Exit Music (For a Film)

I don't care what anyone says about the hipsters and getting-more-expensive rent, I fucking love my new neighborhood! And not for the reasons you think. Not just for band boys that roam the street making for daily pulse-quickening eye candy. Not just for the overabundance of coffee shops and bars (yet mysterious lack of supermarkets). Not just because it makes me feel better about being marginally employed because no one here seems to work a real 9-5 job. No, as it turns out, I love Williamsburg for exactly the reason I thought I wouldn't. I love the landscape of it. The industrial warehouse buildings with broken windows. The truck depots. The aluminum siding covered row houses. The abundance of grafitti on the brick walls on the kind of abandoned walk to my apartment from Bedford Avenue.
Sometimes when you are feeling shitty (and no one has been feeling shittier than me this week since the plague descended. Well, my doctor says it's tonsilitis but the woman did audibly gasp when she looked in my throat. Plus, I think a fever of over 102 degrees on a person that isn't in grade school is a little scary.) you really want to wallow in it. You want the movie of your life to have the soundtrack and set dressing to mirror how truly terrible you feel. Williamsburg has done that for me this week. As I dragged my sweaty, fevered ass to the subway so I could go see the doctor I felt oddly comforted by the quiet industrial landscape and the noise of the tractor trailers on Roebling Street. I felt like shit and the hot, deserted street, strewn with dog doo and beer bottles and (I shit you not) a dead rat, was like "mise on scene" depicting my misery.
I think there are two types of people in this world, those who wake up feeling shitty and who hate that and those who wake up feeling shitty and embrace that and determine to have the shittiest possible day ever. I, obviously, am the latter. If I'm going to be depressed, I'm going to be the best at it, goddamn it!
To wit, I've listened to nothing but Radiohead's "OK Computer" on my ipod since the plague descended.
"A heart that's full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don't, they don't speak for us," going around and around in my head.
It's so cliche- wallowing. It reminds me of being 15 and wearing the signifiers of depressed, misunderstood adolescents without actually being depressed or misunderstood. I wore black on the outside cuz black was how I felt on the inside. But, you know what? Now that the plague seems to have passed and I finally have energy again, I changed out of my pajamas and a sunnier attitude seems to have emergered. Hell, I'm back to my steady listening diet of Franz Ferdinand, The Thermals and The Killers! I know the worst is past.
But, I must admit, that it is oddly comforting to know that when something bad happens- I don't get that job that I want or some boy doesn't like me or I just generally feel icky- that I won't have to travel far to find an environment to match my mood. I'll just walk down to Roebling and N9th street and ogle the broken windows and grafitti on the outside of the warehouse building of what is obviously some hipsters expensive loft on the inside and soak up the fake depression.

PS: I'm totally staying home tomorrow (even though I've had a boring weekend of staying in and "getting better") cuz it's the premier of I LOVE THE 90s!!
PPS: In case I didn't extoll it's virutes enough- penicillin rules. Seriously, I'm rethinking my stance on the best invention of the last hundred years. Screw computers and tv and stuff. I want to have Sir Alexander Fleming's babies. Seriously. Like a million of them. (FYI: he invented penicillin in 1928.)