The Blogger Takes Off One Sock And A Shoe

After a mere four posts, we find ourselves crushing under the pressure to compete with the top Manhattan bloggers. How gleeful, internally that is, were we to post about the new cleanly chic Parisian coffee shop we discovered a few days ago on 2nd Avenue in the East Village. Score one for the Blubox. Ahead of the curve, setting trends for free.

Then today while checking out the site of our fellow downtown blog enthusiast, Lockhart Steele, we see he's mentioned, oh so casually, that very same new coffee shop. Sharp pain. Left ventricle.

A few moments later we discover to our shock and awe that the coffee shop revelation was made back on Monday, before either of us, by none other than Daily Candy, that ultra-femi site that tells Carrie Bradshaw wannabes what to do with their unsexy lives when they're not obsessing about their female co-workers. The dagger cuts deep.

What's next? "Oh, that hot new coffee shop on 2nd Avenue," we will hear on the subway tonight. "The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau has a really cool feature about it on their site. It's been up there for weeks."

The city's bloggers are getting wittier everyday. They're getting more knowing by the moment. On the cusp of twenty-nine we're fortunate they haven't already sent us down from the LES to the Newark Bears a la Rickey Henderson

A grizzled veteran, we are trying to hang on to our spot among the Master Connoisseurs of Life -- what is of value and where to get it, what sucks and how to avoid it. And to be a Master Connoisseur of Manhattan is to reach the highest level of a particular way of living in the earth's ecosystem. It's religion. And at twenty-nine, it takes discipline, effort, grace, instinct, skill. It took nothing at twenty-one.

We don't know if we still have it in us to surf the big waves. What once came effortlessly now feels demanding. Like a war you fight, no longer to win, but because to stop means losing. The joy is gone. Or perhaps it has never been more than a substitute for the joy that was missing. Does the way to happiness possibly by-pass Clinton Street?

But an article in The Guardian about a British mock-metal band called The Darkness tempts me to make an emergency Kazaa download. An entry in the sharp, gossipy NYC blog Gawker about trucker hats makes me wonder how long it will be before the next headwear trend will emerge. And should Blubox be ready, armed with a withering opinion, when it does. Or maybe we need to hand in our membership card. Exile myself from the church.

Maybe only then can one lead the way to something new. And as Rickey would say, Blubox likes leading the way to something new.