A very brief -- but very good -- New York story

And being a New York story, I curse a lot in it. I fucking hate this city.

I write to you from the Empire State, where I have come to finalise the affairs of my son’s father, my first husband, who died suddenly in September.

I had planned on skipping the newsletter altogether this week, as I have been very busy, very stressed, and very sleep deprived. But then something kind of wonderful happened, and I just had to share it with you all.

Probably the worst part of this experience has been dealing with the fact that my ex died alone in his apartment, which caused all sorts of grim issues that I will not delve into here. (Maybe someday I will put it in a book.) On Wednesday, I arranged to meet a man whose company specialises in, uh, difficult cleaning jobs, at the building my ex lived in for close to a decade.

He was late, held up by the fact that he could not find parking in my ex’s downtown Manhattan neighbourhood. I waited in the lobby, along with the building’s security guard - an older African American woman — and the building super, who I’m guessing is Hispanic. When the cleaner, a big tall Italian American guy from Long Island, arrived, I commiserated over the parking by saying: “I fucking hate this city.” 

Unexpectedly, this launched a 30 minute discussion between the four of us that touched on almost every single hot-button culture war issue. Bail reform and crime, illegal immigration, transgender mania, the sexualisation of the school curriculum, the corruption of the uni-party. A building super (for anyone not familiar with New York speak, that’s the custodian person who takes care of maintenance issues in apartment buildings), a security guard, and small business owner who cleans up messes people leave behind: not a single one of them has bought into the fantastical, mainstream, liberal-progressive narrative that has so smothered all media content in the US. These people — regular working people — just don’t buy any of it. Despite working in a highly Democratic urban centre, despite being bombarded by propaganda, despite two of them being “minorities.” They were all like — nope. It was almost as if I was listening to an episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room, not chatting with people in a SoHo lobby. And all I had to say, to bring on this torrent of bewilderment and frustration, was “I fucking hate this city.”

The super told a particularly hilarious and crazy story: a few days before, he went to a gym near the building, and was asked by the employee checking him in “what are your pronouns?” The super, a man in possession of a very bushy moustache, answered: “My pronouns are try/me.” In response, the gym employee called the police. Thankfully, the cop who responded gave the guy who worked at the gym a dressing down for wasting police time. I told him if that had happened in the UK, he would have been taken to the police station and questioned for hate speech. 

I already knew that all the toxic messaging we’ve had shovelled down our throats this last decade is uniquely a form of elite and upper middle class discourse, designed specifically to demoralise and cause disunity among working stiffs and regular Joes — the hobbits, if you will. So I didn’t need further proof. But to see it so clearly, to bond with a bunch of strangers over the craziness of our current world, in a moment of great stress and sadness — well, it really cheered me up.

Message to the elites: the hobbits are not falling for your crap. Now fuck away off.