy, unjustified cockiness, and most of our time is taken up with other things we ignored as a self righteous little snots – working, kids, friends who get cancer or are going through some form of tragedy……and all your peers who would otherwise spend all of their disposable income and then some on the fun budget are busy getting fired from their job because they are over 50, trying to pay off their mortgage, take care of their kids that can’t get a job, and making up saving for retirement. Oh yeah, that’s right, we’re getting old.
Scene followers get off easy when young because they fit the part, but you’ll have to be a lot more original if you want to stay with the game. There is no need to pretend that our culture / society loathes age. If you can ignore that fact, you will stay forever young. If you can not do that, you’ll resent young people – and the person you probably were at one time. So let it go and do what you want, to hell with what anyone thinks. After all, that is what one of the fringe benefits should be about getting old. F@ck ’em if they can smell my soiled senior diaper, i wanna rock b!tch!