Categories
Found

NYT: “Jersey City, a Love Story”

I’ll have something of personal substance up this weekend, but wanted to make sure everyone read this lovely little thing on my current town from the Times.

It stands to reason that moving to Jersey is the one not-cool thing that will never inexplicably become cool among New Yorkers. And I had done it. It no longer seemed necessary to have a different bar to go to every night of the week. It seemed like it was time to learn to live within my means. If this is what aging entails, the Village Voice was right.

Categories
Reflected

The Calm After The Storm

Jersey City Post-Irene (NE)

After all of the stress of yesterday, we woke up this morning and continued to stay cautious and weary until about 10AM, when the Irene was downgraded to a Tropical Storm. We went down to the 9th floor deck and then to the building lobby to survey.

Despite being in an evacuation zone and being literally on the coast of the Hudson, we found no flooding, no fallen trees or branches, no broken glass. We did not once lose power or cable service. The lobby of our building was undamaged.

Yet the more inland parts of Jersey City – not under an evacuation order – suffered widespread flooding and power outages.

There are things in life that perplex me, and this is certainly one of them. I am not going to sit here and call the storm “boring” or “overrated” because it has impacted plenty of people. As I write this, PSE&G says 375k are without power in NJ, and I know more than a few. But how a riverfront area can avoid any damage flies in the face of my internal logic.

In any case, I’m glad it’s done and over with. But now I very badly need a vacation, or a massage, or *something*.

Categories
Best Of Enjoyed Narrated

You Made Me Realize: APW 2009

This is mud. Three hours of heavy rain shortly after the start of the festival combined with a not insignificant number of feet walking across the grounds combined with the frequent animal visitors to the park (geese / dogs / feral cats / et cetera) yield a unique mud blend that is extremely slick yet sticky and also heavily smells of shit. While the texture will threaten to cause you both to slip and to be stuck, this is temporary and location based. The smell will burn your nostrils for the duration of the festival no matter where you are positioned.

This is how you discover your new favorite band, later.