PHIL NGUYEN

I’m going to go on a sushi diet. For thirty days, I am going to try to consume one meal of fish a day. I don’t have any reason to do this except for the reason that I really enjoy it - and also because I live in what seems to be the sushi capital of the world. Within ten blocks of my apartment, there are no fewer than a dozen different sushi joints. In that same vicinity, there are two pizza parlors. I will never understand this ratio. This tells me that affluent white people are wont to eating a california roll after hard day’s work. It must suck to be a five-year old growing up here. Park Slope is also littered with a ton fashion boutiques. It is nearly impossible for me to find a standard black umbrella (and I did try), but if I wanted to buy a sequin-adored pocket sachet, then I’d be in business. My buddy theorizes that these shops are hobbies for stay-at-home mothers. Rich finance husbands will pay for it as a breakeven or even small loss endeavor just to satisfy their nagging wives. Moral of the story: Park Slope is fucking weird.

There are five floors in my apartment building. The bottom floor is just the lobby, and each of the other floors house one apartment each. Because of this, pretty every knows everyone else. Well, I should correct myself. Everyone knows me. I’m too loud, too busy, and too drunk. I embody the image of someone you don’t want to have in a quaint neighborhood like mine. The lady on the second floor is an executive producer for the show Iron Chef. She also manages one of Bobby Flay’s restaurant. Once, she yelled at me for dropping cigarrette buds and a vomit-stained shirt on her terrace. The couple of the third floor are not around very much. I once ran into them in the elevator and they told me they cycle between three apartments around the world, and this is their New York location. I don’t know exactly what they do for a living, but they sure seem important. The couple on the fourth floor works from home. They have a Bichon Frise that yips every few seconds. In the summer when the windows are open, I can hear this satonic dog barking for hours. Whenever I see the dog in the elevator, he tries to bite me. I often dream about throwing an arsenic-laced bone down to their balcony. ANYWAY, I’ve been seeing this three year old child and a single parent often wandering around the building. Clearly, this throttles my every day normality and the Sherlock Holmes of me has to emerge. Apparently, the third floor couple had to sublet their floor while they weren’t around because of the financial crunch. Moral of the story: The ecomony - it affects us all.

For the past few months, I’ve been compiling essays on why human behavior is what it is. I am in the camp that believes most things that happen are linear. That is, A + B = C. Because this logic exists in the world, societal patterns can be inferred from simple human assumptions. I don’t know what sparked this, but I have too much free time on my hands and crazy ideas float into my crazy head. I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do with these amateur pieces of writing, but one option I am mulling is making a category of them for this blog. I am reticent to do so because I’m sure many of my opinions are wrong (yes, I realize that opinions cannot inherent by “right” or “wrong” but these things are decided by people beyond my scope of control). But it’s definitely an option. That or they can sit as a digital file on my computer shuttered from the world to judge. Moral of the story: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears, it doesn’t make a sound.