by Kliph Nesteroff

This story is from Punch!, an app for the iPad which you can download for free here!

The “Nyan Cat” video features a crude digital image of a cat with the body of a Pop Tart. It sails through outer space, leaving a rainbow trail in its wake, to the accompaniment of a Japanese pop tune, for three minutes and 37 seconds.

Since it was uploaded to YouTube on April 5, 2011, it has logged more than 78 million views. Mindless, repetitive, and catchy, “Nyan Cat” is a quintessential artifact of viral culture.

While we may associate such phenomena with the digital age, virality has been around long before wi-fi. But the type of thing that bypassed the cultural gate-keepers and got passed around from person to person in the days before the internet was a lot different from the average 21st-century meme.

Internet sharing favors the simple, the silly, the cute. Before the web, when cassettes and VHS tapes were the most easily shared technologies, the things that went viral were countercultural, naughty, or just plain strange.

Washington D.C. residents Jeff Krulik and John Heyn had an early viral hit with an oddball 17-minute VHS tape, Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It resulted from their pointing a video camera at metal fans outside the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, before a 1986 Judas Priest concert (with Dökken as the opening act).

“I think we spent about two and a half hours on site,” says Krulik. “That was it. Stumbling around the parking lot. Then John took the footage and, months later, really came back with the goods. He’s the genius architect behind it.”

Krulik and Heyn showed the humble result on public-access television and at a punk venue called DC Space, which led to a slot at the American Film Institute.

“We had a good relationship with Eddie Cockrell, the programmer at the AFI,” Krulik says. “Eddie was pretty hip to things going on around town.”

Baltimore cult filmmaker John Waters saw Heavy Metal Parking Lot and said, “It gave me the creeps.” The film was also a favorite on the Nirvana tour bus. But it took another few years for a genuine following to arise. “We realized we couldn’t force our friends to watch it anymore,” Krulik says. Mike Heath, a longtime presence on the D.C. punk rock scene, asked Krulik if he could have a few VHS copies before he left for the west coast. “I gladly gave him about four,” Krulik says, “and didn’t think twice about it.”

And then? “Sofia Coppola called in 1994 to inquire about using clips from Heavy Metal Parking Lot in her TV pilot for Comedy Central,” says Heyn. “She had tracked me down in the phone directory. She had rented it at a cult-video store in L.A. called Mondo Video. This was the first inkling that we had a following.”

FROM THOMAS PAINE TO LADY GAGA

Krulik’s follow-ups — Heavy Metal Picnic, Monster Truck Parking Lot, Neil Diamond Parking Lot, and Harry Potter Parking Lot — haven’t had quite the same impact of the original, which ended up having a 2003 theatrical release.

In 2004, the Backstreet Boys paid homage to Heavy Metal Parking Lot with their video for “Just Want You to Know.” At roughly the same time, Krulik and Heyn created a Parking Lot TV show, which lasted eight episodes on Trio. Then the original video (along with bonus footage) had a 2006 DVD release. It has lived on partly thanks to Lady Gaga, who sponsored a YouTube series, “Lady Gaga’s Pop Culture Parking Lot,” during her Fame Ball tour.

Long before Heavy Metal Parking Lot, touring musicians passed around bootleg cassettes filled with the rants of legendary jazz drummer and band leader Buddy Rich. The ill-tempered Rich was notorious for berating his musicians in blunt tirades — but unless you had been present for one of his verbal beat-downs, it was all just hearsay.

When portable cassette players hit the market, disgruntled band members were at last able to make clandestine recordings of the boss in action. Distributed as third-generation dubs, the tapes got laughs from musicians and other interested parties for years to come.

A sample: “You can’t play shit! I’m accustomed to working with number-one musicians. I’m not accustomed to working with half-assed fuckin’ kids who think they wrote the fuckin’ music business!”

Two decades later, a line from a Buddy Rich tape seeped into a “Seinfeld” episode that had George Costanza confronting a man at a movie theater: “Would you like to step outside and I’ll show you what it’s like?”

Late-era analog technology made it easier than ever for people to share cultural items without relying on professional distributors — but memes had managed to find a way to go from person to person without the help of cultural overlords for hundreds of years before that. It can even be argued that one of this country’s earliest viral works resulted in the American Revolution. In 1776 Thomas Paine anonymously published his 48-page Common Sense, which made the case for independence from British rule. He used plain language to get his point across. The pamphlet sold 120,000 copies in its first three months.

Public gatherings were staged so that it could be read to illiterates, and the Common Sense audience continued to exponentiate. Historian George Trevelyan summarized its influence: “It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting … it was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country.”

BIG GAY CLINTON SPEECH

Another American thinker who skipped past the gatekeepers was 20th-century journalist I.F. Stone, who had been a “Meet the Press” panelist and New York Post reporter until the McCarthy blacklist stopped him cold. Without a job, he channeled his impulses into a newsletter mimeographed in his garage, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which found an audience of 70,000 likeminded thinkers. It was the most successful zine of the Atomic Age.

Stone had been inspired by his predecessor, journalist George Seldes. Upset with The Chicago Tribune for defanging his reports on war-profiteering at the end of the 1920s, Seldes left the paper and created In Fact. The four-page, self-published weekly became a must-read in journalism circles. It went on to expose the link between cancer and smoking, and its circulation reached 176,000, although no major store would sell it.

Paine, Stone, and Seldes weren’t the only independent thinkers to make use of such strategies to get their messages across. In America’s two-party system, viral marketing has proved the best hope for outsider candidates. Prior to the internet love-in for Ron Paul, there was comedian Professor Irwin Corey, who launched a satirical presidential campaign in 1960. Never more than a marginal show-business figure, Corey sent press releases ahead of a Chicago campaign junket, only to have the papers dismiss him as a loon. Facing a media blackout, Variety reported, Corey’s handlers “got word out with a profusion of window placards all over the near northside bohemia, where most of the city’s nightlife concentrates.”

The campaign began to generate mantras like “Throw the Rascal In!” and “Offshore Oil Rights for North Dakota!” Chicago beatniks joined the Irwin cause, and an assemblage of 2,000 marched in Washington Square Park. Corey scored cheers as he pledged to implement “socialized haircuts.” Police dispersed his supporters, and The Chicago American brandished Corey on its front page with a profile and photo spread.

A more serious analog-era contender, Bill Clinton, made a name for himself among key constituents when a videotape of a campaign speech “went the 1992 version of viral,” writes Linda Hirshman in the book Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. A videotape recording showed then-candidate Clinton at the Hollywood Palace, speaking passionately on the subject of AIDS discrimination. Almost immediately thereafter, Hirshman writes, “copies of the tape [were] circulating everywhere in the gay community,” and people were… watching the whole thing on the TVs in the gay bars.” An idea that defied mainstream political opinion had once again found a way to the public through viral means, rather than through the channels of official culture.

SAD DRUNKS OF THE LOWER HAIGHT

Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote.

James Gleick expands on Dawkins’ notion in his latest work, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, saying of memes: “They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention.” In the book, Gleick also nails down what a meme is not: “Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms…. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable — units with staying power.”

While early meme generators, from the sublime Thomas Paine to the ridiculous Irwin Corey, had sociopolitical critiques in mind, viral practitioners of the 1980s and 1990s tended to create stuff that was technically raw, obnoxious (if not simply antisocial), and completely at odds with the more shapely products turned out by mainstream cultural entities. Which brings us to Shut Up, Little Man!, the Jerky Boys, and the early version of South Park.

Shut Up, Little Man! was a late-1980s phenomenon that came about when two gutter punks — known as Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D. — recorded hours of the drunken arguments seeping through the thin walls of their apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district. These recordings eventually made viral celebrities of their drunken neighbors, two unfortunates named Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman.

When Eddie Lee Sausage asked the men to keep it down, one of them responded thus: “I was a killer before you were born and I’ll be a killer after you die.” Soon, Eddie Lee Sausage, a fan of the Fluxus movement, started recording their profane exchanges in the name of art. Here is an example from a Shut Up, Little Man! tape labeled “Nail Clippings”:

Peter: Shut up, little man!
Ray: You are…
Peter: Shut up, little man! Shut up, little man! I don’t wanna see you cut your toenails… For god’s sake, shut up, little man!

Eddie Lee Sausage sent a dub to a friend in New York as a gag gift. A dub of that dub made its way to Ohio. Soon, dubs were made of dubs of dubs and traded within a makeshift network, eventually falling into the hands of illustrators, playwrights, and musicians. Six years in, the San Francisco Weekly ran a profile on the ill-tempered neighbors. Even The New Yorker got in on the act, publishing an illustration of Raymond and Peter. Merchandise followed: T-shirts, comics, screen-savers. Matador Records put out a CD.

And just as the words of Buddy Rich surfaced on “Seinfeld,” a few choice Shut Up, Little Man! bits ended up on Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants,” with the garishly colored undersea creatures shouting catchphrases originally uttered by a pair of furtively recorded San Francisco drunks: You are a nuisance to my community!; Cops, I need you! Documentary filmmaker Henry Rosenthal planned to make a film about the duo, only to lose heart when he met Haskett in person. “It’s much more complex than the tapes let on,” Rosenthal said. “It’s just so… sad.”

Sampled Shut Up, Little Man! sound bites were heard in the work of L7, John Zorn, and Devo. But Kelley Deal of the Breeders was a dissenter: “Raymond and Peter are sad,” she said. “The eavesdroppers who recorded it are sad. The label that released it is sad. The people who buy it are sad. And I’m sad for listening to it.”

The two men who couldn’t stop arguing died in the 1990s, but their words lived on: there was an indie film in 2002, called Shut Yer Dirty Little Mouth; and a documentary, Shut Up, Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, directed by Matthew Bate, which made the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

THE SOUTH PARK BRIDGE

A similarly crude piece of amateur comedy went viral with the bootleg phenomenon of the Queens, New York-based Jerky Boys. The duo was made up of crank callers Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, who taped their hostile phone stunts in 1989. “I was working as a bouncer in a couple of hip spots in the Lower East Side,” Ahmed says. “I used to hand out tape recordings of our pranks, and that’s how they spread.” The grapevine led to that champion of the crude and the juvenile, Howard Stern, who played the Jerky Boys on his radio program. Soon enough Elektra Records put its stamp on the first official Jerky Boys album, which went double platinum.

Throwing money at weak ideas is a Hollywood tradition. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Touchstone released Jerky Boys: The Movie, which flopped. More Jerky Boys albums followed. Once they were embraced by the mainstream, however, the two crank callers lost their friendship and, eventually, their popularity.

A piece of analog-era viral culture with a more lasting success is “South Park,” the Comedy Central staple created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The rude cartoon got its start as a one-off short. Pooling $750, Stone and Parker scored big with footage created from glue, construction paper, and a Super 8. The result, Jesus vs. Frosty, was a hit at a 1992 University of Colorado student film festival.

Today, looking at the prototype, with its inchoate incarnations of characters now culturally entrenched, you might feel like you’re viewing a YouTuber’s “South Park” knockoff. But it’s “South Park,” all right — just a version from an alternate, lo-fi universe.

It begins with four boys building a snowman and singing. When they place a top hat on the snowman’s head, Frosty comes to life — and slays one of the boys (“Oh my God! Frosty killed Kenny!”). The surviving kids run to Santa Claus for help, only to discover that he’s Frosty in disguise. Ah, but the Baby Jesus comes to the rescue, slicing the hat from the snowman’s head using a razor sharp halo. The end.

VHS copies of “Jesus vs. Frosty” flew around campus and made their way into the halls of 20th Century Fox. Fox executive Brian Graeden tracked down Parker and Stone and contracted them to make a “video Christmas card” for his industry pals. The resultant sequel, Jesus vs. Santa, enjoyed similar residual effect — but rather than becoming a hit among VHS-trading college kids, it went viral among Hollywood executives.

At the same time, these proto-South Park episodes were uploaded to pre-YouTube sharing sites and became the first viral videos in internet history. Meaning that Santa vs. Frosty and its sequel form the bridge that connects the grimy era of analog virality to the catchy Nyan Cat culture of today.

Kliph Nesteroff writes frequently — some might say obsessively — about forgotten show-business figures for WFMU’s blog. In addition, he runs the website Classic Television Showbiz, which the Guardian has praised as “a portal into a previously unseen world.”

What is the great New Jersey novel? Here is a list of candidates with varying degrees of suitability for the title. (I agree with the ultimate selection.) There are also a couple of decent collections of New Jersey short stories which those who are predisposed to enjoy that sort of thing might want to check out: Gary Krist’s The Garden State and Tom Perrotta’s Bad Haircut are the first two that spring to mind. But of course we’re all holding out for Dave Bry’s Jersey Mayhem: New and Selected Stories. Get to work, Bry!

Awww! This bear is hot too, just like us! You chill out, bear! Speaking of chilling out, here are some cool cubs for a warm day.

“The video was published in April, but only went viral now, amassing over 300,000 views over the past few days.” You know why? Because these cubs are ADORABLE. Also, snow. Me like.

“Reforming the Lords has given way to pondering whether the coalition can or will survive. My bet is that it will, but the Lib Dems have threatened to kibosh the government’s plans to redraw constituency boundaries and this would disadvantage the Conservatives at the next election.”
 — Wait, we can use “kibosh” as a stand-alone verb now? Or is that just Britspeak? Anyway, it’s a funny word, “kibosh.” Say it out loud. See, it feels weird! Also? No one is quite sure whence it came. Kibosh!

Is this the world’s narrowest street? Sure, why the hell not. BUT MAYBE NOT FOR LONG.

Summer 2012: “But in the last few years, camp food has increasingly become camp cuisine, transformed from an afterthought to a prominent place at the table. Camps no longer hire cooks; they hire chefs…. The locavore farm-to-table movement has also had an impact on the camps, many of which are in rural areas.”

Summer 2011: “For decades, parents in the Northeast who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents’ visiting day. Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps.”

Related: A History of the New York Times, Summer Camp and Rich People

Photo by Condor 36, via Shutterstock

By the time the new high-speed rail for the Northeast Corridor arrives we will all be too busy running from fires to notice. Or dead. Some of us will be dead.

“Whether Jimmy Choos, Pumas or Toms, shoes let us stand out as individuals while fitting into similarly shod social groups. The complex relationship between the social and the personal is why it’s so hard to tell much about a shoe’s owner from a photograph alone — and why shoes are so interesting. Their meanings require, and sometimes reveal, broader cultural context.”

by Amy Sohn

Once a month I get together with half a dozen moms from Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. We call ourselves Hookers, Sluts and Drug Addicts. They dubbed me a Hooker because I wear tight clothes and smile a lot. Sally, a stay-at-home mom of boys, is a Slut, because she’s always touching her body. The Drug Addict is a therapist who can drink a bottle of Cabernet in one sitting. (All names and some details have been changed so I don’t lose more friends than I already have.) Some work and some don’t. The working ones complain about their jobs and the non-working ones complain about their husbands. We go to different restaurants, drink too much and make fun of the Catholic at the table because she is pregnant with her fifth child. (She is a Slut.) We argue over which of each other’s husbands we would have sex with if we had to.

On my first Hookers, Sluts and Drug Addicts outing, to a new restaurant by the Gowanus Canal, I was excited to meet Sally. “She’s very sexy,” said my friend Cassie, a mother of three who recently had a tummy tuck. “Especially since her breast reduction. She flirts with everyone, male or female.”

Sally and I hit it off right away. She had short hair and heavy lids. It turned out we had met ten years ago at the pool room in the back of the Brooklyn Inn, bantering and competing for boys.

Sally went to the bathroom and I waited in front of the door for her to finish. When she came out, I said, “Lemme see your tits.”

“Why?”

“I heard you got a reduction.”

She lifted her shirt and bra and flashed me. “They look good,” I said. “What did the old ones look like?”

“They were too big for my little body. They were an F. After I weaned, I would roll over onto one of them in my sleep and it would wake me up and then I would realize it was part of my own body. Now I’m a D. I love them.” Then she started stroking them. A cook stuck his head out of the kitchen.

Later we decided to go to a bar in Boerum Hill. The restaurant owner, Dave, said he would drive us. He turned out to be a divorced dad. We all crammed into his SUV. There were car seats in the back seat and he threw one of them behind us. The other wouldn’t move so a small mom sat in it, scrunched.

As we were crossing the Gowanus Canal, Dave said, “I just want you to know that I would have sex with any one of you ladies tonight. Even the pregnant one.”

“Thank you,” we said. The difference between twenty-five and thirty-eight is that, at thirty-eight, when a strange man says he wants to have sex with you, you feel grateful.

No one took him up on it that night — at least not to my knowledge. Dave disappeared and two Hookers and a Slut stayed out till two, drinking gin and tonics and paying hipster boys five dollars for a cigarette. Everything about me was twenty-five except I had lost a cup size and wasn’t chafed.

When “Girls” hit this spring, I was shocked by how true the show rang to my life — not my old life as a post-collegiate single girl but my new one, as a married, monogamous, home-owning mother. My generation of moms isn’t getting shocking HPV news (we’re so old we’ve cleared it), or having anal sex with near-strangers, or smoking crack in Bushwick. But we’re masturbating excessively, cheating on good people, doing coke in newly price-inflated townhouses, and sexting compulsively — though rarely with our partners. Our children now school-aged, our marriages entering their second decade, we are avoiding the big questions — Should I quit my job? Have another child? Divorce? — by behaving like a bunch of crazy twentysomething hipsters. Call us the Regressives.

* * *

Why do moms in my generation regress, whether by drugging, cheating, or going out too late and too often? Because everything our children thrive on — stability, routine, lack of flux, love, well-paired parents — feels like death to those entrusted with their care. This is why they start drinking at wine o’clock, which is so dubbed not only because it coincides with whine o’clock but because it can begin at six p.m., or five, or even four. (Though the four o’clock mothers wind up in A.A.) I know a mom who drinks only on the weekends because she thinks it’s more responsible… but she starts with a mimosa at brunch on Saturday at eleven, and doesn’t stop until her Sunday night television shows are over.

My new novel, Motherland, is about five New York City parents who act out mid-life through adultery, marijuana or Grindr. The characters are inspired by my neighbors, who seek liberation not through consciousness-raising and EST the way their mothers did, but through Fifty Shades of Grey and body shots. They arrive home from girls’ nights at three a.m. on a weeknight and then complain about hangovers at school dropoff. (And this regression is not confined to upscale neighborhoods in New York City — I hear similar stories from friends in Los Feliz, Montclair and Rye.) In flux, jaded by parenthood, confused about work and life, mothers are bored. So we rebel, just like bored adolescents — except adolescents, at least, can say they are acting their age.

As the children age (and multiply), the moms are burdened by the responsibility — to work, hold onto their homes, watch over their kids’ social and academic lives. The boredom turns to terror. You can almost clock the moment it begins, past preschool but before kindergarten. The childbearing is over, the breastfeeding in the past, the sling donated to Housing Works. It’s the moment when a mom dresses as a Harajuku girl for Halloween, or there’s a full bar at a four-year-old’s birthday party, or two ladies step out of book group to smoke on the stoop. It’s blowjob gestures at cocktail parties followed by a-little-too hysterical laughter. It’s the mother who says, “Mommy needs an Advil because she stayed up too late last night.” It’s fortieth birthday parties at karaoke bars.

In the new version of rebellion, the men are supportive. “Go have fun!” says the husband to the wife trekking out to meet the gals. Moms in my circle go out much more often than the dads, who are too tired, too anti-social, or just want to stay home smoking pot. (Fortysomething parents frequently go out stag because someone is always at home watching the kids. This allows them to act if not quite single then single-ish.) The same Facebook moms who use kid photos as their profile pics post galleries of their binge drinking. Is the behavior really amoral? No. Does it cross a line? Rarely. But there is a wild, life-craving, narcissistic, oblivious madness to it that reminds me of Don Draper and pals in the mid-sixties. These women are the men their mothers divorced.

* * *

About a quarter of the married moms I know have cheated in some form. If anyone says, “I have a great marriage but it takes a lot of work” it means they’ve cheated.

Yes, there are Brooklyn parents who have actual intercourse with their spouses, but it’s usually because one of them is on Wellbutrin, or French. Ninety percent of the sex being had in brownstone Brooklyn is by French ex-pats, and you can’t count that because they all have lovers back in Paris and it makes them generous.

A month ago I went for drinks in Fort Greene with a mom friend. On her third Grüner, she said, “I cheated on my husband. Once. In the back of a minivan.”

“Who was the guy?”

“A coworker. We were on a business trip. It was really weird.”

“Did you go all the way?”

“No!”

“OK, I’ll hold up fingers to see what base you went to and you tell me when to stop.”

One? Two? Three? “Yes!” she cried. “Third! I went to third!”

“One way or both?”

“Both.” She said her husband had no idea. She didn’t feel guilty because it wasn’t actually sex.

As though to compensate for the intimacy of her revelation we soon turned to blander topics such as family size. She said she wasn’t having more children. “What do you use for protection?” I asked.

“Pullout,” she said. “Pullout and I’m forty-three.” She was using withdrawal as birth control. And she was calling it pullout.

You would think people with multiple children would be responsible about contraception because they understand the financial and emotional toll of childrearing. Instead they are as clueless and blasé as teens, teens who really don’t know any better. My circle of parents use withdrawal plus biological clock or substitute masturbation for sex — YouPorn, xHamster. Others use rhythm, the Pill, or hand jobs and blow jobs — the same methods we used in our twenties. In the 90s we did “everything but intercourse” because of AIDSphobia. Now we do it because of laziness.

As for condoms, no way. If a twentysomething guy on “Girls” can’t be bothered to use rubbers, why would a forty-year-old monogamous dad? (Exception made for the dad who bought Magnums from me at the Park Slope Food Coop while I desperately tried to focus on his baby bok choi.)

I have a divorced friend with three kids. Hot, tall, gymnastic. She and her husband weren’t sleeping in the same room when she got knocked up with the third. They split a bottle of wine and didn’t use a condom. A year later she was separated with a newborn.

The combination of irresponsible contraception and illegal drugs among Regressives is the reason New York is in a baby boom right now. Those couples you see, grimacing, with the two babies fifteen months apart? They were drunk.

What other drugs do Regressives choose? Nineties drugs like pot and cocaine. Plus benzos — Xanax and Ativan — which our doctors prescribe for the sleep disorders we all suffer from post-parenthood. Two dad friends I know go out once a month to a nightclub, sit at a table, swallow Xanax recreationally with beer, and make each other laugh.

One warm night recently, I went to a rooftop party in Cobble Hill hosted by a dad buddy, Ted, and his wife. They have a six-year-old son. Ted smokes pot every night and Jenny knows and doesn’t mind because it makes him more pleasant to be around. Ted and I get together every few months to eat lunch and toss around screenplay ideas. After I confessed to him on one lunch date that I hadn’t smoked pot in a few years, he gifted me with a big chunk in a Lucite box. My husband and I smoked it out of the cardboard part of a wire hanger while our daughter was at a sleepover. Then we made out and watched Seven Samurai.

Ted and Jenny’s roof deck turned out to be stunning, with patio furniture, heat lamps, and guard rails — unlike the tar roofs in Williamsburg I went to in the nineties where I worried someone would fall off. Parents drank champagne and mojitos, discussing public versus private, summer camp plans, Amis and Fonseca’s architect.

“How do you know Ted?” asked a scruffy guy in his forties, as Ted stood opposite me.

“He’s my drug dealer,” I said.

I waited for eyebrows to rise. “Mine, too,” he said.

Because of the full bar, complete with bartender (another perk of fortysomething parties) I drank too much good champagne and left on wobbly wedges at 9 p.m. There were no empty cabs on Smith Street because Smith Street is for rich people now, and after twenty minutes of unsuccessful hail attempts, I hopped on the G to Park Slope, eyeing the Williamsburg crowd half my age.

Another night I went to Milady’s to meet my friend, Dan, a married journalist who never goes out with his wife. He was sitting with a magazine editor named Gary, Gary’s fiancee Fiona, and a late-thirties guy named Adrian who said he worked for a video web site. Adrian was a Cobble Hill dad with a toddler-aged daughter. We gossiped about schools and then I asked Adrian, “You have any other kids?”

“Trying. We have this machine. You plug it into the wall and it tells you when to do it.”

After only a few minutes, everyone stood up and said they were going to Gary’s apartment on Thompson Street. It was the strangest thing. We were having a perfectly good time out at the bar but suddenly they wanted to leave.

There was a glass coffee table in Gary’s living room and as we sat down I noticed some fallen plaster on the glass. Then Dan took out a Metrocard and snorted a line of the plaster. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Dan said, and shrugged. Every other person at the table did a line including Adrian, the Cobble Hill dad. I pictured the cocaine traveling into his nostrils and blood stream and ejaculate, and on into the zygote. The kid was definitely going to be hyperactive.

Did the wife know he was out doing blow before he was coming home to bang her? Would she be horrified if she did or did she feel it was an appropriate stress response to the pressure to come on command?

After Gary took his turn, he said, “Raw!” and patted Fiona on the ass. Then they started talking about a journalist who had won an award. Fiona asked what I was working on and I said a novel. We got in a discussion about third person versus first person. “Has anyone written a novel in the second person?” Fiona asked.

“Bright Lights, Big City,” I said.

“’You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning,’” said Gary.

“You want some?” Adrian asked me, gesturing to the coke.

“No thanks,” I said. “On Friday nights we do a family bed. I can’t get through a night of co-sleeping while crashing from blow.”

“I totally get it,” he said.

* * *

If married parents sound like they are misbehaving, they are chaste in comparison to divorced parents, the biggest Regressives of all. The divorced regressed themselves right out of their marriages and now they’re playing the field. Nothing wrong with that, except they want to tell you all about it. Divorced mothers have the sex drive of fifteen-year-old boys. They go all the way on the first date, because they still have IUDs left inside from their marriages, and then they corner you at parties to ask advice about eHarmony.

“My new boyfriend’s Asian,” a rangy divorcee told me. “I’ve never fucked an Asian guy. Turned out he has a really big dick. Much bigger than my ex’s.” Then she went on about her ex-husband and his new, pretty girlfriend. I had to pretend to see someone across the room.

* * *

At a brownstone Brooklyn party in June, perimenopausal mothers with bangs and strappy dresses drank ridiculous cocktails and rocked out to Biz Markie and C+C Music Factory, raising their palms to the air. “There are a lot of single women here,” said a dad friend from Spain.

“They’re not single,” I said. “They’re just acting single.”

“Oh,” he said. I pointed to the husbands on the side, watching their wives and wincing.

“Psst,” a shaved-bald dad whispered to me. “We’re going to go outside and smoke some weed. You want to come?”

“I’m not smoking weed on the street in this ZIP code. My husband had to go to drunk school for an open container.”

“Your loss,” he said.

He went out to smoke it with another mom, and a dad who was always very funny in the playground. “Did you want to join them?” I asked the wife of Funny Dad.

“I’m breastfeeding,” she said.

“So?” I said. “It’s good for the baby.” She giggled and declined.

The stoners came back with smug grins and then talked about how good the pot was, like if they didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t quite as rebellious. I decided it was time to go home.

On my way out I saw a woman falling down the front stairs as her husband struggled to right her. Nothing changes, except you have to pay a sitter.

Amy Sohn is the author of the new novel Motherland

, out August 14 with Simon & Schuster, as well as Prospect Park West and two others. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Photo by S. Diddy.