This blog has to be about something more than simply recapping the Brooklyn Nets.

I’m going to have to move. Not out of the city itself, or even the borough, but further away from the trendy, downtown adjacent realm where I live right now. And as much as I try to focus on the games, my mind is constantly reevaluating my relationship with the city, and how it relates to what I put up with and what I’ve come to expect.

I am, in fact, a real New Yorker. While it’s not something that people will deal with directly on a day to day basis, the idea of belonging in this city is both nebulous and inescapable. Who is native, and who is simply a tourist taking an extended vacation, writing a singular chapter in their life, always with their eyes set on the horizon, understanding that eventually they’re getting the hell out of here. I wouldn’t describe the area as provincial, because damn near everybody here is from somewhere else, but the question ultimately lingers over your head: Who is a New Yorker? The delusional would tell you that by virtue of putting down one month’s rent, you become imbued with all the qualities associated with being a proper New Yorker. Those people are assholes. I used to frequent stand up open mics. I was, however, never a proper comedian, because I was never paid to do comedy. I’d jumped over only the lowest of bars. Personally, I say that if you’ve done ten years in the city, you count. Maybe you won’t die here, or even spend the majority of your life here. Maybe you won’t even really be able to claim that you’re a New Yorker once you find yourself puttering around a retirement community in Myrtle Beach. But you’d spent a significant portion of your life, and survived longer than anybody ever thought you’d make it. I’ve been here for 13 years by the way.

Others might snobbishly try to insist that only people who were born and raised in New York can possibly be true New Yorkers. Those idiots can go eat my ass. I went through hell to set myself up in New York. I didn’t have a wealth of friends from my days in some local high school, combined with an intimate working knowledge of the city. I didn’t have time to work a job and eventually transition from my parent’s place into my own apartment without quitting said job to go move to New York. I had a few hundred bucks to my name, a train ticket, and two places where I could crash so long as I didn’t use those two spots too often in a row. One was my dad’s girlfriend, who lent me her couch up in White Plains (That’s not in New York City, but above in Westchester County). The other was my friend in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) who rented a room above his Chinese immigrant landlord’s family. Eventually I was told by the landlord that I could not stay over on a cold December night, and made my way into the city so that I could sleep in a quiet part of the Grand Central terminal. One night I worked a gig where I played Santa Claus at an ABM AMRO corporate event at the Roseland Ballroom. My pay was $100, an open bar, and a towncar ride back to my dad’s girlfriend’s apartment in White Plains. So technically, I get to say that I played Roseland Ballroom, which ain’t nothing. Eventually I saved up enough to rent a room in a shitty house in Maspeth (Queens). Eventually I was given enough stability to afford me the chance to rent a room in a shitty apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Eventually, I found a girlfriend with a great location in Hells Kitchen. We got married. We live in Boerum Hill. So excuse me if I don’t have some greater appreciation for the way the true natives crashed with their parents until they were 24, working jobs without worrying about paying rent, before finally, once everything was totally secure and they knew they’d be alright, taking that step out of the nest.

The years have passed. I have not left, and I don’t think that I ever can leave. I’ve grown up as a child of parents who always left. We’d lived in six states by my ninth birthday. Leaving is in my blood. I once left and lived in Florida with little more than two hours planning. I woke up from a nap, felt the calling, cleared my bank account, and drove down. But I won’t leave New York, even as I say goodbye to friend after friend. Because after a few years in the City, you learn to say goodbye to the friends who probably could cut it, but for whatever reason decide that they don’t want to live in New York. Some are lucky and live in LA. Others go on different adventures. Another forgot to ask his eventual wife how she felt about her childhood in Cleveland, and currently finds himself living in Cleveland. The closest that my wanderlust will get to being sated will be when we inevitably leave our neighborhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53zPqXZ_C18

Unfortunately, I love my neighborhood. I get the sense that if you read this article, you will assume that I hold my hood in contempt. That it’s filled with millionaire phonies, and that the soul is being bled out. And it’s true. It’s being over developed. There’s an Apple store next to BAM. There’s a Whole Foods, and a Trader Joes, and a Target, and suburban creep has become the de facto culture. But there is still an aesthetic beauty to the neighborhood. I have my quiet bar just on the corner of Bergen and Fifth. I like the walk to the Promenade or to Prospect Park. I’m surrounded by Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Cobble Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus. I can be in the city in 20 minutes. But I can’t afford to save up, and for as long as I’m here, I’ll never own a place of my own.

A lot of people will tell you that you never have to own a place, and that it doesn’t always make sense. But if I stay here for 30 years, I’m going to spend some number far exceeding one million dollars (If the rent never went up by one dime, which it will, I would spend $950K over that time), and at the end of all of that I will have…nothing. I’ll have the right to keep on paying whatever the rent will be in 2049. I can buy a place somewhere in Riverdale up in the Bronx, or some place in Westchester, or Jersey for less than one million. Even with taxes. Even with interest. And hopefully at the end of those same 30 years I’ll have a place where my old ass can sit and wait to run out the clock, probably writing for this site, fully believing that the Brooklyn Nets are on the verge of relevancy.

So I’ll have to leave this place that I do not want to leave. We’ve got our eyes set on Bay Ridge, that same neighborhood where my friend once lived and I once slept on the floor before dusting myself off and going to a shitty temp job. And in leaving the area, probably in the next few months, where homes cost about $10MM, for an area where they cost $3MM, I might even feel more connected to the ethereal Real Brooklyn. But the day will come, hopefully five years from now, when we finally have enough to put down a deposit on a house in some other, lesser neighborhood, and I’ll realize that I was never truly a citizen of Bay Ridge, or Boerum Hill, or Hell’s Kitchen, or the infinitely less interesting other neighborhoods that I briefly called home. And maybe that’s the final level of being a true New Yorker, that you no longer think of yourself in terms of living in New York, but of living in Bay Ridge, or Staten Island, or Astoria. That you have matriculated into some far more categorized existence, and have become the guy who has skin in the game enough to get to know the mailman or old, weathered face at the hardware store.

I once dumped a girlfriend that I loved immensely- or as deeply as an up-his-own-ass college student can come to think of an immense love- in part because I was 22, but also in part because there was no way that we could ever be happy together, because I did not ask the one crucial question at the start of any relationship. If any young and single people are reading this, allow me to impart one piece of advice. At some point in the first two or three dates, ask the person that you’re seeing “How do you feel about this city?” Because deep down, most people know if they’re going to stay or if they’ll one day feel the calling to go home, or go to Europe, or go to the West Coast. Or go to Cleveland. I didn’t ask that question, and several months in, understood that she would never be able to leave her family in the suburbs of Rochester, New York. I also knew that I was destined to go to New York one way or another. It constantly sent out signals. On some level I’d come to think of living there the way other people think about climbing Mt. Everest, or finishing the great novel that they know they have inside of themself. I judged myself on how much I had failed to as of yet live in New York City, even though I didn’t truly understand what living in New York City entailed. Probably clubbing or maybe some career in satellite radio? In the end we could either be briefly unhappy together, or somebody would have to make a decision that they’d never truly accept. Go with him, or stay with her. I dumped that girl, and it was the correct decision, because if I’d stayed with her for any longer than I already had, I’d have to at least start thinking about far off decisions like marriage, and children, and living the rest of my life in Rochester, New York. But for years after the breakup I pined over her. She’d haunted me on my trip to Florida, and occupied a space in my mind that wouldn’t be filled again until I’d met my wife. I spent years wondering if I’d made the correct decision.

The one exhausting thing about being a New Yorker- aside from all the other exhausting things that come with living in New York- is that when you mention that you live in New York, you find yourself defending your decision to people who do not live in New York. “I could never understand why anybody would want to live there,” is both the most often heard response, and the biggest lie. I often find myself fantasizing about living any other place. I always have. When I go on vacation, I ask myself, “What would it be like to live just off of this ancient European alley?” When I drive in Texas, I think “What’s it like to live in one of those identical houses, in a vast sea of similar houses? Is it comforting or stifling? What if I’d been born here to parents who didn’t move all the time? Maybe I’d love it. Maybe I’d wear a red hat and talk about border security all the time.” In some ways it’s a value judgement, but in other ways, it’s just me trying to understand what it takes to exist in a radically different environment. And I can understand why people live anywhere. Career necessity. Proximity to family. Lack of imagination. Stability. Excitement. Aspirational burden. And any of you can see this when you visit the city. Whether you’re crazy enough to take it on for itself, you can see what the city brings to the table, and understand on a fundamental level why a certain type of person would choose to make this their day to day. You might not catch the bug yourself, but you’re lying if you tell me that you can’t understand why other people feel that way. Just as I understand the comforts that come with suburban living.

I just don’t think I’ll ever lie on my deathbed wishing that I’d lived in Rochester, New York.

Wow, that’s a big, sticky rant that I’m not even sure has anything to do with the experience of watching Brooklyn Nets basketball. Hey, here’s Jarrett Allen swallowing up all of a Giannis Antetokounmpo dunk attempt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYh2lh66p8

Don’t go in there, Giannis.

A few minutes later Nets rookie Rodions Kurucs decided he’d like his own tasty block on Antetokounmpo, and it didn’t go as well.

Giannis Greek freaked out all over his ass. Let that be a lesson in peer pressure, Rodi.

The Brooklyn Nets are 17-21 and in 10th place in the Eastern Conference.

Happy New Year, Nets fans.