On a long enough timeline, everyone who lives in New York City eventually endures a real estate horror story. This one is mine.

I lived in Death House.

I lived there a week before meeting the landlord. She stood a generous four foot, ten inches and wore thick glasses on the tip of her nose. She resided in the basement, a windowless space below ground. Technically, in New York City, this type of room is a cellar and thus illegal as a residential dwelling. My landlord was a basement troll.

The first time we actually spoke, she offered a deal on my rent: a 20% discount if I paid the year in full. She was headed to Central America for a week and told me to think on the offer. The tenant upstairs, she assured me, had taken advantage of a similar offer. Our entire conversation had been taken place in two languages, neither of us fully understanding the other.

Before the basement troll returned, I learned two things: she faced a civil lawsuit and the gas company threatened to shut off service for non-payment. The lawsuit had been left in the vestibule of the building: the former tenants of another property she owned were suing her for negligence. Meanwhile, the gas company notice offered the tenants the right to pay the bill and deduct the cost from our rent. I decided, obviously, I should not pay this woman a lump sum.

I turned to Google. I learned that the basement troll owned the empty lot next door to my building, the site of the former Motorino Pizza. The tenants suing her had lived in the building—in rent stabilized apartments. Motorino, known for its Neapolitan style pizza, put East Williamsburg on the culinary map. But the building began a slow collapse and the New York Post eventually called it the “leaning tower of pizza.”   The city’s building department ordered it condemned.

As summer ended, the basement troll appeared at my door one morning accompanied by two henchman, neither much taller than she. They wanted to fix a pipe. The house sewer line ran through my kitchen and into my bathroom. But as it turns out, henchmen are very poor plumbers.

They started working on a Thursday morning. The henchmen-plumbers promised me one day, two at most, of inconvenience. Thursday night I come home to the toilet in the kitchen and a hole in the floor peering down into the troll’s lair. Two days were required, it seemed.

Friday night I returned home ready for a Memorial Day holiday weekend. Three days of barbecues and outdoor parties commemorating the end of summer. And three days without trekking out to the office. Sadly, the toilet remained disconnected from the plumbing, sitting in the kitchen.

Another three days passed: no troll, no henchmen, no working toilet. By Wednesday, six days after the hole first appeared in my floor, I filed a complaint with the city. They sent an inspector out on Friday. The henchmen-plumbers promptly barred the door locking out the city inspector. He called to say he didn’t have authority to use force.

When I returned home, the henchmen-plumbers were working hard to finish up the toilet project though, so my call seemed to work. The toilet, finally, had been restored to the proper room.

In December, the basement troll had stopped paying her mortgage and the building and the empty lot next door were sold at auction. This did not prevent her from showing up at my door asking for rent.

Three weeks later, I began smelling an odd odor pouring out from the basement door. Now that the troll no longer lived there, I worried she had spitefully damaged some piece of equipment slowly gassing us as some kind of revenge plot. I called the gas company. Their team arrived and promised it was not gas, but sampled the air anyway: carbon monoxide, the silent killer. Four fire trucks responded. The apartments in the building were evacuated for an hour. And the furnace and hot water heater were turned off.

The new owners wanted to demolish the building. They had little interest in making repairs, and offered a deal for me to leave four months before my lease ended. A little cash goes a long way, especially since I wanted to leave Death House anyway.

I began the urgent search for a new apartment. I saw a listing. I met the broker and two young women also hunting for apartments. The broker had two units coming available to show the three of us.  He joked with us that he hoped we wouldn’t all want the same one. Let the Hunger Games begin.

Though both units were similar, the second was clearly better. It was the right price, the right location, just big enough, just nice enough. Then, as the three of us poked around the apartment, the broker revealed the unit was rent stabilized. RENT STABILIZED!?!

Oh, well, why didn’t you say that before?

I could tell one of the women seemed interested. However, she had the innocence of a New York City real estate virgin. She treading lightly and then hesitated. It seemed as though she wanted to tacitly negotiate, hint at her interest without seeming too eager. Her loss. “I’ll take it,” I said, “let’s do some paperwork.” I whipped out a folder containing all of my documentation: W2, pay stubs, bank statements, references. I saw the girl’s eyes begin to water. It hurts the first time.

I signed the lease for a one bedroom, rent stabilized unit virtually on top of the L train, the kind of apartment people live in for fifty years while becoming hoarders collecting scraps of artisanal mayonnaise jar labels. Rent stabilization: ‘til death do us part.

And so it was that I came to leave death house.

Each year we rented a house on the outer Cape. I explain to most people where we stayed by curling my arm to make a muscle; Wellfleet sits on the forearm just below the wrist. Almost an hour from the mainland and surrounded by National Seashore, Wellfleet’s primary industry is summer tourism. If the rural north Jersey suburb I grew up in seemed removed from the world, the outer Cape was outright remote.

Summer vacation meant two weeks without cable television. The little black and white set sat innocuously in the corner of the cottage. We could fidget with rabbit ears garnering grainy pictures of Red Sox games if the wind blew in the right direction. But who wants to watch the Red Sox anyway? I read a lot of John Grisham and Michael Crichton then.

My brother and I had a friend at the Cape. Peter, a Boston boy, was between my brother and I in age. I learned two things from him: how to use ‘wicked’ as a synonym for ‘awesome,’ and that everyone from Massachusetts was named Peter. He befriended my brother and I by accident; his family rented the cottage next door, year after year. We played wiffle ball in the sandy lot between the cottages. And we were friends without ever having the benefit of email or chat or text messages or Facebook.

There was no such thing as telecommuting then either. Occasionally, my father called his office mostly to reassure himself it was still there. Computers only came as desktop models then and no one was expected to bring one along on a family vacation. We were three hundred miles from home, but immeasurably distant from the world.

Around my twelfth birthday, we began renting a different cottage. The new house included basic cable and two televisions. Both were color sets, one of them larger even than the television at home. We could watch TV in both the kitchen and the living room. Cape Cod no longer seemed quite so remote.

I got my first cell phone in college, a thick Nokia brick capable of making phone calls and storing numbers, but not much else. My father’s office finally assigned him a cell phone too. Each day on the walk from the beach he called the office checking up on current projects. He brought his office laptop with him and several times a week he began his day at the municipal library connecting to the public Wi-Fi network.

The year I bought an iPhone changed everything. Email and internet in my pocket, anywhere in the United States, except, apparently, inside the cottage my parents rented. Each time we left the house—on our way to the beach, to a restaurant, to the drive-in movie theater—I held up my phone in search of those fleeting moments of internet connectivity. Download email. Refresh Gawker. Weather. Stock quotes. I didn’t even own stock, but I had an app! I had the world in my hand.

Last year my parents bought a cottage. There is cable television and high speed Internet and Wi-Fi. They hope my brother and I will stay for longer visits if we have internet access. Our offices are never very far away at 8mbps.

My friends and I spent a long weekend there this year. Everyone brought a laptop. We sat around the breakfast table checking email and Facebook. We shared videos of the San Diego fireworks malfunction and Facetimed friends in California. We missed nothing, posted everything. We read our favorite blogs and updated statuses. We posted photos from the trip before we even returned. One friend, who could not take time off from her job, worked two full shifts with nothing but a laptop and an iPad. We were no farther away from the world than our own apartments in New York City.

We stopped seeing Peter at the Cape before the advent of social media. I looked him up on the internet this week. Facebook proved unhelpful. Google spit out too many results. He was a friend, lost. Whoever Peter is today, he remains, to me, only the gangly Bostonian of childhood.

My parents rent out their cottage for part of the summer. At the end of the season last year, one of the renters left helpful feedback: a single television wasn’t nearly enough for their family.

This essay is part of a new, on going series, Rejected Submissions: essays that have been otherwise rejected by a real editor, but that I liked or didn’t want to just throw away and have otherwise exhausted perceivable publication venues.

When I first started a personal blog, it served as a way of commenting, publicly, about the news and events in the world. I posted a link, maybe quoted the article, and most importantly, offered some bit of commentary alongside the headline. Blogging was not about collecting interesting links, but about sharing in the discourse and participating in the dialogue. An article link usually served only as a starting point or as a way to support an argument.

Web empires like Gawker were built around the principle: collate the most interesting headlines and add snarky commentary. Individual bloggers built careers too, either by profiting directly from their sites or using their sites as a portfolio.

Facebook and Twitter allow users to post more quickly. Articles, videos and photos go viral faster because we are all constantly posting and reposting new links. Our friends all bombard us with new pieces of information they have posted, and we bombard them back.

But rarely do we end up posting extensive commentary. And how could we when we’re so busy sharing new links.

Posting a new link on Facebook is a process that requires little effort — and as result — little thought. Comments are usually snarky banter, or even easier, we simply “like” an article to show how much we appreciated it. And how often do we post a new link without bothering even to write anything at all, instead allowing the software to create a headline to speak for us? Twitter’s character limit goes even further; any added commentary must fit in the 140 characters, less the characters of the URL. We all share lots of new links, but rarely say anything about them ourselves.

When I first launched my blog, usually I wrote no less than a paragraph of original thought to accompany every article link I posted. Often I wrote more. Now, I easily post a link to Facebook without any commentary at all. Facebook and Twitter have converted as all from producers of content to merely consumers of content. Personal bloggers were once all producing and contributing to the discourse. Now at best, we leave a comment or reply with snappy one-liners.

We are saturated with information, but we are not necessarily actively engaging in any of it. We consume it. We take tiny snippets of information without ever contemplating it. Like television, we passively absorb the content.

Whether Facebook and Twitter killed the personal blog or if they simply changed the format, the one thing they certainly have done is diminish the discourse of the internet by reducing the importance of original, comprehensive thought in favor of fragments and one-line wonders.

When I was seventeen, a military recruiter who must have lifted my home phone number from a college application or SAT registration or perhaps through some more nefarious means; several times a month the recruitment office would call asking for me.

I spent my afternoons in high school drama club rehearsals or otherwise involved with a nerdy activity. I never was home to answer the call though my mother would dutifully pass on the messages. For months the recruitment office called every other week or so. I have always been too tall to comfortably fit on a naval vessel and my eyesight has always been too poor to pilot a fighter jet. And I have never had a desire to fire a gun. Sure, the battle dioramas at the museum at West Point fascinated me, but I always much preferred looking down on the still-life action then entertaining any fantasy of marching off into battle.

Finally, the recruiter called one evening while I was at home. I picked up the heavy plastic rotary phone in my parents’ bedroom. The conversation went something like this:

“This is [Captain Yossarian] down at your local recruitment center. With high school graduation coming up soon, have you given any consideration to joining the US military?”

Me: “No.”

Yossarian: “Well joining the US Military can be a great way to help pay for college and provide great career opportunities after serving.”

Me: “Yes, I’ve seen the television commercials. But I’m not going to enlist.”

The emphatic rejection must have shocked Yossarian because he paused for a few seconds seemingly without knowing what to say. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

Me: “History. I’ve read a lot of history.”

Yossarian muffled a chuckle on the other end, probably conceding me as a lost cause. “Alright then,” he said, “I guess I can understand that.”

Our conversation ended and the recruitment office never called again.

Data of Discontent, a new science fiction novella, is now available in the Kindle store. For a limited time, its available for the low price of 99 cents.

As the automation revolution took hold across manufacturing, agricultural, and entertainment industries, an insatiable demand for computational power pressured the corporations to turn to a cheap and readily available source of data processing: the human brain.

The unemployed masses have become cogs in the global data network processing critical data for everything from automated water purifiers to toaster ovens while the ruling elite enjoy fantasy holographic games and expansive private estates. All is calm in paradise until a cult begins sewing the seeds of discontent among the huddled masses.

For now, Data of Discontent is only available through the Kindle store. Nook readers should look for an edition formatted for their devices 2012. However, Kindle reader software is versatile and can be used on Mac, PC, iPhones, Android phones and in any standard web browser in addition to dedicated reading devices.

Get Data of Discontent from Amazon or check out at the novella’s promotional page.

Zuccotti Park on the night of October 26th

On October 25th, riot police from Oakland, California and more than a dozen other towns fired gas, explosives and other material at a crowd of people peaceably assembled as part of a nationwide movement to address economic inequality. The police held off their attack until the two network television news helicopters, short of fuel, ceased a live broadcast of the confrontation. Within minutes, the streets were filled with explosive chemical canisters; all of this was broadcast over the internet.

From three thousand miles away, I watched the events unfold in near real time. I was shocked that the police would fire tear gas, shocked at how similar the images seemed to those streaming out of places like Egypt and Libya over the past summer. The protests in Oakland were, until the moment that police opened fire, not unlike those happening in New York or hundreds of other smaller cities around the country.

New York City’s protesters scheduled a march the following night in solidarity with the victims of the Oakland police raid. I marched.

Ten days earlier I had joined in the Times Square march. That protest on a warm October afternoon had attracted tens of thousands to the city’s emblematic heart. Police on that afternoon had been outnumbered easily by a factor of ten, but that peacefully assembled crowd included small children and toddlers strapped to their parents’ backs and senior citizens older than my parents. And even though on that afternoon I was but a few dozen meters from the most aggressive police presence—46th Street—where mounted officers and riot police stormed the crowd and arrested agitators, I never once felt threatened either by the crowd or the police.

The Solidarity march, hastily pulled together in reaction to the Oakland police raids felt altogether different. The immediately obvious difference was in the crowd: the senior citizens and the children were all in bed. This march would largely consist of my peers, the Millennial generation. And while the Times Square march began on an auspiciously sunny afternoon, the Solidarity march was beginning in the dark, dampness of a rainy night. The police, grossly outnumbered in Times Square, now more equally matched the smaller solidarity march. Everything straight away felt intimidating.

The Solidarity march began at the Zuccotti Park base camp. The camp had matured in previous weeks. I filled in midway through the pack of protesters filing around the park. I observed that the innocent enthusiasm of the early days of the protests, when the park could easily have been confused with a college drumming party, had now been replaced with a weathered anxiety. To be sure, after weeks of protests and growing awareness around the nation, despite beginning to effect change in the national discourse, even the heartiest of protesters were being worn down by the elements and the pressure of daily confrontations. As we left the base camp, those staying behind wished us well. They waved and said things like, “Stay safe!” It seemed almost like we were soldiers sent to the western front.

As we marched north along Church Street, passing the World Trade Center construction pit, crowds filled the street. The police, despite providing a well-manned escort, offered no directions. On the advice of a pretty blonde lawyer, I remained well within the sidewalk. Still, there seemed no reason to believe that the police had any concerns with protesters marching in the street, particularly one with little traffic.

The first escalation by the New York Police Department came as the protests rounded the corner of Barclay Street. Here the police began unfurling the now famous kettling nets, the orange plastic used to corral protesters before shooting them with pepper spray or making mass arrests. Their use of the nets may have been an innocent attempt to keep the marchers out of the street as they rounded the street corner. But the immediate result was simply an escalation of the tension between the police and the protesters. For the first time of the evening I felt legitimate concern that getting arrested might be a real possibility.

The Kettle nets appeared early in the march

The first arrests did begin on Barclay Street. Further ahead of where I had walked, police and protesters and a few cameramen tussled. Inevitably the police won and carted away several men as the crowd chanted “Shame, Shame!”

The marched continued on up over Broadway and around the tip of City Hall Park. The usually bucolic park with antique gas streetlights was on lockdown fortified with riot police and civil servants behind the iron gates. They stared out at us with an expression that suggested an ominous threat or restrained sympathy. The march continued up Park Row while the chant turned to “Every time you fuck us, we multiply!” and “Tonight New York is Oakland!”

Continuing around Chambers Street, we passed City Hall and the courthouse. Chambers Street was lined with police every meter or so and they grew more aggressive about marchers remaining on the sidewalk while simultaneously insisting protesters continue marching forward. At this point however, the wide plaza along Park Row funneled more protesters onto Chambers Street than the narrow sidewalk allowed for. The police continued with seemingly contradictory instructions. The crowd must stay on the sidewalk and must keep moving creating a claustrophobic crush of.

Chambers Street where the sidewalk narrowed

As the march rounded back out to Broadway, the wider sidewalk relieved the crush and the march continued on in a circle. I looped back around Park Row where the crowd began to splinter. Ultimately some groups marched to Brooklyn over the bridge, others to SoHo and elsewhere.

I had sensed during the second loop around City Hall Park that the police, despite of or perhaps empowered by the images from Oakland of tear gas and explosives, might turn events sour that evening. I quietly exited stage left into the depths of the 6 train as the march diverged. By the next morning, minor skirmishes with the police appeared in videos on the internet.

I am part of the ninety-nine percent.

The President’s public schedule will begin in the Rose Garden at 10 a.m. with the customary pardoning of a Bald Eagle, a tradition dating back to last year. During this ceremonial event, the President selects a prize-winning bald eagle to grant clemency. The lucky eagle chosen this year will look forward to growing old on display at the Guantanamo Bay Children’s Petting Zoo.

Following the clemency ceremony, the President will entertain up to seven questions from the presidential press corps. If you have not already been informed of the question you will be allowed ask, you will not be asking the President a question.

Afterward, the President will proceed to Camp David Rumsfeld joining the First Lady and their daughters. The first family will enjoy a traditional September Eleventh meal with close friends. The menu will include an organically raised California bald eagle glazed with New Hampshire maple syrup and stuffed with cornbread baked from Iowa cornmeal. Idaho grown freedom fries will also be served even though Idaho plays absolutely no role in the upcoming primary elections.

At 3 p.m., the President and the First Lady will return to Washington by helicopter. They will visit the National Mall to take advantage of the September Eleventh sales. The President said he hopes to find deals on back to school supplies for the first daughters and maybe a new flat panel, plasma television with surround sound. As a reminder, to avoid civil penalties, all Americans are required to spend at least three hundred dollars as part of the American Economic Retail Recovery Act and credit card purchases made after August 1st will be considered a tax deduction for this fiscal year.

At 6 p.m., the President will judge the Fraternal Order of First Responder Heroes seventh annual chili cook-off. He will sample a variety of chili dishes prepared by first responder heroes from across the country selecting a winner from a critical swing state to curry favor with voters prior to next year’s primary. The annual chili cook-off also serves as a fundraiser for the Transportation Security Administration Victims’ Fund.

The President and the First Lady will return to the White House by 8 p.m. to view the Macy’s September Eleventh Fireworks over the Potomac River. The fireworks will be broadcast live nationwide alongside rousing patriotic lyrics and images of American flags.

To conclude the evening, the first family will exchange September Eleventh gifts in the residence. The schedule for Tuesday, September 15th is to follow.

Within the first month of my Freshman year of College, I gave up eating meat. I was not inspired by graphic video footage of factory farms or slaughterhouses. I was not motivated by morals. I was not concerned with the environmental effects, nor by dietary need or health concerns. Instead, I gave up meat because of the college dining hall.

As a child, I had always eaten meat. My mother served assorted cuts from various animals. And we sometimes too ate soy products and beans and other foods vegetarians often substitute for meat. I was an omnivore. Yet whatever Rutgers University dining services served failed to resemble what I knew as meat.

The roast turkey dinner was the end.

By the first week of school, my regular dinner companions began a nightly dinner competition. This contest did not involve speed or volume or even consuming odd combinations of food. Instead, we compared each other’s daily intake of fruits and vegetables, fats and sugars and calories. Meat eating contributed negatively. But yet, the competitive eating was not enough for me to give it up. The roast turkey dinner—slices of bonded turkey protein heated and served in light brown gravy—brought about the end.

Historically, I ate roast turkey as tradition dictates: once a year on Thanksgiving. This is not unusual. Nearly one fifth of all turkey in the United States is consumed on this day. And while deli meat sandwiches account for turkey consumption, I was the exception; for many years I refused to eat sandwiches. So when I ate turkey, it was roasted in an oven and served with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

Whole roasted turkey has texture, sinuous muscle tissue forming wood like grains across a slice of turkey. Well cooked turkey oozes with flavorful juices, but even overcooked turkey arrives at the table with a certain turkey-ness flavor about it. But the dining hall turkey dinner was nothing like this. Dining hall turkey dinner is smooth and slippery—it reminds me of an amphibian, like the skin of the pickled frog dissected in high school biology class. The coloring—pasty pale flesh with pink highlights and lightly browned skin—is all artificial. The meat had no flavor other than salt and the thin brown gravy the turkey was reheated in. And because I tired of eating meat that looked less like meat and more like my high school science lab, I gave up meat.

I adhered to a modified vegetarian diet. I avoided red meat, poultry and pork but I ate fish. I probably ate animal protein in candies like gummy bears, though truthfully, I didn’t even know then that many gelatins rely on animal collagen. If soup relied on animal broth as a base but did not include any chunks of meat, I usually ate it. But even a college town, in an affluent, liberal state, vegetarians had surprisingly few options a decade ago.

The student center restaurants provided the same variety in the food court as a Midwestern shopping mall: generic Chinese food, a pizzeria, Wendy’s, and a steak grill. The vegetarian options – other than a slice of cheese pizza – were almost nonexistent. Even the salads often had meat chunks. The Au Bon Pain attached to the student center offered the only available meatless value meal on its menu; the Mozzarella, Tomato and Basil Pesto sandwich (now branded as the Caprese sandwich) was the only option. Each of the other sandwiches could be ordered without the meat, but the Caprese sandwich was then, the only menu meatless menu item.

Off-campus, the city of New Brunswick offered some choices. Stuff Yer Face, known as ‘that restaurant Mario Batali worked at before becoming famous,’ served custom Stromboli stuffed with any of two dozen ingredients. Falafel and sushi were readily available and there even was a dedicated vegetarian/vegan restaurant. Still, these choices proved limiting because eating a meal is a social experience and because eating meatless meals cost more money.

And then came my first vegetarian Thanksgiving. I expected to feel that I was missing something (my mother wasn’t making a tofurkey just to appease some college fad). But at the dinner table, my plate filled with meatless side dishes and me now more than two months meat free, felt no remorse passing on the plate of turkey.

I survived Thanksgiving. Then I survived my first semester of college. And meat seemed very unimportant.

But that was easy. Even with the limited choices, I always had the dining hall with a seemingly endless bounty, unlimited variety, and always as a failsafe, the salad bar. But my mother’s dinner table always came with meat, and good, recognizable meat at that. There was no salad bar, no slice of pizza, no custom baked Stromboli; there was only my mother’s dinner menu. But I persevered. I overcame prejudices. And I didn’t eat meat.

I got through winter break at my mother’s dinner table and then the spring semester and then the first few weeks of summer. But then there was Italy.

In Rome, do as the Romans. That summer I set off to Italy for three weeks. We stayed with cousins, visited the mountain village where my grandfather was born, wandered the ruins of the Forum, explored Venetian canals, and we ate meat. We ate a lot of meat.

I survived eight months without meat. Thirty seconds after my cousin produced a ten-pound leg of prosciutto, I had dry cured pig flesh in my mouth. We assembled sandwiches from freshly baked bread, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and paper thin slices of the meat. We took these with us and in the early afternoon, in the Forum or beside the Pantheon or along the Tiber we ate meat and cheese sandwiches, the fat from the meat glistening on the bread.

In those three weeks, I ate: chicken, lamb, veal, steak, pork sausages, chicken sausages, beef carpaccio, prosciutto, vegetables stuffed with meat, pastas stuffed with meat, squid stuffed with meat, meat stuffed with meat—I was no longer eating as a vegetarian.

I thought for sure that returning to the United States, I would too return to my modified vegetarianism. After all, when I returned from Italy, I had no cravings for an American cheeseburger as I had four years earlier returning from the British Isles. I would soon by back at school, anyway, faced with the prospect of dining hall meat product. Yes, I convinced myself, I would continue without meat in my life.

And I did. I stayed away from steaks and sausage links and cheeseburgers and chili. But then I slipped a slice of prosciutto hoping to rekindle the magic of my Roman holiday.

I bargained with myself. Poultry, I agreed, was not really meat. Just birds, I reasoned, not because they are stupid or because their brains, slightly smaller than a walnut, prevent them from sensing pain, but because eating chicken and turkey allows for all sorts of culinary delights. Besides, the Caprese sandwich from Au Bon Pain, after Italy, tasted like cardboard.

And pork is the other white meat I told myself, faced once again with slices of prosciutto. I can eat white meat, I justified.

I went another two years before eating red meat.

Then one summer, I began dating a moderately strict vegetarian (who, in an unrelated aside, also didn’t like green peas). She showed up at barbecues bearing boxes of vegetable burgers or tofu chicken patties. I slid back into the familiar patterns. I avoided restaurants without suitable vegetarian options. I chose the meatless option more frequently. I cooked vegetarian versions of familiar classics. I experimented with tofu substitutes and amalgamated vegetable proteins.

Then we broke up and I ate steak.

I have been eating meat steadily ever since. I cook my steak rare enough that sometimes people call it raw. I eat organ meats like livers or kidneys. When I can, I’ll eat game animals like elk or buffalo.

Do I ever hesitate about eating meat? Yes, sure. I’ve read the books and watched the documentaries. I’ve seen some horrific videos. I distrust the industry and the government inspectors. But ultimately, eating flesh is a vice worth the price. Meat is delicious.

Oh, no. Last week your mother made you feel guilty that she is the only woman in Boca without a grandchild. Not even one! In a moment of self-loathing, you finally convinced yourself to call that pregnant friend to congratulate her. Only then do you learn she gave birth six months ago. Finding room in your life for the sort of people mother approves of can be difficult.

On the surface the problem seems simple: despite being a friend of a friend in college, you found it easy to develop a friendship of convenience after you both moved to New York. Now it appears her life has evolved while you still binge drink in Williamsburg on Tuesday nights.

But there’s a whole lot more to this. After all, she invited you to her wedding, and even if it was buffet service and a cash bar, wedding invites mean something. We all know that the carnival of carnal wonder eventually finds an end and we all just hope its before we’re lying face down on Coney Island at four in the morning; if you can’t even be friends with a breeding woman, you might as well just buy a fifth of gin and hop on the D train.

1. Don’t forget that your friend’s body has gone through drastic changes. And this is good for you.

Your friend has endured hormones, growing a human being insider her and late night cravings for pickles with ice cream. Don’t think of her baby fat as an abstract entity; she won’t lose the weight for months. You finally get to be the pretty one.

You can admit you always secretly wished your friend wasn’t so goddamn pretty. Now she isn’t. She’s got stretch marks, tummy rolls, and don’t forget she just pushed a watermelon out of her. Through her vagina. Now that you’re the pretty one, you’re the one boys will buy drinks for. And even if she still is the smart, funny one, all she will talk about is her baby. That’s a major turn off to the guys your trawling for. Believe it or not, your friend’s baby has turned her into the perfect single girl’s wingman.

2. Transition to a virtual friendship.

Social networking sites exist for a reason. Nothing says “I still care about you even though your baby has turned you into an insufferable, self-absorbed little B” as much as “liking” the constant stream of baby photos spewing from your friend’s profile. When you tire of the daily photo updates, you can always block your friend’s news feed. Staying abreast of the child’s growth will be as easy as looking at your friend’s profile picture, now inevitably replaced by her baby’s smiling mug.

As an added bonus, your friend gets to see your photos too. She’ll know all the wonderful things you’re doing—and that she is missing out on—while she’s at home changing junior’s diaper. Remember how super jealous you were that winter break she took an Alpine ski trip? Yeah, she’s not doing that anytime soon. Even lame photo albums like “Weekend in Inwood” will move her to tears as she wipes up green and yellow vomit.

3. Do drugs just like you always did.

Obviously your friend isn’t going to be joining you for an all night warehouse rave anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop bonding through illicit drug use. While drug use can contaminate breast milk, we all know your narcissistic friend doesn’t want a postnatal breast lift. She weaned her precious little snowflake twelve hours after being discharged from the hospital. But she may not have time to get to her dealer, so she will probably appreciate it if you serve as a drug mule.

Consider something like the socially acceptable Prozac or, if you are into the whole retro thing, try a few tablets of Valium. Once the drugs start pulsing through your veins, you’ll think nothing of spending the night in with your friend while the two of you watch another gripping adventure of Dora the Explorer.

4. Join the party and get knocked up.

If your breeding friends truly are important to you, the only way to stay close is having a baby all your own. You’ll find plenty of new ways to bond with your old friend arranging play dates, agonizing over whether the nanny should speak Spanish or Mandarin (Mandarin, obviously), and debating how soon you should create a Facebook profile for your new tot.

But the big thing with getting pregnant is, you’ll no longer resent your friend for droning on about her baby. Instead, you’ll commit her valuable life lessons to memory. Yesterday’s boring pontification on the virtues of diaper services becomes tomorrow’s helpful hints. Besides, you probably want to reproduce before your lady parts become desiccated reminders of your vestigial womanhood anyway.

And remember, your mother loves you, but she isn’t getting any younger and she’d really like to see a grandchild before she goes.

I learned to ski on a hill just across the New Jersey border. Any competent skier could complete each of the seven runs in less than two minutes. A few seasons learning on that topographic lump and I felt ready for a proper skiing excursion. I joined a friend’s family in the Pocono Mountains. We were thirteen or fourteen at the time and after a few runs down the easier slopes—the “kid’s” slopes—we finally decided the time for the dangers of a black diamond slope had arrived. These trails all had names like “Light’ning” and “Thunderbolt.”

The trail chosen for our first big boy adventure included artificial moguls. We thought nothing of the challenge moguls present having from time to time encountered the obstacles on the much smaller training hill. The Pocono Mountains suffer from the same crisis all east coast ski resorts face: ice. Ice creates conditions leading to hard and fast skiing but also makes controlling skis that much more difficult. Navigating snow moguls requires quick sharp turns; the ice added to this challenge a combination of high speed and low maneuverability.

The trail started off much like the easier slopes we had skied on earlier that afternoon, a slow descent seducing us with the gentle curving slope down the mountain. We encountered the first moguls on this early stretch and with our confidence bolstered we pressed on without worry. Then the horizon disappeared below me the true incline of the slope revealed itself. Suddenly I was racing straight towards a vertical slope.

The steep portion of the hill also produced higher, deeper moguls. Some of these were at least as tall as I was. I hit the first one and bounced on out navigating towards the second. I swung around and into the third. I was doing it! And then I fell.

My skis popped off my feet and began sliding down hill. But I stopped. I landed in the deep depression below a mogul. As I sat up I looked over my head to see the enormous mound of snow and another skier cresting the mogul and vaulting over my head. In three seconds I realized how perilous my position was. I was flirting with death, or at very least serious injury. Another skier cut across my line of sight. I was going to die.

I scurried out of the hole, out across another mogul dodging downhill skiers as I scurried towards my skis. Losing my balance meant falling, probably head first, down the mountain. Finally I reached my skis carrying them down towards a more gentle portion of the slope. That was the last black diamond I went down that afternoon.

A few months after moving to Jersey City, while on my way to work, a car sped through a stop sign. Running stop signs is some kind of local sport, though I was not amused by this gold medalist. I held on my horn while the car cut in front of me and turned into the opposite lane of traffic. The car stopped. The doors opened and two men launched out of the car.

The men held guns. Until that point I had only ever seen handguns on television, but here were two ten meters away. I was going to die in the crossfire of a drive by shooting. I threw my car into reverse.

I drove half a block before oncoming traffic impeded my escape. What were these people doing? Didn’t they realize we were all going to die from the crossfire? I heard sirens. I saw more men appearing from around the side of a building. My death would make the five o’clock news.

In a single motion I pulled a u-turn in the middle of the street. The driver behind me seemed confused. For several hours that afternoon I convinced myself I had survived gang warfare; I read the next day that undercover police had been staging a raid at the location. A few years later I moved into an apartment at that corner.

After seven years commuting by car, my office finally moved to transit friendly Hoboken, New Jersey. I could walk or bicycle or ride the subway. Cars were out.

One afternoon, I felt an urge for a chocolate milk. The newsstand a few blocks away had not restocked for the week; I checked that morning. The coffee shop across the street from my office, I thought, might just have chocolate milk. I crossed the street to look into the window hoping to catch a glimpse of the bright yellow NestQuik bottles in the refrigerators. I wanted to avoid walking inside the shop unless certain they sold chocolate milk.

The glass reflected the afternoon sun and cupped my hands around the window as I pressed my face against the glass. I saw no chocolate milk. Just as I decided to give up, I heard the revving of an accelerating car engine and the squealing of imminent danger. As I turned away from the window I saw the oncoming grill of a black livery cab certain I was going to have shards of glass and chunks of headlight surgically removed from my body that afternoon. The car crashed into a fire hydrant stopping just in front of me. I waited for the fountain of water to drench me and the other pedestrians but that must only happen in the movies. I did not drink a chocolate milk that afternoon.