The official announcement

So it’s been nearly two months since we moved to Brooklyn Heights. Highlights of the move included the previous tenant’s shit all over the apartment the day we moved in, resulting in our 80 year old landlord’s inability to get inside to clean the place, resulting in eight years worth of refracted pee on the wall next to the toilet.

But that’s ancient history now. Our place is big and clean and (mostly) pee-free.

Then there’s our neighborhood. In Tribeca, our window was right at the intersection of two one-way streets and a dead end. Nearly everyone driving down our street discovered this fact 10 feet below our window, and decided that the most effective way to correct the problem was to hold the horn. Not honk. Hold.

Now? The silence is almost holy. It’s angelic. Now when I walk Franny at midnight in my underpants, there are no homeless people to scoff at how slovenly I’m dressed, no blacked out strip club patrons, no Fresh Direct trucks idling outside our bedroom window, no dim-witted protesters, no sketchy Fox news vans, no quote unquote mosques as a next door neighbor.

It’s nothing but tree lined streets and brownstones and dogs and babies. In short, people just like us…

Well, almost like us.

Our baby boy isn't due until May.

change of pace

Well, we did it. We found a new apartment. After a monthlong search, Crissy’s organizational booster rockets exploded out of her eyeballs, and she rode both of our brokers’ lazy nutsacks right into a beautiful three flat in Brooklyn Heights.

It was really impressive the way she pitted these bastards against each other, ramping up the competition, and lighting a fire under both of their asses by doing our own simultaneous Craigslist search. If we’re paying these sons of bitches six thousand dollars to find us a god damn rental unit, Crissy was gonna make them work for their money.

We haven’t covered this much in the blog yet, but we decided to move to Brooklyn almost a year ago. Since then, everyone in Manhattan has been trying to give us a big city pep talk, like moving to Brooklyn means we’re throwing in the towel and moving to South Dakota.

Have you looked on the Lower East Side?? Have you considered the Upper West Side?? Have you considered a refrigerator box alongside the West Side Highway?

The answer is yes, we have. We’d love to stay in Manhattan. But we want more space, and last I checked, we don’t manage hedge funds. Because the starting rent for a clean, bedbug-free 2 bedroom in any decent neighborhood is just over four grand a month. That’s if your broker is lucky enough to find you one, after you’ve been anal raped by…er…paid them their fifteen percent cut.

On top of that, it’s starting to feel like TriBeCa is conspiring to drive us out of the city. The anti-Park51 community center demonstrations are heating up (the loudest and dumbest was this past weekend on September 11th), the sound of the construction surrounding our building can only be described as warlike, and NYC’s hottest summer on record served up every foul, repulsive, soul-melting stench this city has to offer.

Don’t get us wrong. We love you Manhattan. But we’re ready.

P.S. Here's a pic of some of the horses asses parked outside our apartment this past weekend. More on that later...

details, details

They had to go there, didn't they.

curve-breakin'

A lot of people ask for money on the subway. All of those people should be pissed at this guy's group of curve-busting panhandlers, who bust out full-on breakdancing routines on moving trains.

I'm not talking about some half-assed robot either. I'm talking backspins, handstands, backflips.

Yes, backflips.

all fun and games till dad gets gunned with a hose

bedbuggin' out

Crissy’s been trying to get me to freak out about bedbugs for about a year now. I wasn’t having it.

I thought bedbugs were the stuff of nursery rhymes until I Googled them. Not a good plan in the middle of August. Suddenly this scuzzy-ass city seems mighty bedbug-friendly.

And it is. They’re everywhere.

First they shut down the Hollister store on Broadway. Then they popped up in Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. They shut down a couple advertising agencies for a few days, including Euro RSCG Worldwide.

They’ve popped up in the New York Public library, the Empire State Building, and the Time Warner Center. Most recently, they’ve begun shutting down movie theaters.

But you know how they really know it’s an epidemic? Because rich people get them too. Which is the only good thing about bedbugs. Everything else sucks.

I guess you have to pay NASA eight billion dollars to burn your house down and shave your head if you have them. They’re like cockroaches. Except they live in your bed. And drink your blood.

So now we’re all freaked out, because we’re planning on moving to Brooklyn in October, and our new apartment is obviously going to have them. And even if it doesn’t, I can’t stop shopping at Victoria’s Secret.

P.S. This is a picture of my wife and dog, surrounded by bedbugs.

hey, that's great

There’s been a lot of controversy over this proposed Ground Zero Mosque lately. Except, of course, it’s not exactly at Ground Zero. It’s a couple blocks north, at 51 Park Place.

Our address? 53 Park Place.

Having a national debate as a next-door neighbor has been very interesting. And by interesting, I mean supremely annoying.

Of course, nobody seemed to care about the community center/mosque/ex-Burlington coat factory back in December. But now that elections are coming up? It’s been a steady stream of news vans, overly-coiffed newscasters, and weirdo protesters with very little drawing/spelling ability.

The newscasters are usually there until roughly midnight, which means, at the very least, our late night walks with Franny are blindingly well lit. It also serves to remind us that, according to Fox news, Franny’s apparently been peeing on hallowed ground for the last year and a half.

But none of that was any match for the powerful annoyingness that was the anti mosque demonstration yesterday. Luckily, we were properly forewarned and left town, heading up to my friend Kurt’s house in Newburgh for the day.

It was, by all accounts, exactly as advertised: loud, dumb, and ugly.

And at the risk of getting all political here, I’ll just say this: the towers were not attacked by a religion. They were attacked by a small group of psychos who are slavish to fanatical dogma.

But, of course, that’s Micky Mouse stuff compared to our own corporate sociopaths; the people who are actively poisoning our food and water, f*cking our financial system, taking out life insurance policies on ailing employees, and spraying cancer all over the Gulf of Mexico, all in the name of Corporate America’s one true religion…

The Bottom Line.

Sorry to get all preachy. It’s just that, when it’s so in your face, it’s hard to forget that this is exactly the kind of bullshit controversy drummed up to distract people from actual problems just before elections. The bad guy needs a face, and it really helps if that face looks different than ours.