#156 - the woods, the snacks & the sea.

oh man. so my high school pal jeff is getting married this summer & his bachelor party was this past weekend up at foxwoods. originally, i wasn't planning on attending, but circumstances eventually changed & by saturday afternoon, i was drinking a beer in a foxwoods hotel room. this is what happened: on friday, tadley (of spotted dick fame) & nugs drove up from d.c. for a friday evening stopover before heading up to foxwoods on saturday. i got out of work a whole hour early & met them out at mission dolores (alternate name: missing clitoris), a new beer garden in a converted church on 4th ave in park slope. it was a lovely day out & we sat in the outdoor courtyard drinking snooty beer after snooty beer & taking artsy photos & by the third beer, i'd said "screw it" & decided to join them when they left the next morn. after all, how many bachelor parties is jeff going to have? two, maybe three?

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only in ny #3: snack shop

  

snack: snickers cupcake
drink: manhattan special espresso coffee soda

in the BOCOCA (boerum hill, cobble hill, carroll gardens) area of brooklyn, smith st gets all the hype. they've got the requisite hip neighborhood quota of restaurants, bars, shops & boutiques. they've got a comic book store, a cheese shop & a brooklyn industries and american apparel. all told it equals H-I-P. in my time in brooklyn, i've spent a lot of time on smith st. i've had many a drink in its hip bars & food in its hip restaurants. there was a time when i used to go to faan at least once a month. in some forgotten restaurant on smith, i had dinner one night with this dude who was a friend of a friend, only to realize after that it was likely a date. i even got dumped in one of the handful of interchangeable sushi joints. good times on smith st.

...but in my book, smith st is so 2004. in 2010, court st is the way to go. it's filled with restaurants & shops, but it's never got the same sort of attention that smith st has. still, the more i've lived in brooklyn & the more i age & the more i become a hermit, the more i find myself on court st. that's mainly because while smith is home to lots of places to go out to eat & drink, court st is home to american beer distribution (where i often buy beer to drink in the comfort of my home) & cobblestone foods (where i often buy cheese to eat in the comfort of my home). if lines & cramped spaces didn't freak me out, i'm sure i'd frequent the fairly new trader joes on court. there's a movie theater on court st, but i read somewhere that it's MAD SCARY. scary or not, smith st doesn't even have a movie theater. so yeah, court st's more my style these days.

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flea at laff #2: milk truck.

snack: mediterranean grilled cheese
drink: mexican coca-cola

one of the best things about flea markets is that you can go to them & wander around for hours just looking at stuff, knowing full well that you aren't buying a damn thing. you can show up, bullshit with some old dude about the importance of gargoyles for a half hour, really show interest in a particular latvian one he has & even make up some story about how your dead uncle was latvian. then, out of nowhere you can flip the switch on him, give him the ol' "well i'm going to think about it. good day, sir" & slowly back away from his gargoyle booth. in a nutshell, i'm one of those folks who wanders around flea markets looking at stuff & never buying any of it.

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#155 - four twenty.

happy four twenty, dudes & dudettes! when you woke up this morn, were you all like "oh man, where's my weed? where's my bong?" of course you were! it's 4/20 & that means that today's totally international smoke pot day! pick your best tie-dyed shirt up off the floor & throw it on, sprinkle yourself with some patchouli fragrance, smoke a big fat one & head out to see a MIND-BLOWING advance screening of phish 3D. your fate has been predetermined by the calendar, bra. get out your hackey sack & rastafari gear & head on down to your local multiplex...or at least go get stoned somewhere. the calendar decrees it. hurry up!

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flea at laff #1: asiadog.

snack: "sidney" chicken dog
drink: fresh squeezed limeade soda

here in brooklyn there's the brooklyn flea, a flea market held every weekend at two different locales--on lafayette ave in ft greene on saturday & right outside the atlantic center on sunday. it just started up again back on the 10th & this year, they've assembled an impressive lineup of TWENTY-FIVE hott food vendors, with folks like sigmund pretzel shop, kumquat cupcakery, pizza moto, mile end, porchetta & red hook lobster pound serving up treats to flea-goers. since i need to get outside more often, i've decided that over the next few months, i'm going to try to pay the flea as many visits as possible & sample as many of the copious snack & drink options as possible.

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