Consumption Lounge: A Late Winter Lunar Stoop Find in Brooklyn
A quick update from the Brooklyn community consumption garbage pile
Hi everyone,
I’m sorry it’s been a minute. Everything has been dog shit and I decided can’t keep having shitty birthdays. In fact, I almost wrote about them right before it last month as an ode to shitty birthdays, but didn’t want to jinx myself into inadvertently having another one.
Past shitty birthday hits include: going to Auschwitz on my 21st birthday; murdering a lobster while hungover at 9 a.m. at 30; sitting alone in a terrible Thai restaurant in Chicago while sleeping in my friend’s unheated sunroom in the dead of winter when I was 36; sitting alone in my apartment because of COVID at 37; the time some kid showed up with a butterfly knife at my birthday at the park district rental space when I was 8th grade even though I was a complete nerd and was surprised anyone would come at all.
But not this year! I just couldn’t! I needed an “Easy (Fucking) Getaway in the Hudson Valley & Catskills.” A hot tub and a fireplace. My birthday was getting an attitude adjustment this year — no more sad Pisces shit. In 2024, I am finally living the aspirational life I sell because that is my aspiration: to be living my best life as an expert on living, laughing, and loving, despite all odds! And I did. It was great.
Anyway, that’s why you’re just hearing from me now a little late. Sorry. Just doin’ me!
For some reason, a bunch of you decided to sign up during my live/laugh/love fest last month, and I started becoming a little worried that those just tuning in were going to think, “What the actual fuck am I reading? Is this girl stoned or what?” (Well, as a matter of fact, it was you that signed up for the Pipe Dreams By The Weed Witch newsletter. So, yeah. Obviously).
Once a month, I (try to) do this regular feature called “The Consumption Lounge” because I’m constantly sick with consumption that I need to write off in my taxes (they’re coming up! Don’t make the mistake of not back filing like I did—it’s awkward when the IRS shows up at your door to collect on taxes from the one year you made $12K and were too broke and desperate to pay for the privilege of confronting your life choices on TaxAct!). Except I forgot to do the feature last month because I was living my aforementioned best birthday life in the Catskills, followed by two weeks coming down from the existential hangover of wondering how people live peacefully in nice cabins upstate where they only have to work like three days a week and get to enjoy the luxury of reading a book and sitting in a hot tub completely unbothered, and also, why am I not writing more books?
Point being: this month is less about telling you about things that you can consume and more about sharing something that I’m still chewing on. It’s this piece of art that I picked up a couple weeks ago: a framed poster of different images of moon phases. I snagged it on the street outside the Pilates studio in Carroll Gardens I had just left, then awkwardly (but humble brag-ishly) took it home on the train like a real New Yorker, weaving around the tourists packed onto the sidewalks of Bleecker.
I snagged it from a woman who was moving out of her apartment with her partner, where it seemed like they had probably lived for like 25 years or something. I sifted through her belongings on the way in, catching her on the way out, and enjoying this weirdly intimate moment of meeting the individual that I’m essentially digging in their trash as I always do, rifling through complete stranger’s personal belongings, unsure if I actually like this junk ironically or am about to take on some unfortunately large cosmic responsibility.
Space is precious, but so are stoop finds in Brooklyn. Coming across one of these rare moments in Brooklyn requires making quick decisions about the energy you’re about to absorb in personal belongings because anything left on the street is gone in a New York minute. “My apartment is blessed with the gifts of the universe, timed by chance and human connection—this random piece of garbage is actually serendipity” is my internal justification every time I bring something home that I have absolutely no space for. This is a totally unhealthy mindset to adopt, assigning sentimental value to found possessions, or possessions in general. and that’s why I’m consciously aware that I am unevolved because I am spiritually weighed down by my love of goods and not Rick Rubin’s coffee table book (even though he’s surely weighed down by his minimalistic luxury goods, too).
The stoop freebies had the intimacy of a non-exploitative garage sale, except the owner happened to be alive and present just in time to proudly see her hoarded belongings being toted off to their new lives with a new family (me). She had a boxes of CDs, cassettes, and DVDs I didn’t want, pilled wool J. Crew men’s sweaters, outdated books on feminism, sexuality, and self-discovery all up for grabs (and for some reason, Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” that I grabbed because it was there and why not?), and this gigantic framed moon art poster.
I really had nowhere to put it, but sized it up for a good, long while anyway. She came out and told me to take it, apologizing for the dust. “It was made by an artist from at Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street,” she said, as if this detail was impressive and somehow increased the urgency to take it.
I had to think back on that one for a minute to consider whether or not it devalued the art by the sheer nature of the protest’s stance on the capitalistic commodification of art. Like, how much should it be worth without pissing the artist off by insulting or angering them? And what does the moon say about Occupy Wall Street?
Ultimately, I now realize why this was a gift: it is priceless.
Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of stuff coming up soon but that’s sort of a high-level touchpoint of last month. In case you missed it, check out the latest podcast with Rich Wexler of Vintage Annals Archive and be on the look out for another one coming soon with legacy weed journalist and cannabis culture figure, Mary Jane Gibson, plus dispatches from the Catskills and Spannabis—Spain’s cannabis conference—in Barcelona.
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