I ❤️ BLUR, clearly

Five months weed free in Brooklyn

I have always been fond of a blur. I visited Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie, permanent home of massive blurry Monets, about a year ago. At that time.there was an exhibit about blur, called Dans le Flou. In life, I felt at home in the blur and was therefore entranced by a whole exhibit devoted to the acknowledgement and tolerance of the unknown, “loss of distinctness,” “the erosion of certitudes,” and embrace of it. When one surrenders certitude, there can be discovery of a deeper truth of an unpredictable future.

It felt best contained in the observation that where the child asks, “Why?” the adult asks, “What is that?” It’s the adult need to contain an observation in reference to the distinctiveness of what we’ve already known. It’s as if our life were a canvas and we’ve already chosen our initial point, and every point after is just somewhere to draw a straight line back to that origin. The form of the whole piece is determined by the first mark.

Today is five months without weed, spent in my point of artistic origin, Brooklyn. Here is the place where I’ve made my mark, and all other marks draw a straight line from this point, as blurry as that mark may have been. The return, without the dependence on the plant, has felt both familiar and alien. Every street corner has the reference of the day where an idea for a story was conceived, or a shooting location birthing that idea into life. I can see it all clearly, and in that clarity there is a blur of both gratitude and grief.

The other day I was riding a Citibike along the bike paths I have traced for nearly two decades. I’ve spent the last five months decoupling myself from getting stoned, breaking up with one of the loves of my life, the plant to which I once felt I owed everything in terms of making my mark. But on this Citibike on this beautiful evening, moving from point of origin to destination, negotiating bikers en route to their own destinations, I realized that my gratitude for being on a bike may have been the most deserving recipient of my gratitude.

It’s not the biking alone, but my love of biking, which birthed my love story to New York. It’s not just the practicalities of what biking offered: an expedient journey through congestion, the necessity of vigilant presence because your life depends on it, the exposure to a vibrant city that so many call the greatest on Earth. Despite these external gifts, I found perhaps the greatest gift of all coming from inside of me — love. I love the way I love this city from the seat of a bike.

This love kept me going in my late twenties while I worked for $13/hour in a plant shop in Williamsburg. I’d bike forty minutes each way from my Ditmas Park apartment. I’d spend the day delivering plants, interfacing with characters from 2010s Brooklyn, studying apartment interiors, and connecting with people over the aesthetic appreciation of botany thriving in apartments, encased in pots, striving for light pouring through the window, thriving in situations that nature never intended for them. The plants and their caretakers gave each other life. And none of these plants were smoked. None of them were used to numb the grind. It was just understood that having a plant in your apartment made life better. And despite being five floors into the sky, the plant’s roots still grew down, despite the impossibility of penetrating the layers and layers of concrete. They brought the soil up to them (or I brought it up via the freight elevator) and they brought the rain in the faucet. People loved the way they loved the plants.

And at the end of the day, I would bike home from this plant shop, down Kent along the water, around the Navy Yard, climbing the hill up Vanderbilt all the way to Grand Army, my mind alive with whomever I had interacted with that day, and in what space, and I would imagine how life would transpire in those spaces after I left — how the people would take care of those plants, and vice versa. And during these musings, I would avoid dying in a bike accident. At Grand Army Plaza, I would reunite with the plants in Prospect Park, biking the counter-clockwise route down the west side, one more uphill push in an environment that might as well be upstate, past runners and rollerbladers and baby strollers and teens from Park Slope, and after cresting that hill I would stop pedaling and coast downhill with the breeze rushing through my beard, my reward for a hard day’s work. Past the tennis courts and Church avenue, I’d appreciate the Victorian houses and the sycamore trees of Ditmas Park, whilst finishing the stories I’d written in my head along the ride.

I’d push through two lobby doors, the very particular echo of a pre-war lobby, wave hello to the man who seemingly spent all day sitting down there, and ride the elevator up to our fifth floor apartment, hearing the baby next door from across the hall. I’d hang my bike up on the wall in the first apartment I had ever truly made my own, full of plants in which I had reinvested with my measly paychecks.

Friends would invite me back out to Williamsburg or Manhattan to some event that night, but 45 minutes on the train seemed untenable after a long day’s work. And in those days, when ordering from a weed serve and waiting for the guy to call back, it’d take an indeterminate number of hours to make it out to Ditmas, so I had to wait within the window he offered. Instead I would opt to smoke the crumbs of weed (or pipe resin) and write my observations down on note cards that I’d pin to the wall. And after dinner, I’d stand at the desk I’d built for myself, and edit the footage I had shot months before, adding in a new song I had heard that day, making a short film that had no promise of success at that time, but about which I was excited to one day put on the internet.

There was another person who lived there with me. She’s gone now. Our good and bad times all seem to blur together. But in Ditmas, I loved the way I loved her too.

Today, people in Brooklyn love the way they loved the mark my show made on them. Sometimes I’d feel melancholy when they use the past tense. “Loved your show.” What? You don’t love that show anymore? That melancholy would spiral when I was still smoking weed. I would be in my head, thinking my best work was behind me, wondering when I would show them that I still got show in me. But these days, without the self-conscious weed cloud and with this newfound ability to escape the world of my head, I can now be present with their appreciation and look them right in the eye, I’m encountered with the past tense, with what that show meant to them at the time in their lives they needed it (a lot in the pandemic). Today I’ll be walking my dog in Fort Greene park, or riding around and feel the gaze of a fan that I have come to detect, and I feel this amazing gratitude that the best city in the world loves the way it loved my show after all of these years.

Five months without weed, the once familiar is new with clarity, and yet the future is a blurry uncertainty. It’s like a time-lapse photo, where I’m standing still as the blur of bikers swirl around me, and instead of asking “what am I doing here?” I just marvel with slightly anxious curiosity, “Why? Why me?” And then with gratitude. “Why not?”