Lucky me! The Williamsburg Bridge, the 71st-longest suspension bridge in the entire WORLD is just a 2 mile walk away!

Today is my second day waking up in New York City.  I live in a closet-sized room in Bushwick, a neighborhood sort of smack-dab in the center of Brooklyn.  I'm close to the J/Z train (which runs through Bedstuy, where rapper Jay-Z grew up).  This train takes me into work today, and everyday (in a roundabout way) over the Williamsburg bridge.

I took this picture standing against the unseen wall. My thrift-store Samsonite from the 1970s is wider than my bed.

When I say that my room is a closet, well, it's not.  It's pretty small, though.  There are doors on both sides, a small closet (closet-in-closet?), a 1960s desk and chair, and a teeny cot-sized bed - perfect for what I need, which is a place to put the few things I own and a place to sleep at night.

Despite having no window, the room's got heat, and nobody can complain about that.  The room's sparseness is incredibly well-lit by a high-wattage compact fluorescent bulb that slathers really boring light all over everything.  Later, maybe next week, when things get stabilized (i.e., when I have a constant source of income), I'm going to try and spruce things up a little bit.

As I said earlier, the room doesn't have a window, so there's no natural light to shine in on my face and stir me from my cot (which is made from a broken futon) every morning.  This isn't terrible, but it does mean that the first window I see in the morning is the one next to the shower.  Imagine my surprise when I was drawing the shower water this morning and the only slightly familiar Bushwick cityscape outside was covered in a layer of grimy snow.

Here is an aerial view of the downtown Raleigh legislative complex covered in snow. There are no people in this shot since they're all at the fucking grocery store, buying all the milk and bread.

In the South, where I was raised, we regard snow with some reverence and excitement.  Reverence, because none of us know how to drive in it, and excitement, because at even the hinting of a possibility of a chance of snow, we close down everything we possibly can: schools, businesses, churches, daycares, everything.  Since snow only comes once a year, or once maybe every two or three years, my inner 5th-grader-about-to-get-a-snow-day lights up.  It is a fresh excitement that is quickly cudgeled by nobody else in the entire city giving a shit that there is beautiful snow all around them.

My snow-fueled excitement keeps glowing as I ride the J train into town today.  Like a bewildered child I press my face against the north side window of the traincar as we float over the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge.  I see Manhattan again, dirty and polished with frost.

So far, this is my favorite part of my daily commute into Cobble Hill.  I've seen Manhattan busty, Manhattan groggy, Manhattan rained-upon, Manhattan being carved out by sunlight, Manhattan at night, burning like the end of a cigarette. I am still engaged by the sight and want to keep seeing it with this whimsy - at least, as much as I can before I become like everyone else that is with me on the J train.  Not even snow impresses them.

After a transfer to the F train, and a ride under downtown Brooklyn, I arrive at the coffee shop where I'll be working during my Brooklyn stay.  The shop is called Brooklyn Ecopolis, because it's located in a non-profit community center whose goal is to encourage and support city projects for green and sustainable living.  But, it's not that, yet.  Right now, it's five expansive and dusty rooms stacked on top of each other.  The rooms are filled with all kinds of appliances and fabrication equipment, countertops, paint, brooms, cardboard scraps, wires, pipes, contractors, empty coffee cups, plastic covering, and 20 different people speaking 13 different languages.  And, well, now, there's me.

This morning, there are a number of things going on.  There is a beautiful countertop made from recovered glass being installed.  Atop it will sit a FETCO CBS-2052e brewer and four Luxus 1.5 gallon urns, as well as a hot water tower, and a coffee grinder.

Gloria wakes up for the first time. How can you not be pumped about that sweet INDIGLO display?

This morning, however, attention is focused on the espresso machine, which is freshly unboxed and perched on a countertop made from wood that was reclaimed from a 500 year-old monastery.  The espresso machine is the Plus 4 U Gloria model from Astoria, and everyone I've talked to in the coffee biz hasn't gotten their hands on one yet.  It's part of a new "Green Line" of espresso products by Astoria that utilize intelligent software control over boiler temperatures in order to conserve energy.  Naturally, as a former computer science major, I'm dubious of any computer program that purports to do something that good fucking sense can do better, but I'm always open to alternate ideas.

Despite being fully capable of installing the machine myself, the Gloria unit (for service contract reasons) must be installed by some jackass Italian know-it-all who loudly proclaims the inferiority of American coffee and touts the "Italian roasting method," where beans are apparently cooked and cooled in repeated succession on a conveyor belt.

"Like a sandwich at Quiznos?" I ask, attempting to coyly reveal the fact that I think he's a jackass.  He doesn't answer, but goes about connecting the drain hose to the espresso machine's drain reservoir.  He does this poorly, so later the monastery wood countertop is covered in gunky water and I get to clean it.

Wanting to keep busy, I set up the Mazzer Robur-E grinder next to the machine.  It's so new it still has little styrofoam packaging bits on it.  The Mussolini of Espresso sees me doing this and promptly insists that he dial in the right grind size and dosing time, so I stand back and let him screw around with it.  I'll just change the settings back to my liking when he's out of the building.

This is the first drink I made with Gloria. The steam wand's strength really took me off guard, so it's kind of a shitty rosetta.

After Benito is gone, I empty the hopper of the shit charcoal espresso that the owner of the cafe purchased for testing and fill it with some Stumptown Hairbender espresso that she has brought from Cafe Pedlar, a Stumptown-operated cafe just a block away on Court St.  After dialing-in the Robur-E, I test out the steam wand - it's powerful and it catches me off guard.  I have no qualms with a powerful steam wand and make a few lattes before cleaning up and heading home.

I make it home without once checking my iPhone for directions or for what trains to take.  Cardinal directions make sense, and my legs are starting to remember more than my head.  Since I'm near the Atlantic ocean, there is wind and it is cold and vicious and sharp, and the teeny cot in my teeny room is welcoming and warm.