Haunt You Down

This Halloween, learn to perceive the void

When I was in college, our friend went on Wheel of Fortune and did well enough that he suddenly had a lot of money to spend. He proceeded to do the most opulent thing any of us could imagine: eating at Chipotle every day for a full month. Like so many youthful aspirations, this epitomized the good life at the time; once I got a bit older, though, the dream of eating at Chipotle every day revealed itself to not only be quite attainable but downright mundane, if not kind of sad. Nevertheless, Chipotle is good enough for Knicks player Mikal Bridges, who claims to have eaten it every day for the last decade, and it’s still good enough for me—most weeks, I go multiple times. It fits well into my routine and is usually the least exciting, most predictable part of my day, which is the point. I never get tired of it and it balances convenience, nutrition, and price in a way that I have deemed optimal after hundreds (thousands?) of trials. But the ‘00s-era thrill of fast casual dining has faded and, like Starbucks, the experience is now much closer to that of fast food, with consistency and availability the main sources of appeal. The Chipotle I go to in Brooklyn has the same stainless steel aesthetic as always, whispering “eat your food and get the hell out of here”—a liminal space only on its better days.

Yesterday I went into my usual Chipotle in the middle of a torrential downpour and was next in line when the store started flooding and the staff announced they would close. This Chipotle bookends Williamsburg’s slop corridor, which also has a Sweetgreen, Dig Inn, Cava, and Just Salad, one after another on a single block (there’s also a WeWork thrown in for good measure). As you might imagine, there were hardly any people out in the storm, but the block was far from desolate because DoorDash and UberEats were popping off and delivery bikers were swarming. This was only a more extreme case of a pattern I’ve observed occasionally in NYC, more often than I’d expect and much more since 2020, particularly in bad weather, where I suddenly notice that the only other people around are delivery guys. Whenever it happens I picture apartment buildings containing row after row of adults tucked into bed or cozy on the couch with multiple screens arranged around themselves, having ceded the nighttime streets to the pleasure seekers, the indigent, and these “essential workers” who move ghostlike through the dark, not meant to interact with anyone else but to quietly uphold a fragile supply chain that ends at every residential front door. That this all seems too ordinary to be worth pointing out is a sign of how complete the transformation has been, as this Atlantic piece notes. Today, 30 percent of the orders at full-service restaurants are eaten somewhere else. The widely discussed explosion of post-pandemic food delivery has this second order effect that is still less acknowledged: the ad hoc reallocation of people and activity in urban space, the thinning out of once-vibrant zones, the reconstitution of that life within the domestic sphere, and the recoding of vacated public space for new purposes.

In the spirit of Halloween, a reader (thank you Samir) sent me a surprising post about the decline of trick-or-treating in many American neighborhoods. It’s not necessarily that fewer people are trick-or-treating but that certain “destination neighborhoods” have become magnets for the tradition, offering exquisite decorations, top-notch candy, and vibrant crowds, and thereby attracting families who drive in from elsewhere to partake rather than staying in their own neighborhoods. This is a self-reinforcing phenomenon, with the destination neighborhoods investing more in the experience as more people show up and everywhere else getting worse as trick-or-treating dwindles—a winner-take-all dynamic that is especially prevalent in the social media age. The best candidates for destination neighborhoods, of course, are affluent walkable communities, the kind that are also thriving more broadly. Near the end of this piece, the author describes his new neighborhood as a place where nobody trick-or-treats, mentioning that he didn’t bother putting up Halloween decorations this year because no one would notice. I couldn’t help but imagine similar dead or dying zones across America, incrementally drained of the small civic pleasures that are theoretically available to everyone, the social version of a small town deindustrializing. It’s easy to simply blame the internet, although this doesn’t seem that straightforward; the internet, however, is not good at accommodating negative space, training us to stop seeing sites of inactivity and always directing our gaze toward the spectacular. When the void finally materializes, we’ve usually already departed ourselves. With any luck, there’s a Spirit Halloween ready to fill it.

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Reads:

• Dean Kissick on the rise of the “vulgar image,” the visual culture of AI, and the revolt against good taste. “Culture has been cultivated and refined to the point of maddening blandness, and the Vulgar Image is a reaction against this tasteful mediocrity.”

• Kelly Pendergrast on Bryan Johnson and the dream of collective blood circulation. “The life extensionist biohacking of Silicon Valley’s young plasma crowd exists somewhere between the fluid interchange of the communist Martian horizon and the deranged linear cruelty of the human centipede.”

• A brief history of the Factory Pomo aesthetic.

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