flea at laff #4: the good fork.

snack: meatloaf sandwich
drink: d&g jamaican ginger beer

oh brooklyn flea. would it kill you to learn about the concept of turnover? this past weekend i made my fourth trip this season to the flea & let me tell ya, it gets sadder every week. see that bitchin guitar up above? i first mentioned that guitar back in back in late april & every week for the past month, i've gone back & it's been sitting there on that table, just waiting to be bought by the reincarnation of ronnie james dio. i tell you what...i believe the ouija board behind it is a relatively late addition & if it's still there mid-month, i'm going to go all tawny kitaen, buy it, summon the ghost of dio & get that guitar bought quicklike. you just wait! summer taunt-the-guitar-shredding ghost party at my place!

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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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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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#146 - move on.

full disclosure: i ♥ brooklyn. other than my childhood home in nh, i've lived here longer than in any other locale & although there's a good chance that i won't eventually settle down here, for now it's become what i refer to as my "home." since moving here almost a decade ago, i've lived in three different places & with each move, i've moved closer to manhattan. this past weekend, after a three-year run in my park slopish apartment, i reversed that trend & moved way south into a new place in dyker heights, a hood that many brooklynites would likely have difficulty pinpointing on a map.

sunday was moving day & for once, i was actually packed & ready to go a day ahead of time. the day started quite early, when my bro & i woke up at the ass-crack of dawn (7am) to make a 9am pickup time for a pickup truck he'd rented through zipcar. if there’s one thing i can say about choosing a vehicle for your move, it’s that if you choose to go the u-haul route, you’re a sucker. every single time i’ve rented from them, some sort of debacle has ensued--flat tires, u-haul locations that decided to close early on my moving day, missing hand carts, etc. this time, largely thanks to my bro's assistance, everything went absolutely swimmingly & by the early afternoon, i was already back at the new apartment & getting settled. best. move. ever.

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