The best things in life are $2.75.
I do not buy the narrative that much of my generation will never be able to buy a home because they spend too much money on avocado toast, though I accept the two items as separate statements of fact.
Much of my generation will never be able to buy a home — or at least a good one. This is true, but it is owing largely to nefarious real estate forces, bad city planning, stagnant wages, and a thousand other factors beyond avocado toast.
At the same time, I believe that my generation does spend too much money on avocado toast. While precise economic figures are not easily accessible, I know that the number is more than zero dollars and is thus far too much. I do not care for avocados (and, as we know, my tastes are a determinant of objective truth) and I can make toast at home.
Avocado toast remained an abstract concept for me until some weeks ago when I went to a restaurant that was serving “Brunch.”
When I was a child, “Brunch” occurred only once each year, after church on Mother’s Day. During the year, I would eat 364 breakfasts, 364 lunches, 365 dinners, and one “Brunch.” “Brunch” included a chocolate fountain and a waffle bar. It was, for a child, thrilling.
In adulthood, however, “Brunch” becomes more common and one’s parents (in my case, at least, though perhaps the same cannot be said for some of the avocado toast crowd) stop picking up the tab. The expense and lack of a chocolate fountain remove much of the meal’s appeal.
“Brunch” serves no purpose. “Brunch” solves no problems. Meals before 11 a.m. are breakfast. Meals at or after 11 a.m. are lunch. This is a simple concept. Still, “Brunch” marches on, driven by a partnership between purveyors of avocado toasts and those who, yearning to eat the breakfast through which they have slept, will pay any price.
At the “Brunch” venue to which I recently paid a visit, the going price of the toast was thirty dollars. This is the same cost as a week of unlimited travel on New York City Transit and, if pop history is to be believed, six dollars more than what Peter Minuit paid for the whole of Manhattan in 1626.
I did not order the avocado toast because breakfast food is out of order after 10:59 a.m. and also because I hate avocado toast. I instead ordered the cheeseburger, which was quite good. Its cost, however, was 700% of what I pay for a cheeseburger at the bodega near my apartment, and the burger was not 700% better. Considering this, the cost pained me greatly.
I come from a people who do not like spending money — people who, when complimented on anything from a new garment to a cut of meat, will quickly explain the deep discount through which it acquired. We walk great distances to avoid paying for parking. Even on the most splendid road trips, our minds never deviate from thoughts of fuel efficiency and IRS mileage rates (to this day, both of my grandfathers keep a small notebook in the glovebox for the to make exact fuel mileage calculations). To pay thirty dollars for any food item is to taste death itself.
The other side of the matter is that nothing is more thrilling than a good bargain. For the “Brunch” resister, New York is full of these, mostly in the form of street food. For dinner on Friday, I had two slices of pizza and a can of pop (which, after the local custom, one must call “soda” when ordering) for five dollars. I have been riding a wave of sheer ecstasy for days as a result.
Similarly wonderful is a no-nonsense food cart entrée which may be obtained by asking for “chicken over rice with white sauce.” At six dollars and with enough food for two meals, it is perhaps the best deal in the city and is available anywhere. I defy any fancy restaurant to produce a food with such a high ratio of pleasure to cost.
In the budget experience department, too, New York delivers. Last month, I heard Wynton Marsalis live in concert in Central Park. To see the trumpet legend would have required a ticket, but the sound was just as good on the other side of a tall hedge, and the price was perfect. The Subway, which costs $2.75 per ride (or about as much as a very expensive cheeseburger for a month of unlimited travel) presents to its guests spectacular entertainment and the whole range of humanity at any time of the day or night. The Subway is not even the best game in town for the price point.
On Saturday, I did not eat “Brunch.” I ate a bagel and then took a trip on the East River Ferry, where avocado toast is not served. It was sunny out but still pleasantly cool. We sailed down along Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, where the landbound “Brunch” eaters sat working on their toast. The adept eavesdropper would have heard every last passenger saying the same thing I was: “Can you believe this?” And then adding in the chorus from the song of my people: “And for just $2.75!”
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“The Time Tax” by Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic.
The Time Tax cuts to the heart of one of the more agonizing problems in American public policy that we all seem to take for granted: that most of the red tape and bureaucracy in American government is left to ordinary people to sort out. This is true of our social safety net programs, the way we file our taxes, and just about every other way we interact with our government. It does not have to be this way. In a particular highlight of the piece, Lowrey finds an unlikely hero in Michigan’s own Department of Health and Human Services.
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz.
I discovered Fran Lebowitz much later than I probably should have when she was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s Pretend It’s a City last winter. Lebowitz, who has spent several decades suffering from what she calls a “writer’s blockade,” now has the enviable position of traveling around the country to complain professionally in front of audiences and on film, which is my vision of perfect happiness.
I recently came upon a collection of her writing in a bookstore and spent last week making a start on Metropolitan Life, her first book from 1978.
Her thoughts on everything from manners and behavior (There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.) to sports (When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.) to travel (As you leave the Vatican Museums, you will notice to your right a suggestion box. I suggested that they put an acoustical tile ceiling in the Sistine Chapel to cut down on the incredible din produced by the German tourists.) are an inspiration.