On Beer and Bright Lights
OK, it is sexist - I appreciate this - but pretty damn funny or as these Brits would say: "cheeky" (thank you Paul). Another ad offers: man -> beer -> Blackberry. How happy I am not to be chasing skirt. Not that this ever my style, mind you - I have always been fortunate to have good women in my life+self-awareness that I am not raffish. Nor Rhett Butler. Still, post-college, I did find myself single for a time and often enough in some bar on the Upper West Side or downtown in SoHo or below. What a younger man in New York does not appreciate at all is that he has no chance. Women, mostly, look to step over the awkwardness of one's 20s - why team up with a guy struggling through the same transition? Who is also figuring out his own life? Who has no money? Any young fellow who thinks his banking or consulting or professional whatever competes with a 30 or 40 year old is nuts: the latter more secure and way more interesting with life experiences and all that. I see plenty of my single male friends dating outside their league, which is not necessarily a ranking based on the opposite sex's youth BTW though this is often a plenty simple barometer: "she's totally hot, dude, and 25." In honesty, I cannot imagine a conversation with somebody this young - the intrigues of the PTA? My exercising schedule or picking up the kids? "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?" Brother. So back in those early '90s I would be at The Tunnel or Odeon competing with Texas in cowboy boots or some divorced managing director paying for the round. Not an even playing field, I'll say for sure. Probably best that way, for me, anyways.
One of the few books I re-read every ten years or so is Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" and the first time in '88 when my ambitions were New York and, well, the title of the book. The story follows the young, stressed-out main character in the 1980s fast-lane. Unusually it is written in the second-person which adds to the hero's disorientation - he is an outsider to his own narrative which he must find his voice the hard-way via experience and disappointment. It still resonates with me as a period piece that I lived through. Bravo.
"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning and, though the details are fuzzy, you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar."
Jamie Conway, Bright Lights, Big City
