fuelgrannie

Shake off your black veil and grab that baby bottle, kids: we have a funeral to attend.

Fuelgrannie is dead.

Ok, maybe not in real life, but I have croaked on Twitter which just might be better than passing away in real life, which Twitter isn’t, amirite?

Ding dong that witch is dead: RIP to a real one.

Emilia Defraudin apparently has died from joy.

Rebel with Good Cause Aaron Carr is selling #freefuelgrannie t-shirts.

Ceiling-gazer Meeeeelar puts me in a league of my own: save a seat in the front row for him, pweeeese.

Ben Wetz, however, is muting both the fuelgrannie funeral and any of its related keywords: SpiderYim is already over this particular trip to six feet under.

But Ben Wetz is amplifying me as he tweets about muting me.

Which presents the conundrum of the yimby victory lap: as they all howl for their opponents to just take the L, yimbys draw almost too much attention, sometimes even inadvertently positive, to their enemies, while also revealing their own bloodthirst for overkill.

Dresden, anyone?

The gloating may go over well in their limited bubble, but even a dead person like me can see the optics and downside of such off-putting bragging. The victory lap can bring its own backlash.

Yimby, as a movement, remains unpopular in New York City: it may be politically protected; it may garner obvious puff pieces from big press; but it struggles to attract much grassroots traction as many New Yorkers remain wary of a group of arrogant, condescending eye-rollers, who publicly infer to private jokes while struggling to connect with anyone outside their tight, mocking clique.

Housing is tapas to them: they move every year, tasting new apartments, trying on new neighborhoods, a living game of SimCity which can only be played by individuals making enough disposable income to crib-hop. Aka, not how the other 70% of us NYCers live.

And I have been calling out that inability to connect for years now: yimby doesn’t partner well; they don’t get their boots on the ground in any meaningful way, sticking mostly to their own closed meetings and whenever they do dare to show up for live, in-person public engagement with other humans, they are sorely outnumbered and jeered.

Because New York City can always smell insincere opportunism: we shudder at fake smiles; we know a scam from ten blocks away; we’re not dumb. We know when we are being excluded and when we are being played: a braggart’s pyrrhic victory does not win us over.

But whaddo I know? I’m dead.

So dance it up with my casket on your narrow shoulders, boys: no fuelgrannie in your backyard.

I’ll be here instead: in real life.