Diary of a people watcher, 3
Gentrification, grittiness, multicultural intersections, and the symphony & the master of time
I plan on writing more vignettes like this people watching series or these myth retellings. To art! Prose! And observation!
I worry that decades in the future, people won’t be able to tell what it was like to be young in the 2020s, because of how little direct description went into the billions of words of writing we are producing about those years.
— Sarah Beth Spraggins for Inkwell (read in full)
Every city has its hypergentrified enclaves that run on OKR money from the vague-job-title class (“associate”). The Republic of Middle Managers is accessorized with electric vehicles, labradoodles, lab grown engagement rings, and adaptogen smoothies, and unlike the finánce metrosexuals three more blocks south, these PowerPoint worker bees were once proactive on campus, and the remnants of their social activism as incoming larvae of the glossy world of professional services show in their liberal politeness. The upwardly mobile keep this psychology alive in their corporate exoskeletons by proudly supporting nouveau-bohemian interests, like Substack poetry readings and backyard R&B jams. Deep down, they relish the discomfort of denying a hierarchy they know full well exists, pretending away the economic inequality between themselves and those who earn less—which is their favorite form of self-flattery.
Grittiness
Two block north of that is an alternative space—an urban forest of grit and enchantment—a counter-city inside the city that resists the polished verticality of glass towers and lawfulness, a civic junk drawer that’s home to cash-only pho, marijuana smoke, dangerously delicious churros, Caribbean takeout, oxidized fruits, crack pipes, graffiti, and same-but-different thrift shops with porches decorated (littered) with naked mannequins arranged in strange plastic orgies. In this midsummer night’s dream, Dorothy, if she followed the right gum-dotted road, could easily meet Alice, where rabbit-hole adventures of varying legality are available for purchase.