Leaving NYC was my best decision of 2020. Second best...?
Friends, this is an email based on my latest blog post at Thacher Report. I'll write more soon, stay tuned. This essay has been updated.
I fled NYC amid COVID — and it was the best decision of my life.
Zachary Thacher
Fall, 2020 — Brooklyn
The NY Post wrote a clickbait version of my return to The City after fleeing in March. The popular AM news radio station 1010 Wins interviewed me, even Voice of America, the State Department's Cold War propaganda outlet for Russia and beyond, came to Brooklyn to shoot video of me walking around with a Russian voiceover. If you're in Moscow, you can now see my masked face. The only way to express the sudden press coverage: Oy+Yo!
Did my blog or writing for PS I Love You earn the attention? Was it ten years running my digital agency, Thacher? My five unsold but hilarious and touching spec feature dramedy screenplays I pitched at SONY for four years? Nope. Credit goes to Facebook.
A journalist found me on Into the Unknown, a group set up by Rebekah Rosler for people fleeing New York during the scariest, earliest days of the pandemic. It’s a private forum to discuss the pros and cons of towns outside the city, to swap home buying tips and offer support. Asking for advice and chatting with people going through the same dislocation was a balm when inhabiting in-law apartments with carpeting from the Reagan administration in rural New England as I wondered: stay or leave, return or abandon?
I even went on a date from the group and became buddies with a musician who moved from the East Village to Tulsa. Who says Facebook is just for low information/high discrimination white people without college degrees?
Speaking of Republicans: Do an interview, add a photographer, write a misleading clickbait headline and voila, you have a New York Post article! Yes, the same periodical that published a completely false story about the Biden campaign. Gotta love concentrated media.
But… truly, I’m grateful to the journalist for her attention and for making a few corrections about the farm and my time there.
Contrary to Post’s headline, I loved leaving New York. It was a great decision. The anxiety of solitary confinement in a tiny and wildly expensive apartment while my income dropped, a rising death rate, the fear of infection… and a lifelong desire to live an rural life set me free.
My farmer friend Andrew in Massachusetts, and then my homesteader friend Jesse in Vermont, offered me shelter and hospitality, unconditional friendship, opportunities to get my hands and knees dirty in their fields and raised beds as we sowed, weeded, watered and harvested. I miss sitting with Jesse on his lawn to watch the sun fall behind the Adirondacks. I miss hiking with Andrew to a forest pond as fish rise and dapple the water.
My second best decision of 2020? Returning to New York, this time to Brooklyn, which has more trees, slightly less oligarchic rents and no skyscrapers blocking out the sky.
Now, back in the city, I’m reconnecting with friends, dating with more kavanah/intention, enjoying the diversity of a city and when the weather cooperated earlier this fall to celebrate Jewish life — in a mask, outdoors, carefully — with one of the world’s largest and most active Jewish communities. I wouldn’t change any of these 2020 decisions for a second. I’m grateful to old friends, my family and to strangers on Facebook.
Soon I may also be thanking Inside Edition if I get on television. We’ll see. Reminds me of Andy Warhol’s quote from a Swedish exhibition in 1968.
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Soon my time will be up, it may be already. The attention is like ice cream, pleasurable in small amounts.