I spend my days below 14th St. and generally above Canal. I’ve had girlfriends. I’ve been in love. I’ve had my heart ripped out and handed to me by numerous women. I’ve done my share of ripping too. These are stories of my New York.
I wrote this a while ago to introduce boyslifenyc on a much larger website. That deal never went through, but it seems like a good way to say goodbye, so here it is:
It could be true that three years ago when I set up a Tumblr and bought the Boyslifenyc domain name I was trying to make sense of two, one very long, the other very short, failed relationships.
It’s also could be true that at the time I’d just completely dismantled the six figure career I thought I’d always wanted, was borderline suicidal, and unknowingly desperate for a creative outlet.
Both these things are sort of true, but they are not really why I started the blog. I started the blog because, like every other idiot that’s ever given away his money to GoDaddy, I had a moronic I could do that moment.
What happened was, Alexi Wasser interviewed one of my friends on her blog, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, that blog was the I could do that catalyst for Boyslife. I’m not going to waste your time with a diatribe on what a self-aggrandizing vehicle for STARmeter points her blog became, but I will say that, beyond really wanting to fuck her, in its infancy her blog was wonderfully candid and contained a vulnerability that I found inspiring. So inspiring in fact, that I set up my own blog.
I wrote essays and fictionalized versions of my sexual and romantic escapades in a grammarless prose so rife with misspellings it could easily have been classified as not English. People reacted. In my social circles I was an instant hero or villain. People didn’t understand, they called me disgusting, one dude, who I think was mad because I fucked some girl he was into, even commented on an entry that he hoped I died of AIDS. But there were supporters too, people I love and respect cheered me on, encouraged my writing, even helped me with my grammar. And although my Analytics were less than spectacular, I could tell that I’d found a nerve.
I wrote these controversial stories until it felt like I was writing the same story over and over again. Then I realized, to grow as a writer I was going to have to abandon the blog. I decided to stop posting stories and focus on the novel I’d begun writing. Then one afternoon I set up one of those thingies where people can ask you questions anonymously. It exploded. I was besieged with questions. Hundreds of questions, thousands of questions. I sat down and started answering them. That first week I must have answered 500 questions. People wanted dating advice, people wanted to know if their pussy was ugly, if there was life after herpes, if I was Ted Barrow (I’m not) if they should kill themselves, and on and on. I did my best to mock the fools, giving answers I thought would make my friends laugh, but when someone seemed to really needed help I tried to do the right thing. It’s been two years, and the questions still come, some days they’re so annoying I can’t even bare to read them, other days I feel like I’m drowning until I sit down at my computer and answer a few.
A while back friend confessed to asking the blog for relationship advice, he said that my answer had really helped him. I told him I was glad that I could help, but why didn’t he just ask me himself? He just shrugged his shoulders and said I don’t know. At first I was embarrassed that I was so unapproachable in my actual life that my own friends were afraid to seek my council outside the Internet, but after some though I realized that maybe it was not just about me. Maybe this guy needed the veil of anonymity to be himself, to get whatever it was off his chest, to scream and rant and bemoan his cunt ex-girlfriend. I can relate to that.
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO TOOK THIS JOURNEY WITH ME.
RIP BOYSLIFENYC
Love,
Andy ‘Roctakon’ Brown.
