Two Classic Cures in the Adrenaline City

The two classic cold remedies stand next to each other. You need to take more of the one on the left but it tastes a lot better.

Sometimes Isabella will stand in front of the fan and let you take her picture.



But most of the time she laughs and runs away.




Only two more days here in Brooklyn and then it's time to come home. Plot and Duck feel like they've been on the run for months -- they're getting very comfortable living out of their suitcase -- but it's worth every second to get to spend time with BZ in DC and PD, 5H and BB in Clinton Hill.



This is the equivalent of Plot and Duck's Church Street Fruit Stand. It's a little like going to another, wealthier country where your dollars don't go as far.



There really is no other city in the world like New Shmork. It's true. There's here, and there's everywhere else. NYC is a city. The others are small towns. Plot can remember how it felt to live here, in the belly of the very beast, and he understands how tempting it must be to figure out how to stay. Especially when you're young.

You give up your garden. You give up peace and quiet. You give up saving money.

What you get is adrenaline and diversity, where people from all over the world are crammed into the same few square miles. Many strange languages are spoken on the streets and they're all English. You can get anything you want to eat, except decent tacos.

What you don't ever get is a sense of belonging. You come here for opportunity, not because you love it. You may grow to love your neighborhood, your block, but NYC isn't about that. NYC is motion. People come, people go, good ones and terrible ones. You live in the center of a bulls-eye. You also live where the world gathers to have fun.



And no one is older than thirty five, because everyone else has moved away. Plot and Duck made friends in their years in the Apple that are their friends still today, but only one couple stayed in Manhattan. Sending your kids to school becomes an impossibility -- even preschools are often selected because they will feed into the proper kindergarten, which gets you into the better elementary school, and on and on.

And it ain't cheap. Preschool. You spend your time worrying about preschool.

PRESCHOOL.

Plotnik sounds like Alan Iverson.

Eventually you, like all your friends, say: "Enough."

But until then, what a fabulous place to be.