local delicacies

e visited this weekend and we walked around the city. It reminded me so much of when we were in eastern europe and filled our days with idle wandering. But this time this city was the city and I live here. While she more or less took the lead abroad because her phone had service I took the lead here, obviously. She wanted to shop so we started in soho at the paloma wool pop-up and then migrated to sephora where we blended in with the tweens. We spent twenty minutes picking out the things we wanted to buy and then concluded they weren’t worth the half hour we would spend in line. We both had to pee so we walked into the nearest restaurant. It was upsettingly Italian. Every piece of furniture was rustic and distressed and very shabby chic. Poperie stank up the place. The host was blonde and middle-aged and very obviously not Italian. I think this explains a lot of New York’s problem that hasn’t completely metastasized yet. It’s charm has been so co opted and doubled down on and shoved down your throat in areas like Soho that it can make you gag. It is much too self-aware and does not trust the taste and intellect of its viewer, like a Marvel movie. Therefore too many of its cafes and restaurants are tackless in their execution of a theme or culture or trend. And it becomes much too stylized and ugly and stinks too much of poperie. I think in less touristy and smarter areas of new york—which is most of it—its charm still shines. The grit hasn’t been scrubbed away. 

We found a bookstore run by an asian lady with a table of pornographic coffee books. We flipped through them and gasped. They made me wish I had a coffee table and nice sitting area where people, especially my mother, could do the same.

We sat down at mud, ordered drinks indulgently and food abstemiously: a bottle of orange wine to split, bowl of tomato soup for e, bagel and cream cheese for me. I talked and talked and talked in a way I only can with her, in a way I have a million times in Irish pubs and foreign cafes. We finished the wine, ate half of our servings, paid the bill, and walked to the west village. At w’s we made note of people who gave us goosebumps, mostly people from home. I posited that these people have bpd and that is what has aroused our skin, the intensity of their personality. I stand by this conclusion, since it has proved true on several separate occasions. At Satsko’s we ordered thirty dollars worth of food and one sixty dollar bottle of sake I could hardly stomach. We ate and drank outside so we were very, very cold, but it was likely a net good because we probably caused a raucous. We ran to Cornelia St. where the older doctor z is seeing lives, walked into his empty apartment and opened his safe. The apartment was predictably stark, very corporate killer besides the few very kitschy elements that signaled the existence of a gay guy—a chair with eyelashes, a wooden sign that read “p-town <3.” Besides that a framed collection of rorschach tests hung above the couch, the bathroom was entirely cement and marble, and the closet meticulously organized and obviously walkable. 

We ran home. I slept like a baby. Sat outside and looked over the crimson courtyard. Bouvette for brunch. Eggs, salmon, brioche, creme anglaise.