Hello! Thanks so much to all the new subscribers both free and paid. I generally send out one or two paid-only posts a month, but in an ideal world, there would be more. In the meantime, signing up for a paid subscription is a very helpful way to support my work and if you can spare it then I appreciate it. Either way, enjoy this report from going upstate and coming to terms with past transgressions.
The natural law as I once knew it was people generally moved west from New York City, not north. They went to the suburbs of New Jersey or back to the Midwest. Some of them ended up in the desert or near the mountains if they really wanted to feel a world away from the life they once knew, but most of them ended up in Los Angeles. The way I’ve broken that down is about one out of the four of those people end up moving back to New York, one thrives out there, and between the other two that stay, one will always talk about how happy they are in L.A. with this real dead-behind-the-eyes look, while the other realizes that it wasn’t Manhattan or Brooklyn that made them unhappy and that now they’re still miserable, but they’re also lonely. For years, I had this all figured out as the way things went. Maybe there was the rare hiccup, somebody saying “Berlin is affordable-ish again” or a friend telling me they were moving to some town in the middle of Indiana that was once the fourth-largest yarn manufacturer in the Midwest because there were three abandoned factories and one of them was getting turned into condos for artists. The other was being turned into a brewery. Then there was something I figured was an anomaly when a friend told me they were moving upstate, about a hundred miles north, and “They’d take the train into the city for work,” adding it was a three-hour ride to and another three hours back.
I did that thing where I had a smile on my face, but I just kept blinking as I tried to process this information. Upstate. Real upstate and not Westchester, like so many New Yorkers like to pretend counts when using that term. At that moment, I didn’t quite understand, but then I started to let it sink in and it began to make more sense. It’s not New York City, but it’s still New York. It’s far enough away from everything, but also close enough. It’s not a million miles from the city and all its chaos, but it must feel like it. I said I understood, even though I don’t think I totally did.
Then at some point during the first year of Covid, I can almost swear I woke up one day and I knew about a dozen people that lived upstate. They lived in towns I’d heard of and ones with names I had a difficult time learning to pronounce; they lived near old Borscht Belt resorts and in farmhouses with a few acres of land or small homes situated near some sort of body of water. They all seemed happy. At least as happy as somebody could be during a pandemic.
After watching the upstate life from my Instagram, Emily and I finally made a trip up last September. The band Woods and their label Woodsist started throwing a yearly festival in the town of Accord, a hamlet with a population of under 600, a couple of gas stations, and limited dinner choices including a god-level pierogi spot just over the city limits in Kerhonkson. The air smells nice pretty much year-round, and there’s a stillness I don’t think I could honestly ever get used to. I’ve been a fan of Woods and some of the bands in their orbit (Real Estate, White Fence, and a bunch of others I saw at places like Cake Shop and Death by Audio when there were still some good DIY venues left in Brooklyn and Manhattan), and they had the Feelies, Guided by Voices, and Waxahatchee on the bill, so we made the drive up and had a really lovely time. We stayed at the Starlite Motel, a refurbished midcentury motor lodge that I see getting incorporated into selfies all the time, and decided since we also have some friends who run the local wine shop, that we’d make the trip again for another quick trip, but without a music fest to go to. We did that this past February and made plans to go back up once Woodsist announced their 2023 lineup.
The latest Woodsist was this past weekend. Kevin Korby and Kurt Vile headlined the two nights, but it was the Nigerien group Bombino that stole the whole show. We had a good time, and since this was our third trip up in just a few days shy of a year, we decided to branch out and explore a little more. We did some hiking, ate the first cider donuts of the season, and generally felt nice, especially because we’ve been taking a hiatus from drinking in my home over the last month. It felt like clean living, or as close as I’d like to get to it.
Maybe it was the sober mind, but at some point, Emily asked if I had to choose a place outside of NYC, but not too far from it (so basically New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, or upstate), which would I go with. I was actually stumped by the question. I’ve always liked the idea of having another home outside of the city. Somewhere small and quiet place where I could fail at growing vegetables and getting a goat to eat my grass because I’m too lazy to mow always seemed like a nice idea, but I never considered it an option. It isn’t now, either, but having the question posed has me really taking stock of what I like, what I’d like more of, and what sort of place seems like it would be the most chill situation for me now.
As we drove without much of a destination, I kept getting reasons to say “upstate.” The first was this cheese shop we went to that honestly had one of the most impressive selections I’ve ever seen in the United States. After that, it was a nice short hike through Awosting Falls, followed by a series of shops that all exist only to resell. Nothing new. What a nice, quaint life I thought.
When we got to the third shop—an expertly curated vintage clothing shop that had one of the more impressive stacks of vintage denim I’ve seen in a second, including multiple pairs of old Wranglers I guessed came from the same owner because of the circles forever imprinted in the butt pocket from hours of sitting on chewing tobacco tins—I thought to myself that I had the answer to my wife’s question. It was a no-brainer that upstate was the way for me. I was about to tell her that, but then I noticed somebody walk into the shop. I’d seen her face before. She’d aged, but I knew her from somewhere. I couldn’t remember where, but as soon as she started talking to her friend who was working at the vintage clothing shop, I remembered: “Girl from 2005 who had the mustache tattooed on her finger who worked at a friend’s small vintage shop, then stole a few thousand dollars from him and disappeared, only to end up being a girl who had a mustache tattooed on her finger who had worked at and stolen from at least five other businesses across the country and had multiple warrants out for her arrest.” Oh my god, I thought. The fugitive! We always wondered what happened to her!
I didn’t say anything to her. We weren’t really friendly, and I like to mind my own business when it comes to criminal matters, so we left and I decided it was a random occurrence. Her criminal activity—that I knew of—took place almost 20 years ago, but people change. Sometimes they stop committing crimes, but no matter what, they do grow up. We all get older, and over the next few hours, that fact of life made itself abundantly clear.
Once I saw Mustache Finger Tattoo Girl From 2005, my upstate experience suddenly became a haunted house filled up with living ghosts. Later, we were walking down the street in New Paltz, talking about how every East Coast college town has the same crunchy vibe that I always find appealing on some level, but couldn’t imagine living in a town where the tofu scramble at the diner run by townies is the most popular dish around. I was going to say something about the nice selection of Dead shirts at the local hippie shop when another familiar face crossed my path. It was a guy who once upon a time had a very nice head of hair that he styled into a fashion mullet sort of like Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie and played in a band that I couldn’t recall the name of, but remember they had one of those bios that was written to appeal to a big audience, but also catch the eye of a few record snob types—something like “A cross between James Brown in ‘73, Neu!, French ye-ye, and post-punk.” Those kinds of bands were a dime a dozen in the aftermath of the Strokes blowing up, and a few of them could say they opened for another band that had a lot of fans on MySpace, but this guy’s band I recall had a writeup in New York Press that had all my friends thinking, “Man, that dude’s band is going to be huge. A newspaper wrote about them!” Spoiler: They didn’t get huge. They put out a CD on some label I’ve never heard of, then stopped playing shows not soon after. I still saw the guy with the Bowie mullet since he bartended at a place near the Lorimer stop. At some point, he moved in with a friend of mine, but then he got kicked out in a very dramatic way (punches thrown, a small fire started, cops showed up and did nothing), after sleeping with my friend’s girlfriend.
After that, I started thinking about our previous trip upstate last winter. We were walking down the street and I made a joke that basically everybody who had a literary website in 2008 was now living in the town we were in. My observation wasn’t totally wrong, but I think a more honest take was “This is the place where alt-lit went to die.” Later that afternoon, we were in Kingston, and I remember having to divert my gaze because we were walking towards a guy who disappeared off the radar after his name was on the Shitty Media Men list in 2017. We locked eyes as we passed each other, but I told myself it was cool since the guy acted like he never knew who I was before he was banished from the Gin Mingle, but he stopped and said “Hey, man,” like we were old buddies, but I just went “HAHAHA, yes that’s so true” to my friend I was walking with like we were in the middle of a conversation and I hadn’t heard the hello from the guy whose transgressions I couldn’t seem to recall.
The fact that all of these people happen to be in the same little part of the state is really no reflection on the place itself, I get that. I don’t think the Hellmouth lives in the town of Rosendale, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t a secret society that meets up at the Mohonk Mountain House every year to try and figure out how they can lure more assholes who once lived in Brooklyn up to their area. In fact, during the second night of Woodsist, I came to the conclusion that I have no idea what Mustache Finger Tattoo Girl From 2005 is like today. Maybe she’s changed and she’s not stealing and she donates her time to hanging out with orphans or something nice like that.
What I do know is that the more time I spend around the particular part of upstate we like to visit, the more I notice lots of people around my age who also look like and could very well have lived around me, worked in the same places, gone to the same bars, saw the same shows, and knew some of the same people I did 10, 15, or 20 years ago. It’s like a retirement village for people who lived in Brooklyn in the aughts up there. To steal a Portlandia joke, the dream of artisanal Williamsburg is alive in Accord. Some of the bartenders—sorry, mixologists—with old-timey mustaches who worked in places that looked like bad Freemans clones are working up there now. A few only serve non-alcoholic cocktails, but they seem just as busy as the ones making ones with booze. BjornQorn, the company whose “solar popped popcorn [is] cooked in safflower oil and topped with nutritional yeast and salt” operates out of Kerhonkson. Last year, they bought the old roller rink that was described as “beloved but abandoned” by a local reporter. Instead of turning it into a store or office, they just fixed it up and kept it a roller rink that now looks like the hottest place in town during the weekend. If such a place existed in Brooklyn or Queens, then it would immediately be run by some marketing company and turned into some annoying branded content hellscape like “Old-Skool Skate and NYPD sign-ups brought to you by Kia and Haliburton.” It’s nice that a popcorn company just wants to give the kids a place to skate.
And on Saturday night, just before Kevin Morby started playing his headlining set that included a duet with his wife Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee fame, I found myself waiting on line for the Mexican food truck behind a few other people, including a child in a vintage Built by Wendy t-shirt. The kid was crying about how they wanted to go rollerskating to his mom who was in Hunter rain boots and had a Books are Magic “Books” hat on her head. When the kid turned and looked at me, I smiled and told them I knew somebody who had the same shirt they were wearing once, as if the child cared. The mom turned to tell me it used to be hers and now it fits her kid better than it did her. I laughed, and then something strange happened. The woman stared at me for a second and said nothing. It was an incredibly awkward silence, the type that went long enough that I had to make a cringy smiley face instead of asking if something was wrong. The woman shook her head, took her child by the hand, and walked away in what I can only say was shock just north of disgust. I tried to figure out what I’d done, and then it hit me.
2005. I answered an ad on Craigslist for a room in an apartment in Greenpoint. The deal was that the person who posted the ad would keep living there for two more months before they had to go to Asia for work, and the new roommate would take over paying the rent for the next eight months. I was bartending more at the time, and making pretty decent money, so I decided that even though I had the option to get another roommate to split the rent, I was going to live on my own for the first time in my adult life. I moved in, everything was going as planned for a short time, and then, after a string of very poor financial decisions on my part, I showed up one afternoon to the place I worked at to find it closed, a note saying it had been seized by the government. I had somewhere around 25 or 27 dollars in my checking account, and not only was I supposed to take over paying for an entire apartment I could have maybe barely afforded just a few hours before I found out I didn’t have a job, but I also had to give the outgoing roommate the money they put down for the security deposit. I tried to consider my options, but only landed on how being 25 and not having any family I could ask to help me out, there was only one thing I could do. In hindsight, it was the most dirtbag, shithead 20-something decision, but I couldn’t think of any other options: I convinced a friend to let me crash on their couch for free while I looked for another job, and I told the roommate, sorry, I can’t keep living here, and moved out two days later, leaving her to figure out what to do with the apartment in her name.
As Kevin Morby played a song off his new album the other night, I kept waiting to order some mediocre tacos, wondering if I should walk over to the woman and apologize, tell her how sorry I was for being a selfish asshole all those years ago, that I was broke and basically always an inch away from the edge, but I really should have at least tried to figure something out to make her life easier. But I didn’t. I don’t know why. I probably should have. Part of me didn’t think I should bother her since I’d already burdened her enough. But there’s also part of me that’s always going to feel some bit of shame around people that knew me when I was in my 20s since I was the guy who was always broke and prone to making poor life decisions that generally never affected anybody but myself, save for a few thoughtless ones like moving out of that apartment without much notice and screwing the roommate over.
I try not to be so hard on myself. A place like New York City is really tough. It was a hard city to live in when I was young, and it’s even harder now. I find myself sounding like older people in the early-2000s who wondered aloud why anybody would move here to try to “make it” as a writer, actor, comedian, whatever unless they had a trust fund or whatever. Otherwise, the only real option is to work non-stop at jobs you hate, come up with good excuses when friends want to eat at places you can’t afford because your bank account is in the negative and do things like bail on rent you can’t pay. You might realize at the time it’s shady, but you’re young enough to tell yourself it’s what you’ve got to do and so it’s justified. And maybe it is. I don’t know. I seem to have turned out OK and so did my former roommate. Maybe the same can be said for Mustache Finger Tattoo Girl From 2005 and the guy who was in the band that I can’t recall the name of who slept with my friend’s girlfriend. Canceled Guy Who Acted Like He Didn’t Know Me When He Was Hot Shit Before 2017 I’m not so sure about, but you never know.
But instead of walking up and apologizing, I just kept waiting to get to the guy taking orders. I’d remain just another person who pulled some shady shit on somebody back when they lived in Brooklyn another lifetime ago and nothing more.