I co-wrote a zine! It’s called Zineship (because we are Friends and also Corny about Friendship) and is 16 full-color pages full of art and long-form writing on music, travel and more. This issue specifically contains: the Sopranos characters as Midwestern Emo Albums, a definitive matrix ranking of all the Irish crisps I’ve tried, art about post-marathon toenails, and more. You can get a feel for the vibe on our Zine IG. Alan Murtha is my collaborator (and best bud).
If you’re interested in pre-ordering an issue, smash that “respond” button and let me know. Cost is $15 including shipping. We use a small local printer to get these made and the quality is always *chef’s kiss.* Pre-orders help us to get a feel for quantities to print. Issues will mail out within a month.
Below is a preview essay from the zine that I wrote about a Rite-Aid in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that contained a disco ball. If you like this, you’ll probably like the zine. Thanks for reading!
I think every New Yorker has one neighborhood that shaped their early days here and remains indelible despite apartment changes and bar closures and friends moving away and every other miniature tragedy that defines living in this city. Greenpoint was the first neighborhood where I lived, in a giant communal Airbnb loft, while working a more-than-full-time unpaid fashion internship.
My room was hoisted halfway up the two-story-high wall and required climbing a flight of wooden stairs with no railing. I shared it with my friend Hannah, our beds only an arms’ length apart. The rest of our floorspace was taken up by various going-out shoes and a gangplank which connected our bedroom—in an utterly surreal violation of probably every safety code—to a second, even-more-floating bedroom. The women living in that room would go on to become dear friends, but at first they were just two people who had to cross a gangplank and then my bedroom every time they needed to pee.
I happened across the Disco Ball Rite-Aid totally by chance that summer. I think it was late at night. I was coming home from doing something totally different, because that’s the only time I ever remember that I need things from a drugstore. I was tipsy, which is important because the main thing you need to know about Disco Ball Rite-Aid is that it’s completely nonsensical and you don’t get a warning about the disco ball. As soon as you walk in you’re hit with difference: right past the entrance the floor starts sloping downward, a long, carpeted ramp lined with shelves full of tilted drugstore things. This is already very confusing, so you follow the ramp down. At the bottom the store opens up into a vast, circular space, with a domed ceiling and upper balcony levels that are (devastatingly) not being utilized to sell Rite-Aid products. Look up.
Hanging down from the center of the dome is a still-functional disco ball. Your brain is going to have a hard time making sense of all these pieces, this uncanny valley drugstore experience that you were in no way prepped for. All these components are like a visual puzzle that takes the mind a moment to reconcile, but it will come: this Rite-Aid lives in what was once a historical skating rink. At some point, the chain drugstore powers that be must have bought the building out and said, no renovations necessary. This is a whole vibe.
Something important about the Disco Ball Rite-Aid is that I’m not even sure it exists any more. I think I read in an article recently that it was being demolished, and I’m afraid to Google it because I don’t want to tinge this essay with a confirmation of loss. But hasn’t my whole experience of Greenpoint been summed up by loss? There was never a moment during that first summer that I didn’t count down the days left and think, how lucky I am to have this time here. I couldn’t yet fathom what the shape of my post-graduation life would look like, but I knew it would be different and probably worse from that summer. It was this golden time where I was able to live independently, despite the unpaid work, thanks to a mix of scholarships and savings; where I got to
feel like a real adult, even as I shared a room with a friend; when all my responsibilities in the world consisted of learning new things at work and then putting on silly little outfits and drinking in the backyards of Brooklyn bars until late at night.
I would take long walks along the Greenpoint waterfront and listen to whole albums, no skips, watching the sun set over Manhattan from a dock that jutted off India street. I’d pass totally alone between huge warehouses that have since been demolished, pitch- dark because no one cared to light up such a desolate area at night, and then suddenly I’d be at the dock and the whole skyline would be laid out before me, glittering, stretching out so far in each direction—Greenpoint is parallel with Midtown, you stand there and you’re splitting the island of Manhattan in half—and my chest would feel so full and I just could not believe that I was really there, in that place. I was far from home but I was also making a new home.
You get such a specific feeling being in the Disco Ball Rite-Aid. It’s that feeling of an utterly expected, mundane moment transforming to magic right in front of you. You don’t deserve it, but the universe is handing you a little piece of it anyway. There are so many of those places, that feeling, tucked away in a city as big as New York. I’ve taken many friends there, but I have also taken several bad dates to the Disco Ball Rite-Aid. I guess I wanted to entertain both them and myself, a silly effort to distract us both from the fact that we were very clearly never going to make out. There is a threshold of wrongness of company where I start to feel very emboldened to amuse myself at almost any cost. It’s impossible not to be amused when you realize you’ve entered a subterranean Rite-Aid containing a disco ball. It was always a little gift from me to them. You can’t leave the Disco Ball Rite-Aid unchanged.
Even if it’s been demolished, those strange insides are living permanently in my brain. Nobody can take away all of those shitty Bumble dates that I forced to wander in after two drinks. Nobody can take away Peter Pan Donuts, two doors down, with their angry Polish waitresses slinging out the best somehow-only-two-dollar donuts of my life. Nobody can take away Greenpoint, and the summer that I spent there in that floating bedroom, and the walks I took along a waterfront that doesn’t exist any more. When I think of all that I always come back to Disco Ball Rite-Aid, and I know it isn’t possible to kill a summer like that. Long live.