It’s 5:40 a.m. and I’ve reached the point of sleeplessness where you abandon all hope of getting any rest. I’ve been wrestling with this night for hours. I’m lying in a grungy room of a grungy apartment, and all its imperfections are amplified by my sleeplessness. The floor is slanted by about five extra degrees. Every truck outside sounds like a steel factory being propelled up Bedford Avenue by jet engines. The mouse in my closet is six feet tall and its jaws are caked with blood. Human blood.

My bedroom is crooked. It’s basically Dutch angled. My life inside it is, fittingly, like a German expressionist film. My computer desk has wheels that, if unlocked, would carry the whole thing about eight feet east until crashing it into my bed. Before, I knocked over an empty Yuengling bottle in the dark and listened to it roll for a solid fifteen seconds. I don’t know where it stopped. I can only conclude that their are valleys in this floor that I just haven’t found yet.

Crooked floor or no, this city and I are starting to fit together. We’re approaching the right configuration. The gears are starting to catch, the machine is rumbling to life. I’m still fumbling around in the dark most of the time, but I can feel the early makings of a rhythm between me and New York.

And I’ve settled into this room. There’s something right about the floor, the dirty coffee mugs, the messy piles of books I haven’t read yet, and those monstermobiles roaring up the street. Maybe I’ve been hurtling through time and space towards this sleepless night in this absurd room for twenty-two years, four months and four days. Maybe it’s 6:27 a.m. and I’m starting to write nonsense.

Either way, I’m gonna go bike around Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy now, and try to make it back to my roof in time for the sunrise.

Hello, Brooklyn

I’m moving to Brooklyn tomorrow. This means that I will be living in New York City. Around the clock. I will not board a Metro-North train back to Connecticut at 11:22 tomorrow night. I will not be in a basement that my dad refinished, safely dozing off to old “Simpsons” episodes by 1 a.m.

At 11:22, I’ll still be god-knows-where in New York City. I will doze off not on a futon my mom bought, but in a dingy third-floor apartment in Clinton Hill, my head resting in close proximity to more Hasidic Jews than my mom has ever seen. So many Hasidic Jews.

I’ve wanted to live in New York for a long time, probably for more than half my life. But I’m moving in under less than ideal circumstances. I don’t have a job. I have a small amount of savings that will start thinning fast. I have framed bachelor’s degrees that I can dust off and shove into anyone’s face, but I have very few marketable skills. Actually, that’s not true. I have no marketable skills. On top of that, I am a child in a weak, lanky man’s body. I don’t own a checkbook. I don’t eat fruit. I learned what a cashier’s check is just the other day. I still do not know what a cashier’s check is. I take baths. 

So, I’m anxious. The 9-year-old me that made plans to live in the Empire State Building could never foresee all this dread. The 9-year-old me was a small, cute dumbass. Lots of questions haunt me now. What am I doing? Can I even survive this? Who do I think I am? What, for fuck’s sake, is a cashier’s check? Recent trips to the city have been more stressful than affirming. I’ve been seeing New York for its hardness and inhumanity, when I used to see only magic and possibility. I used to see the brights lights and the energy and the bigness, and feel at home. Now I see long, weathered faces and too-heavy bags, and feel unwelcome. Homeless people are walking cautionary tales. This place will break you. This has made it hard to get excited.

Yesterday, I was driving a UHaul van packed with all my shit into Brooklyn. Driving, and thinking that there was still time to back out and do the sensible thing. There’s time to turn around and go home: a place where there’s way less meanness and, by definition, there can be no homelessness. Where failure can be blissfully ignored, covered up by second dinners at 2 a.m. and a futon that will gladly receive any pasty, poorly-maintained body. I thought about how easy it would be to retreat back to that safety.  

And then there was this point, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where my van crested a hill, and all of the sudden Manhattan was laid out right in front of me. Fucking sparkling, the way tourists are promised it will. It felt like seeing it for the first time. There was the same sense of possibility, of encouragement. The same impulse to make myself a small part of this monument to human achievement. And I just thought, Something about this has to be right. 

I might have some rough experiences in New York. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll still get to spend every day in a place that is, by its very existence, a kind of culmination of human history: a place that is at once the pinnacle of our species’ achievement and the gutter of its failure. And because of that, every street, every building, every character you meet, is somehow hallowed, somehow sacred—somehow special because they exist in what should be an impossible, inconceivable place.

I’m so ready to soak it all in. And I’m excited to see a lot of you guys there.    

(As an incentive to get myself writing, I’m gonna post daily about how this all unfolds. I hope these blocks of text don’t stick out like too sore a thumb on your Tumblr feeds.)