Sorry Flatbush

In recognizing the process, you effectively end it, or at least do it irreparable damage.

More often than not, it is thinking about forgetting something that causes me to forget it. I moved to Flatbush three weeks ago. About the same time ago I came to a particularly telling dilemma in the route that is my life.
The distain I have spent so much time honing regarding some vague group of people who represent all I oppose is beginning to dull. You see, I am 26 years old; I live in New York City, I am a student, and I work as a disc jockey and a baseball coach. The people I come across in my various activities as any or all of these are, to some degree or another, cool. My friends are into music, my fellow students are politically progressive thinkers, and the kids I coach are just cute as hell.
None of them provide me with the disgust I need to fuel my passion for social revolution so I have planned a cross country trip living and working with “average” Americans hopefully participating in the kind of despicable socializing that fires me up (of course this is all planned in my head and will never take place, more likely it will join a long list of my projects and ideas obscured by reality; my cross country trip with my turntables playing records to landscapes, or my photo journal, “Rise and Shine”, of all my friends in their beds during their first waking moments, hair messy, eyes still half swollen shut with a hung-over smirk and a day ahead that could bring any number of good things).
On my trip I can imagine going to work one day with a businessman in Tennessee, he will joke with a friend on the phone about how they are racist, and he beats his secretary, and he sells bones on the black market from bodies he and his brother spend nights digging up, and the whole time they chew tobacco.
I will sit around the dinner table with a particularly pathetic family of 4 in Idaho. They will have trouble communicating but the few words that are spoken will be about what they can do to be better liked by the neighbors and how great Pepsi is (several times specific products will be mentioned). I will visit the battered elderly and spend as much time as possible with Evangelical Christians.
That’s what I need; good old ignorant, hateful American pastimes. Instead, I am in New York with a bunch of cultured, intelligent, loving people leaving me enough satisfied for complacency to set in.
“Make yourself uncomfortable”, my college baseball coach used to say, “it is the best thing you could do”. I made myself uncomfortable, I moved to Flatbush.
Like most things I encounter, by the time I encounter them, or in this case, it encounters me, “it” sucks. My arrival into an all African-Caribbean neighborhood is a sign of the end to a homogenous scene here. The same paranoia that moves me to forget things by thinking about forgetting them fills my worried mind in Flatbush: I do not want the neighborhood to change, but I am the very change I wish not to see. And so goes the cycles of forgetting and remembering and having to constantly reinvent everything just to meet the day and not have to say goodbye.