B/4 and Ever After

B/4

Getting certified had become my new midlife habit. As addictions went in 2019, it wasn’t the worst one.

There I was, an aspiring filmmaker caught in a bi-coastal live-work situation between Brooklyn and the Bay Area, deciding this was the perfect time to get certified in my latest expensive hobby: aerial yoga.

My certification habit came with the vague hope that eventually one of these hobbies might turn into an income stream. By then, my midlife map was one long zigzag: PADI Deep Diver, Ui designer, Thai Yoga Massage Practitioner, soon-to-be Aerial Yoga Instructor—with no discernible payoff in sight.

But hey, I was learning that life, liberty, and the pursuit of expensive hobbies can last a lifetime—as long as you have a a self-discovery slush fund and a safe place called home. Preferably one that can’t be taken away from you.

Enter the plot twist.

Part of this story was recently told at a NYS Loft Board public hearing in a downtown Manhattan courthouse. I waited to disclose the details until I had a less-sad ending.

Here’s what went down: my landlord tried to illegally evict me from the artist loft where I’d been a responsible, rent-paying tenant for nearly twenty years.

New York landlords are a special breed of greedy, with well-known tactics for booting decent tenants out of leases so they can raise the rent. I knew this much. What I didn’t know was that my landlord was apparently Putin.

Within days, his request to “make a few improvements” had reduced every corner of my home to rubble. He left my home covered in toxic dust, floods, with sinks and a toilet removed—all just as the rest of the world shut down for a pandemic.

Sadly, my impressive collection of hobby certifications had not prepared me for an ugly legal battle, homelessness, unemployment—or, apparently, the collapse of civilization.

I remember the breakdown. I was slouched over a pile of broken records and boxes of moldy photographs in my destroyed living room, crying.

How had my card-carrying-cool zigzag of a life ended with this?

As an artist, bandleader, storyteller, and B/Sider, this shitty pile covered in toxic dust was now my life to clean up.

I blinked away tears and looked at the ceiling.

Ten feet above me, a pipe dripped some brownish yuck onto the floor by my feet. I stared up, squinting, calculating the trajectory of the next drop.

I could have fixated on the new leak.

Instead, my brain went somewhere else.

Look how high that pipe is.

I stopped.

“Wait,” I said to no one. “I have high ceilings.”

Then I said it again.

“I have high ceilings.”

Suddenly I was giddy.

I could turn all of this—see photographic evidence above—into an actual aerial studio.

I sat up and stared at those ten-foot ceilings, imagining colorful aerial silks hanging where my living room used to be.

I let that image burn into my pupils.

Then I fought my Putin-esque landlord.

And I won.

Two years later, I opened Aerapy Method, a holistic aerial movement studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn. With Air, Mazzy Star, and Zero 7 on the playlist, I set the room to what I believed the world needed after everything we’d just been through: Radical calm. And resilience.

The Ever After

This is my very fulfilling life on the B/Side.

Designing rad playlists for aerial classes is now my job. Leading aerial retreats in Costa Rica is also my job. Helping people find relief and freedom by swinging through space? Somehow, miraculously, also my job.

I had no five-year plan. No career strategy. Certainly no straight line.

I got here through a real crisis, a bumpy zig, a rocky zag—and my obsession with getting certified for self reinvention.

So when everything around you is crumbling, remember to look up. The ceiling might be higher than you thought.