A walk in white Brooklyn

 When I am at one of our lay berths in Brooklyn in between cargoes, it's the only time I have at work where I can go ashore on my own w/o a task to do. 

   Generally I hope to get ashore once a week to walk, get groceries, and head back to the HQ, usually a 3 hour process if time allows. 

   I'm just 3 watches away from going home so I didn't need groceries today, but I did go to the store anyhow to stock up on caffeine, bump up my stores aboard.  Along the way I saw a really unusual number of people who looked like me...and I mean, like, really unusual numbers. 80+%, maybe even 90, once I crossed over into Red Hook.

     I found White Brooklyn. 

       In the 14 years since I agreed to be homeported in Brooklyn, I've seen it become a 3rd world neighborhood, and a place in decline. For the most part much of New York is the same now. On a 4 mile walk through Cobble Hill, downtown Brooklyn and Carroll Gardens, I'll see maybe a dozen white people total, and of the other 96% it's some black people here and there mostly around the projects areas and the shoe and wig stores around Fulton Market, and a whole shitpot of arabs and latinos everywhere else. 

 But today I walked through Red Hook, and once I passed the run down ballfields and projects,  the white people started peeping out, like crocuses in a snowdrift. By the time I was walking down Van Brunt, there were sun-averse Americans on the street and in neat lines waiting to go in shops and cafes, speaking English, and it was surprising to behold. I heard words I haven't heard in over a decade in New York, when I stepped off the curb to pass a couple of sickly-looking woman in front of a shop.

'Woops, excuse me.' 

Coulda knocked me over with a feather.

   Turns out, it's Sunday and when the weather is fine, white New Yorkers put on something tan or brown, or something that won't attract the dangerous attention of feral foreigners anyhow, let down their unkempt and kinda oily shoulder-length hair (men and women), and, dowdy like sparrows on a leafless branch, make noise. 

 Surprised me too. I didn't know there were so many of us... but all had the sickly, furtive look that you see when you see Londoners in photos during the blitz. These are NOT thriving people. These are rabbits living next to a coyote den. Now, granted, it's Brooklyn, and 90% of the people more than likely share a certain political commonality, and that political demographic certainly isn't famous for being hale, hearty, broad of shoulder and brash. Rather the opposite. But it being Sunday, I saw some maybe women, but wearing dresses, which was pleasant to see, and I only saw maybe two Che Guevara tshirts on the usual weedy stunted eunuchs. 

       Still, it was nice. No fighting, no yelling, hardly like Brooklyn at all. 

 Anyhow I got my stuff and went back aboard. Next time I go ashore, God willing, it'll be to the airport.