Babydolls, Broke-Ass is so damned tired she feels as if she might puke at any moment. But that circumstance, as we know, is nothing new. Why, Broke-Ass has vomited three times alone in the past week. Why? Who knows. Why is the past never really dead, but not even past? Twenty-three thousand dollars worth of gastrointestinal medical bills, and the madness of art, and here we all are. 

And here she, particularly, is: on the eve of her last night as a resident of New York City, where she has resided since 1989–in Brooklyn, in particular, since 1993. The Rancho is, essentially, vacant, but for a few last boxes, dust bunnies, and the 10 odd chickens in the back coop that the lovely, soon-to-be owners have requested be left. The keyboard tapping echoes.

Broke-Ass: first visited New York, in August, as an eight-year-old Berkeley kid in her flip-flops home-made tie-dye and without irony declared outside Maxwell’s Plum to her mother that “This is where I’m living when I grow up”; fought her late Darth Vader-like father in court to attend Columbia (and won ; worked like fucking hell; started her career at the late PC Magazine, continued at Time, US News & World Report; continued to work like fucking hell, fondly observing the fruits of her infernal labor flourish via the net take at various and sundry sample sales; drank; quit drinking; got married to her dearest friend of eight years; smoked; quit smoking; worked like hell; worked like hell; gave birth to two sparkly-minded daughters, Baby Poodle and Little Mousie, and experienced her heart gloriously parting for the first time; worked; bought a little gem of an apartment in Park Slope; wrote a book; held her head to the chest of her dying father; sold the apartment and bought a brownstone; found herself in the middle of a bone-crushing, heart-seizing divorce; moved to the Rancho; lay on the floor, amid the wreckage; got up, took care of adorable schmushkies; worked like fucking hell, observing the fruits of her infernal labor come to nothing; got hitched to Big Daddy; gave birth to Two Lumps of Sugar; worked like fucking hell, still nothing; resumed smoking; raised her own produce and hens; dealt with a whole lot of serious bullshit and poverty; and then remembered Philadelphia.

Broke-Ass and New York: A Life. Pretty much inseparable.

But, as mentioned, Broke-Ass is tired.

So, Philadelphia.

What the fuck is going to happen, babydolls? The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.