NYC

Two Unrelated Morning Idiocies

Walking up Gold Street this morning, passing through the projects, I saw a backhoe slowly chugging up the street alongside me. This is not an unusual sight in the neighborhood, since there’s an insane amount of road work going on.

Except for two things: It was brand new, nearly pristine John Deere backhoe, the kind you’d see on a farm. And it was laden down with junk.

The “hoe” part of the backhoe was filled with an old TV, broken kids’ toys, and a smashed-up sub-IKEA particle board furniture. The junk was arranged carefully, trying to make the best use of the space available in the hoe. But this still struck me as an extremely inefficient use of top-notch construction equipment.

It was also an extremely inefficient use of the roadways. Gold Street is all torn up from road work, leaving only one lane in either direction. So there’s no hope of getting around a backhoe traveling 12 miles an hour.

The backhoe made a left on York Street just as I did, and I decided that I had to see where this thing was going. It stopped halfway down the block, again blocking traffic, and waited for cars in the opposite lane to clear. Then it hopped the curb and drove into a project building’s trash lot, where all the dumpsters are kept.

So whoever runs this particular project decided two things:

(1) A backhoe makes a better trash hauler than a pickup truck, or a van, or any other regular vehicle.
(2) The dumpsters at this particular building are insufficient for the needs of this particular junk. I must truck it two blocks away, as slowly as possible, to another identical set of dumpsters.

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

* * *

Shortly after this incident, I passed into the ritzier confines of Dumbo. I saw a gleaming red BMW with MD plates parked right underneath the Manhattan Bridge. I’ve driven to work many times, and I can tell you that you’ll see open parking spots like that about as often as you’ll see leprechauns. In fact, between the roadwork and the ridiculous alt-side restrictions, I usually wind up parking so far away from my office I may as well have walked from home. (This is how much I hate relying on the bus.)

So basically, this guy’s got everything in life working out just fine for him. Except that someone placed a banana peel on the car’s trunk.

This placement was not accidental, like someone was eating a banana and just tossed the peel casually, maybe hoping to start a silent film comedy cavalcade. The peel was at the exact center of the trunk, with the two halves splayed symmetrically.

I’m guessing someone saw the exact same thing I saw–brand new car, doctor’s plates, perfect free parking spot–and decided to throw some misfortune into his otherwise spotless life. Thank you, stranger, for making me smile.

NYC, Tuneage

Unfortunate Juxtoposition Theatre Presents…

While stuck in traffic, “Accidents Will Happen” popped up on my iPod via shuffle. I’m sure I’ve heard this song several thousand times, but not in quite a while. By rule, I am never in a good mood in the morning, but this immediately brightened my commute.

I got that warm feeling you get when you listen to something again for the first time since forever, and you remember how great it is. I thought about how it is exactly the right length. How haunting the outro is. How fantastic the lyrics are; not as overtly clever as in some of Mr. Costello’s songs, but simple and subtle in the best possible way. Lines like It’s damage that we do and never know/It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so.

And I thought about how there was a period when I listened to Armed Forces on a nigh-daily basis. When it was so much a part of my being that, like Jonathem Lethem once said about Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, “I might have wished to wear the album…in place of my head”. I thought about listening to the whole album start to finish, something I never do anymore with any album in this iPod age.

And as Elvis sang Accidents will happen…, an ambulance came screeching alongside my bus, sirens blaring, lights flashing. It hopped a curb in front of an auto parts store, then squeezed in between a phalanx of parked cars and a truck that completely ignored its pleas to get through.

Real accidents always overshadow metaphorical ones. I hit pause until the drama passed. But when I unpaused the song, it just didn’t feel the same. Sigh.

Baseball

The Mets Hate Free Enterprise

mets_hooky.jpgI can’t wait to see the Wallace Matthews piece about this bit of email:

The Mets obviously haven’t done enough to take taxpayers money with their horrible stadium. Now, they encourage workers to skip out on their jobs and line their pockets, too–thus depriving the city of thousands of valuable man-hours! For shame!

And to promote this shameful, anti-patriotic effort, they use Jose Reyes–the man whose lack of grit and hustle has single-handedly cost the Mets a playoff spot two years in a row! How long shall we allow the Mets and Reyes to corrupt the youth of America?! For double shame!

To be fair, Wally has a column in today’s Newsday where he sort-of compliments the Mets on their sweep of Pittsburgh. Back-handed praise is the only kind of praise he allows.

A potentially explosive collection of verbal irritants