I lived off Myrtle Avenue at Vanderbilt on the northern edge of Fort Greene for three years. It was my favorite place I have ever lived. Never once did I embark on the long walk home from the Q train stop at DeKalb and not become softened by the familiar ambience - the earnest groups of siblings roaming the shady lanes of the projects, Jay Z playing out the windows of apartments and Marvin Gaye from old Cadillacs, the animated conversations of the barber shop, the 90-year-old lady who mistook me for her lesbian lover in Sing Sing prison, the two drug dealers on the bus stop corner, and the crazy old guy playing his boom box and making promises of positive events to come in all of our lives.

That was only the first block. It just got better. Especially in August.

I have been pretty depressed about New York lately; everyone seems to be unemployed, too many people look like they just got off a Greyhound bus. And today after seeing the third non-ironic outfit of plastic skinny jeans with Reeboks and a beanie on a woman (who happened to be picking her feet in a subway station), I was starting to think I was being granted my childhood fountain coin toss wish to be Linda Kozlowski’s character in “Crocodile Dundee” just two recessions too late. But then I arrived on Myrtle Avenue and things turned around immediately.

While turning the corner of Fort Greene park I passed a woman with two children talking on the phone. My grim mental state was jarred by the conversation I overheard. “That’s why I was laughin at her when she was sayin that dumb shit upstairs, talkin about ‘Oh, [she] was psyched.’ “

“At least someone believes in themselves!” I thought to myself as I wrote down her quote in my notebook. How inspiring it was - the woman’s certainty that whomever it was claiming to be “psyched” was not only an idiot, but also probably lying. There may be a recession, and the rest of the world may be lost in bad faith, but that lady on the phone knows bullshit when she hears it and she isn’t afraid to call it.

A moment later I was passing the bus stop. I noticed the fastidious immigrant family cleaning and organizing the front of their 99-cent store, and there was the crazy man with the boom box. It was not on. As if on queue, he looked at me and exclaimed, “This bus stop ain’t a bus stop without music!” turning on the stereo. I passed the two drug dealers discussing some crack. And at once I had recovered from the cruel sights of recession-era New York. I was back on Myrtle Avenue, in Brooklyn, alive, and surrounded by people speaking the unchangeable truth.