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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

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.