Category Archives: NYC

NYC

Snow Madness on the Streets of New York!

nycsnow.jpgA city is really an organism. Though made up of millions of independent pieces, it acts and behaves as a collective, cohesive thing. What affects one urban dweller effects them all, because their mood and actions ripple outward. For instance, when the weather negatively impacts a place, that place, as a whole, goes a little nuts.

In New York, this typically happens in the summer, when the humidity is 110 percent and every corner smells like microwaved landfill. The heat pisses people off, and the inescapable nature of the situation turns that anger into mania, thus causing people to do crazy stuff like stab each other or think buying a cabin in the Catskills is a good idea.

For the first time, I see something similar happening in the winter. This particular winter has been so brutal–in terms of both temperatures and storms–that the entire city is gripped by a kind of madness you usually only see during a heatwave in August.

Maybe it’s from being cooped up inside far too much. Maybe it’s because the unmelted snow has narrowed the sidewalks, pushing everyone in close proximity to everyone else. Whatever the reason, everyone in New York is on a knife’s edge right now. You can feel it in the air. It’s like a subzero version of Do the Right Thing.

Just within the last week, I have been witness to two separate incidents of insane, maddening rudeness that stood out even against New York standards of selfishness and disregard, and which are usually seen in the brain-melting dog days of summer.

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NYC

Sights from My Blizzard-Induced Trek Home

  • blizzard.jpgA queue at my usual bus stop outside the M train, so long that it told me walking would be the surest way to get home before midnight. I have not seen a line that long since my last trip to Great Adventure, and until the MTA can make its buses more like Batman: The Ride, I refuse to wait on such a line for one.
  • Cars swirling and spinning their wheels on Fresh Pond Road, a major road in this part of Queens, which was only plowed in the most academic of senses. This was the route I needed to negotiate in order to get home.
  • Three young ladies walking in tandem across the entire length of the narrowed sidewalk, strolling very slowly, not a care in the world. I scaled a snowbank and almost body checked one of them just to get by.
  • A thugged-out guy carrying a very small dog under one arm. The dog was dressed in a Santa outfit, including hat.
  • 37 sidestreets completely untouched by any sort of plow, and which will presumably remain so for days into the future.
  • Clouds of filthy snow and disintegrated tires, materializing and dying almost as quickly. The air stung with the sour smell of burning rubber, from dozens of morons trying to get their cars onto the street in sheer defiance of all logic and reason.
  • A gym with exactly two people inside: the attendant, and one man using an elliptical machine. The slow business didn’t prevent the gym from pumping music onto the sidewalk via an exterior speaker. The song was “Boom Boom Pow.”
  • A seven-year-old girl who packed together a very bad snowball. It flew apart in frost shrapnel as she tossed it, at point blank range, into her mother’s face. The mother, completely defeated, could only respond with a weak “stop it.”
  • A delivery car for a Chinese restaurant, pulled up as close to a street corner as it could get. The driver eased himself to the passenger side of the front seat to hand over a bag of food. The recipient stretched as far as he could over an enormous snow bank between the street and the sidewalk, and just barely was able to retrieve his dinner. Amazingly, the car was able to spin away back into traffic without much trouble.
  • A crew of 15-year-old Polish guidos hanging outside a deli who gave me the stinkeye for getting too close to their turf. I gave it right back.
  • A car completely completely covered in snow from top to bottom, except for one tiny piece of its trunk. This revealed a bumper sticker that said THE GODDESS IS LOOSE.
  • 800 metric tons of frozen, smeared dog shit.
  • A man of Rex Ryan proportions trudging up a hill in a powder-blue Phillies hoodie. In this part of Queens, that means he is either very lost or very brave. Or perhaps someone who was banking on an Eagles win that evening to help him recover from a rough weekend with the bookie.
  • Not a hint of a whisper of a ghost of a bus.
  • My searing back pain getting worse with each snow-bumped trudge. Maybe you think I couldn’t see this, but trust me, this was the kind of pain you can see, like when you press your hands into your eyes and little stars appear in front of your eyes. I felt perfectly fine after digging out my building, if a little sore, but this lengthy stomp along along a few miles of barely shoveled sidewalk completely destroyed my fragile lower spine.
  • A man guiding his friend’s car, completely unnecessarily, into a snow-demarcated parking space another car had just vacated. He made the back-up motion with his hands until the car was in place, then did a “yes!” fist pump like he’d just sunk a game-winning three-pointer.
  • Some mook walking down the same side of the tiny sidewalk as me, who I literally had to stare down in order to claim my share of the pavement.
  • The bus stop where I normally get off on my way home, three miles from where I started, with its own endless queue of people waiting for their ride. I resisted the temptation to yell DON’T BOTHER. I can’t decide if this restraint was kind or cruel.
  • An exhaustion-induced vision of me choking Mayor Bloomberg to death and pissing on his corpse.
NYC

Mayor Bloomberg: Snowstorm Harms NYC’s Fine-Based Economy

bloomberg.jpgThis snowstorm has been a disaster for New York City. Maybe you see Midtown blanketed with white, but I see it covered in tons of green, blown away in the driving winter winds. This blizzard has put a serious cramp in my city’s fine-based economy.

Right now, tons of cars are parked illegally, and there’s nothing I can do about it! I’m haunted by the vision of so many vehicles sitting on the wrong part of the street for alternate-side parking, or positioned slightly too close to hydrants. And all those poor little expired meters, barely sticking their heads above the snowdrifts!

Not to mention all the cars literally stuck in the middle of the street, stranded by the snow. Oh, how I’d love to tow them to remote, expensive city-owned lots! But there’s so much snow on the ground, we can’t even get to the outer boroughs (whose names escape me right now).

And this is the prime fining season, too! So many people driving in from out of town, unfamiliar with our arcane and ever-shifting traffic laws. So many residents double-parking for three minutes to drop something off at an elderly relative’s house. 

In case you’re wondering when we’re going to plow your neighborhood, please know that we’re working on it. First priority is Times Square, then Wall Street, then the area immediately around Zabar’s. Everything else in Manhattan will be plowed on a first-come, first-serve basis.

As for the outer boroughs, those will be plowed as soon as we can work out a way to fine each resident for the service. Right now we’re working on the same model we’ll use for charging car accident victims for getting rescued by EMTs. Maybe you think these fines haven’t gone in place yet. Well, they have. They were approved by bipartisan panels with memberships chosen completely by me at 3 in the morning on Christmas Eve.

Considering road conditions, I’ve decided to be magnanimous. Alternate side parking rules will be suspended on a rolling basis. The rules will not be in effect in three-hour sets for named streets on a reverse alphabetical order basis, skipping every other letter for obvious reasons. Numbered streets will get the same treatment based on a Fibonacci sequence. Further details can be found at geocities.com/NewYurk/sno/~parkedrules.htm

Until we can plow the streets, we hope residents will assist us to the best of their abilities by digging out their cars so we can see if you have expired inspection stickers or broken rear view mirrors. And it’d be great if you could remove enough snow from the windshield so a traffic cop can slip an orange ticket under your wipers.