Tag Archives: sad people

NYC

The 24,000th Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

This past weekend, our neighborhood had a street fair. The Wife and I usually refer to street fairs as Tube Sock Festivals, because unless they have a specific purpose/theme, they consist of booth after booth of people selling tube socks. Or little fridge magnets shaped like food. Or badly woven wall tapestries dedicated to Tupac. Nothing but dumb, cheap junk.

Still, The Baby hadn’t been out of the house all day. Two-year-olds are a lot like dogs–you need to bring them outside every few hours or they will make you pay for it. (Although with a kid, peeing on the carpet is the least of your worries.) So we decided to take a stroll to the street fair and check out the latest in roasted corn technology.

Another thing street fairs have a lot of: cheap, dumb rides. Usually the inflatable kind, where little kids can jump up and down on plastic mattresses manned by 14 year olds who don’t look like the best guardians of children’s safety.

I brought The Baby to one of the Inflatable Ball Pits of Doom, and asked the kid in charge where to buy the tickets that granted her admission. I swear this kid didn’t speak English. I don’t mean he was foreign; I mean I don’t think he was smart enough to ‘get’ speech. Like he crawled out of the woods, the member of some obscure tribe as yet undiscovered by anthropologists, who only communicate in grunts, gestures, and punching.

But before we got to the Inflatable Death Traps, I saw another quote-unquote ride that immediately filled me with sadness. I have a hard time recalling the scene now. I remember each individual detail, but all together they don’t add up to a sane picture. Still, here it is.

The ride was literally on the back of a truck. Not a flatbed truck, but a pickup truck, painted fire engine red. The paint lacked any sort of sheen, and its dullness added to this scene’s pathetic feeling. Contained in the truck’s bed was a pirate ship-type ride

pirateship.jpgI’m sure you’ve seen rides like this at fairs or in a carnival or down the shore (like this example to your right). They’re boat-shaped or large semicircles with rows of seats on each side of a pivot that rocks the ride from one side to the other. Basically, it’s a really big swing. But in the version you normally see, the ride is big enough to pitch you 20-30 feet in the air and pin you to your seat with G forces.

The mini-version I saw was not big enough to do this. Not even close. At best, the riders got six to seven feet above the truck bed. Even that estimate might be generous. With so little room to work with, the ride could only manage tiny little arcs, like it was trying back into a very tight parking spot.

Even crazier: this ride was manned by three people. One older gentleman stood the back of the bed, arms folded, not doing much of anything. Another attendant, who looked all of 15 years old, stood in the exact middle of the ride, providing some much needed ballast. A third attendant stood opposite him, just outside the ride.

At first, it looked as if this third attendant was grasping a few crucial beams that held the swing to the pivot. Like he was literally holding the ride together. Or worse, as if he was the guy moving the ride back and forth. I noted this to The Wife and we chuckled, because of course that was absurd.

But as we got closer, we saw to our horror that this third man was, in fact, the power behind the ride. He was swinging it back and forth, all for the entertainment of five or six bored-looking kids (the ride couldn’t possibly hold any more). We stifled our laughs right away and moved past the ride as fast we could, ashamed.

What struck me about this scene was that no one in it looked happy. In my own mental backstory, the three attendants represented three generations of a carnival ride business. The oldest man wanted to retire, but the economy and his pride wouldn’t let him. The youngest just wanted to hang out with his friends and resented working with his family for the summer. And the man in the middle never wanted to be in this business in the first place, but the time to quit came and went a long time ago.

And the kids on the ride looked just as unhappy. It reminded me of when I was a kid, and my dad would bring home some knockoff toy he bought from a table in the Hoboken train station. Like a Transfirmer, or a handheld video game called Pacri-Man (seriously). I would feel bad for dad, for not knowing the difference between the real thing and a cheap knockoff. I would feel bad for the poor slobs in Nowhereistan putting this garbage together. But I would mostly feel bad for me, for having to pretend like I liked this thing and play with it.

Mind you, I looked at this scene for about 20 seconds tops. And in those 20 seconds, I absorbed a Chekhov play’s amount of sadness.

NYC

This Precinct Serves the Shame District

precinct.jpgNo one is happy at a police station. No one wants to be there, not even the cops. And all precinct headquarters (in NYC, anyway) were built at the height of the Stalinist Municipal Building movement, designed by the architecture firm of Doom & Hopelessness, making liberal use of cinder blocks, warped wood, and muffled screams.

To add to this aesthetic austerity, police stations make poor interior design decisions. Like painting dirty walls rather than cleaning them. Or leaving up a corkboard full of outdated, mimeographed notices. Or choosing cracked orange plastic chairs for the waiting area that must have been discarded from the saddest pizzeria ever.

My police station experiences have been maddening, but ultimately pain free. Then again, I’m a white male age 18 to 35, so police stations don’t evoke the fear in me that they do in some people. Yesterday, I went to the local precinct to pick up a stolen vehicle report I need for DMV/insurance purposes. I was reminded that it sucks getting your car stolen, then waiting an hour to pick up a report that takes five minutes to complete, but some things suck a lot more.

When I arrived, some kid was trying to clear up some hassle involving a vehicle-related summons/ticket. I couldn’t quite understand what was his deal was, but I got the impression that his dad was a cop–the other cops addressed him by his first name, and had no problem with him going behind The Big Desk to explain himself. I also got the impression that he was trying to take care of this matter ASAP and obviate a severe ass-whipping from said father.

After him, a young lady filed a complaint about some creep who’d been following her in his car. She knew the guy from the neighborhood, but didn’t really know him or talk to him ever. Didn’t sound like she’d been threatened per se, but she felt threatened and thought it could get worse from there.

This was about all I could hear (without trying) about this case, and pretty much all I wanted to hear.

I thought another man was next, a well-dressed Asian gentleman who looked to be in his 50s, but he said he was still waiting for his paperwork. So it was my turn. But when I entered the clerk area, he then came up to the little saloon door that separated it from the waiting room to inquire about his paperwork. There was a mirror directly across the room from him, and I could see his head barely stick over the top of the door, which made him look sad and ridiculous.

As soon as the clerk saw the man, she sighed. “I told you, I can’t take your report, you’re wasting your time!”

The man insisted, very calmly, “But the DA told me I had to come here…”

The clerk cut him off. “You can say that all night, but if you don’t got no paperwork from the DA, I can’t take your report.”

The man sat down, but returned five minutes later, looking like a scolded puppy in a gray suit. The clerk tried to deflect him again, and he was just as insistent in his stoic way.

I barely understood the gist of their back and forth. But apparently the man had been evicted, wrongly, in his opinion. So he needed some kind of report to take legal action, I think. But without some sort of paperwork from the DA who worked his case, he could not file that report. Or something. It was all very Kafka-esque and bureaucratic sounding.

The clerk had no intention of taking his report unless he returned with the proper paperwork. This hadn’t deterred the man for waiting for three hours (according to the clerk), until finally, during my visit to the clerk’s room, he was sufficiently convinced to go home and get the paperwork. Or come back the next day and try to wear down the clerk with zen fortitude.

So all things considered, I’m okay with waiting an hour for paperwork, then sitting through a clerk’s weird phone conversation with an unnamed relative. Anything to get out of there.