What is it about brownstones and bucolic tree lined sidewalks that make people go completely insane? I’ve had many a friend living in “the Slope” wax poetic about their enclave, dating back to the mid 90s when 16th Street and 7th Avenue was sort of “borderline”. This latest incarnation as a middle-class, family ghetto is pathetic. I’m now actually convinced: Park Slope is no longer New York.

What’s worse is that the people who move there know it’s pathetic. Just take a look at this article in the New York Times. The author’s inauthentic disdain notwithstanding (I love the fake disdain insurance policy), she would have us believe that the “relaxed” breastfeeding without a modicum of cover in a public restaurant (Two Boots!), taking up the whole sidewalk with a cross-species circus of offspring and canines and waiting until the light turns green to cross an empty “Sesame Street” (where the hell are the cars on Sesame Street anyway?) is what makes her feel like she’s “won the lottery” because she lives in Park Slope. What a fucking crock. Rather than “relaxed”, maybe she meant to type “remorseless” or “rude”. Well I would call it uncivilized, we’re trying to eat pizza here. Why do they have to use that fishing reel dog leash too?  You know the one where the dog is walking two blocks ahead?  Put your mutt on a leash so he doesn’t jump into my kid’s stroller for god sakes!  And by the way, jaywalking is a New Yorker’s god given right.  Because unlike the lemmings that need red and green to tell them to stop and go, we think for ourselves.

The reality is that Park Slope is a blue chip neighborhood.  It’s the people there that suck, big time.  And it’s because they have no life other than being parents.  Even the gay people there are parents.  What the fuck is that? That’s what Park Slope does to you. That’s why it matters that you “take the high road” when someone openly insults you for crossing the street on your own time rather than conforming.  If Park Slope was still New York, that woman’s daughter would have got a vocabulary lesson.