Welcome

Sometimes you just know. Most of the time, I don't. But there are those occasions. We all have had them. Where you walk into the room and you know, right then and there, it's the place: "I'm going to live here." Or you look at his gait as he walks toward you to commence small talk, and you just know it. "I am going to fall so hard for this person that it's going to bloody my knees, scrape my elbows, and take skin off my hands." Like rollerskating drunk (don't try that). But it will be worth it. It will be worth it even if I am so numb afterwards that I cannot cry myself to sleep because my grief for that moment prevents me from admitting tears. It will be worth it because I will know that I was alive.

This is not a Mommy blog. I am a Mommy. And that is my favorite part of myself, by far. It is not a slick real estate blog although I'm impossibly slick (a joke) and I know an awful lot about Brooklyn real estate.

Bklynside is a revival. Literally, I had a blog called Bklynside back in 2005 and I deleted the entire thing because I was worried someone I was dating might see what I was writing and therefore know my soul. Before I deleted it, I printed it out, page by page, on my computer in that old built-in desk at 150 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. This was before "cloud storage" and the phones were not even very smart back then. I put the pages that I'd written, about nonsense, my stuttering when I was a child, and Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's break up; how that made the world feel unstable (this was ages before Facebook and Trump). I stacked those printed pages up. They looked like a phone book for a small town. I fastened them with a binder clip, and slipped them into a manila envelope that I bought at Court Street Office Supplies.

Then I moved five times and had two kids and I lost the whole thing. I believe the original Bklynside is in my storage unit in Sunset Park (I hope so) but if not, it's okay. Because here I am. Same domain, different year. And whoa! The technology is a lot smoother now.

But I'm no smoother. Which leads me to the mission statement, because you ought to have one, right? Tie this thing up in a bow and tee you up to buy what I am selling? I've been in real estate sales for ten (gulp) years now and time passes quickly. Babies grow into little humans with opinions. I can tell you how to tile your bathroom and where to buy property in this great city. I might even be right some of the time. But. My mission is to stick to the original goal of Bklynside which was no goal. Maybe just to stop and breathe for a moment. And tell the story.

Kevin Patterson said it best in The Water In Between, one of my favorite books of all time:

Languor is underrated. It is not possible to be immobile in modern urban society except by dint of constant effort. Holding on tightly to the riverbank and fighting the current is not languor. Nobody likes that. But bone-lazy idleness, hours and hours spent staring at the sky and remembering books and birthdays and great kisses; this is a pure pleasure that eludes the productive in all their confident superiority. Languor is sunny and hot. It is at home near the sea and is best appreciated in environments of beauty and limited promise. It contains within it the idea of boredom, but is also colored by idle fancy and the understanding that some things proceed best with limited attention. Fishing, for instance. If you're always reeling in and checking your bait, you'll only worsen your chances. Relax.

- The Water In Between by Kevin Patterson, 1999

Welcome to Bklynside circa 2018. I look forward to hanging out with you here.