The Horror That Is The 7 Train

Speaking in 1999, Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker said the following about New York City:

“Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing...”

Saturday Night Live’s Colin Quinn, doing the weekly news spot, said this about Rocker: “He might be a bigot, but he’s definitely been on the 7 train.”

Despite all the romantic notions you may have in your head about New York, there are some traditional New York experiences that are never pleasant no matter how much you romanticize them. Being mugged is never fun; neither is stepping in dog shit or having to smell a homeless person.

Another old New York tradition that is no fun is the 7 train. The 7 train is a human cattle car of endless misery and inconvenience. It perfectly combines all the incompetence of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority with the rancid overpopulation of our city that makes New York the cultural calling card of the dying American empire. 

I live in Flushing, Queens and work in lower Manhattan. I have an hour-and-15-minute commute each way when things go well, but things rarely go well. I take a bus to downtown Main Street Flushing, which has a crowd density similar to that of Times Square, and board a 7 train that takes me to Grand Central, where I take either the 4 or 5 train (also no joy) to the Bowling Green station near where I work.

Today I managed to get down the overcrowded stairs to the train platform only to miss the closing doors of a not-very-crowded 7 train by seconds. The next express train arrived soon but sat on the platform for 10 minutes and didn’t leave the station until it was wall-to-wall people.

Sometimes the 7 train likes to quit on you and dump all of its passengers out a random stop. “This train is out of service! No passengers!” the conductor will announce. Sometimes the express 7 train decides to go local, sometimes without telling its passengers until they’re at a stop they didn’t plan on making. On the weekends, the 7 train doesn’t run any express trains at all and often will have large service gaps that will leave its passengers scrambling to shuttle busses or trying to find alternate trains to take.

In September, when the U.S. Open is happening at the U.S. Tennis Center, the 7 train is flooded with tennis fans who are clueless as to where they are going and completely unschooled in subway etiquette. Sometimes a perfect storm of passenger clusterfuck will happen and you’ll have Mets fans and U.S. Open fans cramming the same trains heading to the Willets Point station.

The 7 train will often stop service entirely or delay service torturously or decided it doesn’t want to run express trains at the height of rush hour. Often the reason the MTA gives passengers for this is “signal problems.” One winter I asked an MTA worker on the platform why express service was abruptly canceled and he answered, “It’s cold outside, sir.”

I don’t bother trying to get a seat on the 7 train. Those are the dominion of sharp-elbowed Asian women who push their way onto the trains before the unfortunate souls who have to commute to Flushing can exit. I actually prefer to stand. I’ll actually have more room standing and the ride isn’t that long. Besides, I sit on my ass for eight hours at work. I usually try to position myself directly between two car doors in the center of the car, where the crush of passengers will be slightly less.

It is often standing-room only before the trains leave its first stop, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to cram themselves on to the train at later stops.

The 7 train is one of the oldest lines in the city, so its rails are close together and the cars that fit on the tracks are narrow and without as much room as other trains. It is also the only subway serving some of the most densely populated parts of the city and it terminates (for now) in Times Square.

And the 7 train is about to get worse. The geniuses who run our transit system decided it would be a good idea to cram 15 pounds of ham into this 5-pound bag instead of 10, so the 7 line is being expanded all the way to 34^th Street and 11^th Avenue. This means more crowding on a subway line that can barely handle what its current ridership. Joy.

There are some upsides to the 7 train. Most of it is above ground, so you can see some beautiful views of Queens and Manhattan that you won’t see from any other train line. Also, while it is regularly packed to the gills, most of the riders are working New Yorkers who are not there to cause problems; you don’t have the thug element of the A train or the hipster abominations of the L line. Because the trains are so crowded all the time, you have fewer homeless and crazies. I have never seen a “Showtime!” subway dance troupe try to ply their obnoxious trade on the 7 train.

For all its faults, the 7 line has stood the test of time, and if overcrowding doesn’t bring it crumbling to the ground this year, someone will be bitching and moaning about it 100 years from now. 

The Myth of Male Feminism

It’s time for the few men who call themselves feminists to stop.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support the rights of women. It means the feminist label isn’t meant for us. Asking a man to call himself a feminist is like asking a woman to wear an athletic cup. It’s just not meant to be.

Furthermore, the men who are claiming to be feminists are either acting out of fear of being labeled sexist or are trying to get laid. Either way they are full of shit.

I think you’d find it hard to paint me as a woman-hating ogre. I have a wife and two daughters and my last three bosses at work have been women. I have no problem working with women and I would fight to the death to make sure my baby girls are treated fairly.

But feminism as practiced today demands an illogical accounting of the genders in the world and assumes what is dictated by nature is actually the result of some patriarchal conspiracy. And it assumes men and women are equal in all things, which is false. If men and women were equal in all things, I’d be able to breastfeed my two girls, and I can’t.

The adoption of the tem “feminist” by men is by design awkward and one-sided. It’s a label not meant for men to ever use and asking men to identify as such belies the supposed egalitarian intent of the feminist movement as it exists today. We are told feminism means treating men and women equally. Women who believe in treating men and women equally don’t call themselves “masculists.” That would be ridiculous. And so are men who call themselves feminists.

We have to acknowledge that there are differences between the genders that will dictate how each is treated in society. That’s not sexism, that’s reality.

If I were to walk into a women’s restroom, the women in there would not welcome me as an equal being. They would tell me in no uncertain terms that I was in the wrong place. (Although now the idea of “gender neutral bathrooms” are supposed to be catching on. It may be a trend on some college campuses, but females will put a stop to that quickly if it ever picks up steam in the real world).

Treating men and women equally under the law might make sense to a certain degree, but then again, the law will run face-first into scientific reality. Should I be entitled to the same amount of parental leave as my wife? No. Women can feed babies with their own bodies. Men can only do that if they have vampire children. There are legitimate functions in society where gender differences have to be acknowledged in some way and this has often run afoul of the contemporary feminist movement.

Feminism as practiced today has shed its heritage of fighting for suffrage and has instead joined the tired fray of identity politics.  What this needless war between the sexes has given us is a certain segment of the female population who mistake rudeness for assertiveness and then pull the gender card when they get called on it. It’s also produced a large number of men who are afraid to be called sexist or else have a confused notion of what women want. In reality, women want strong men.

The men who identify as feminists are a parade of either self-emasculating depressives or fast-talking pickup artists.

Believe me, the men who are playing the feminist card are trying to get laid. For the most part it won’t work, and the men who tout themselves as male feminists do so because they are in some way shy or awkward around women and they think that perhaps appearing in this activist posture will get them some positive attention from women. That is mostly doomed to failure because men and women don’t choose their mates by their political stances. Even the most outwardly feminist straight woman still wants a man with a level of self-confidence that would often preclude him adopting the feminist label.

But the men who call themselves feminists and are successful with women treat those women like dog shit. I have had acquaintances who were adamant about declaring their feminist politics publicly but then spoke in the most vulgar terms about their conquests of women when there were no women present.

One way or another, all male feminists are frauds. I will gladly fight for the rights of women. But I can’t be a feminist, because I am a man. 

Head to the New York City Woods

Summer is a traditional time to go to the beach and be near the water, and New York City has 14 miles of public beaches where you can contract skin cancer while being eaten alive by horse flies. I never understood why people would want to go to a sunny place and let the sun burn them during the hottest time of the year.

But believe it or not, New York City also has woods and you would do well to spend some time in the shade this summer. There’s something immensely satisfying about going for a walk in the woods and knowing you are still within the five boroughs of New York City.

For more than 10 years I lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. I was lucky enough to live right across one of the wooded sections of Inwood Hill Park, which contains the last piece of natural forest in Manhattan as well as Manhattan’s last surviving salt marsh. It is also the highest natural point of elevation in the city.

I moved into Inwood on a Saturday in the summer and the following Monday went on a jog in the park before going to work. Not familiar with the park and its paths yet, I became lost. I couldn’t believe it that I was lost in the woods in Manhattan, but I was. I eventually found my way home and wasn’t too late to work, but Inwood Hill Park remains a treasure with lots wooded paths to walk. Even on weekends in the spring and summer when the park is typically crowded, you can find some solitude in the woods.

Be careful though, there are no shortage of shady characters who know this as well, and while I was living in Inwood a young Julliard student named Sarah Fox was murdered in a wooded part of the park one afternoon while she was jogging.

Inwood Hill Park may be one of the best and most overlooked wooded parks in the city but it’s not the only place to cool off in the shade.

Now that I am in Queens, I live not far from several parks that have real woods and wooded trails.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided we would go to Alley Pond Park. My wife, who grew up in Queens, knew it as a place high school students would go to drink alcohol under the cover of darkness. The park is the second largest public park in Queens (Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which doesn’t have dense woodlands, is the largest).

Alley Pond Park would be difficult to reach via public transportation as it is not near any subway lines; you’d have to take the bus if you don’t have a car or can’t walk or bike there. We found a parking space in a small parking lot that looks like it overflows during busy times. We put our twin daughters in a jogging stroller and managed to navigate it through much of the wooded paths in the park. Of course, being in New York City, the paths in the park were sometimes paved and sometimes led to steep staircases that we dared not traverse with a stroller, but we were always able to turn around and find another suitable path that would let us enjoy the woods a little more.

We saw lots of birds and even a rabbit. There were plenty of mosquitoes as we got near swamp areas of the park. We came across other strollers in the woods but like Inwood Hill Park, one can achieve a certain solitude in the woods even on days that the park is crowded.

No matter what borough you reside in, there is no shortage of wooded parks in New York. It will be cooler and less crowded in the shade. 

The Luxury View at Yankee Stadium

I entered a haiku writing contest and was judged one of three winners. The haiku had to be about the World Cup.

Here is my winning haiku:

The American Way

We are new at this

Chant U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

But don’t know the rules

I am originally from The Bronx and I was raised a Yankee fan. My father went to high school not far from Yankee Stadium and I stood by the team even when they had the worst record in baseball. I quit watching the 1996 World Series after the Bronx Bombers dropped the first two games to the Atlanta Braves. They won the next four games and began their late 1990s dynasty.

I had been to the new Yankee Stadium only twice before. Once for a game and another time for a Big 4 concert. The new stadium had not impressed me. From the cheap seats you could not see the entire field (Stadium Building 101: one must be able to see the entire field of play from every seat. They had the technology to do this in 1923). From where I was a few years ago at a game, I couldn’t see all the way to the right field wall even when I stood up.

There are numerous other reasons to hate the new Yankee Stadium. The upper deck is two decks, there’s a moat keeping people from getting close to the field unless they have expensive tickets. The Yankees, one of the richest sports franchises in the world, got a sweetheart deal from a broke city to build a luxury stadium on city park land. And it’s a leaky concrete slab with no soul.

So the chance to experience how the well-to-do take in a baseball game was something I wasn’t going to pass up. I would likely not have the chance to take in a baseball game from such a seat of luxury again. I made sure I could make the game and gladly accepted my prize.

I got to the stadium more than an hour before game time and met an attorney from the firm that hosted the contest. We chatted until the other two prize winners arrived. One was a media attorney and the other was a corporate restructuring specialist.

Once we were all there we entered the stadium through the special ‘Legends Suites’ entrance. We got special wristbands and were shown to a very nice restaurant area where waiters brought drinks to your table and there were several food stations for all-you-can-eat food. There was a special guest chef serving his take on a lobster roll (they were on small toasted hamburger buns and had a plastic Yankees flag in them). I got an obscene amount of food, even enjoying a big plate of sushi. I couldn’t finish my dessert. Overhead, TVs broadcast the pregame show, though one large row of televisions was broadcasting the current World Cup game (of the U.S. losing to Belgium). All the food and drink was free unless you wanted alcohol. Towards the exits to the seating area, there was a wall of shelves with baskets of candies and other snacks for the taking.

We got to our seats, which were amazing. We were the second row behind home plate. My family and friends saw me on television. I got to see the game from a perspective I never have before and I could see the entire field.

Baseball great Bill Veeck once said that a fan’s knowledge of the game is usually inversely proportional to the price of their ticket. My few visits to the box seats at Yankee Stadium have shown this to be accurate. I’m sure there are some knowledgeable baseball people among the well-off denizens of the luxury sections, but they would probably get their asses handed to them in sports trivia by your average Bleacher Creature with a bad hangover.

Of all the talk overheard among the other luxury seat occupants, there was a lot of talk about business and vacations and other facets of life, but there was not a lot of talk about baseball. There was only one person nearby who was acting like a real baseball fan, yelling criticisms at the home plate umpire with bellowing gruff wit, and he was looked upon askance by people sitting around him.

A group of four women arrived late and sat in front of us. The ushers seemed to know them, or know at least one of the women, an attractive blonde. One of them, the one sitting directly in front of me, appeared to be some kind of model. She was very young and unusually tall and thin. I saw others looking over at the group so one or more of them may have been celebrities. The blonde that the ushers seemed to know was friendly and told me where I could find complimentary hot dogs in the luxury dining area. While I had feasted on high-quality seafood, the thought of not having a hot dog or two at a baseball game was sacrilege.

These supermodel women actually tried to get the rest of our section into the spirit of the game and stood up at the very end. It was two outs and two strikes with the tying run on base for the Yankees. This is a traditionally a time when the crowd stands to applaud to help rally the team. The supermodels stood up and I stood with them (I also would not have been able to see the game otherwise). An usher came along and told us to sit down.

One of the more depressing aspects of following the Yankees in recent years was the press decrying the “aging” Yankee lineup, made of players who are my age and younger.

Shortstop Derek Jeter, the captain of the Yankee team and a fan favorite for a long time, is retiring after this season and is considered over the hill by many sports standards. He’s a year younger than I am.

While I was at the game, I got to see Jeter tie Lou Gehrig’s record for most doubles hit by a Yankee. I also got to see a great play by center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury, who is now my new favorite Yankee player. Ellsbury was caught in a rundown between first and second base, and let himself get hit by the ball—when a player is hit by the ball during play he automatically advances to the next base—turning what looked like a sure out into a stolen base.

Derek Jeter looked over in my direction several times during the game. I’m guessing someone told him about my awesome haiku and he was hoping I’d stick around to give him an autograph after the game. But because I left as soon as the game ended he probably had to make due with hanging out with the supermodels in the first row.

The game itself didn’t go like I wanted. The Yankees lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 2-1. Continuing on the theme of luxury, I treated myself to a cab ride home, enjoying the sight of the New York skyline at night capped off a nice evening. 

The Central Park Five Are Probably Guilty and Will Soon Be Rich

This past week, New York City’s Comptroller approved a settlement reportedly totaling $41 million to members of the “Central Park Five.”

The five men were convicted in 1990 of the brutal rape and bludgeoning of a woman jogging in Central Park in April of 1989. No one who was living in New York at the time could ever forget it. The jogger was so badly beaten that a friend had to identify her by a ring she was wearing on her finger. There was no telling how many people took part in the assault. The five who were convicted were part of a mob that numbered in the dozens.

Four of the five had confessed, and videos of their confessions were shows on the news. They renounced their confessions, claiming they were coerced, and went to trial.

Because several of the accused were juveniles, there was no way they would serve enough time in jail. They were somehow acquitted of attempted murder. They were convicted of several crimes committed that night, including the rape and assaults on other people in the park, and were sent to prison.

Years later, a serial rapist named Matias Reyes claimed that he had attacked the jogger that night and had acted alone. DNA evidence showed him to be guilty. The Manhattan District Attorney asked that the convictions of the Central Park Five be vacated as a result.

Here’s the first big problem with the confession of the alleged lone rapist Reyes: his tale of being the only attacker goes against the medical evidence that indicates the Central Park Jogger was attacked by multiple people. Part of this evidence includes bruising on both legs of the victim indicating she was held down by more than one person and cuts from a blade (Reyes said he only hit her with a rock and tree branch).

After the verdicts were vacated, the New York City Police Department published a detailed examination of the case, the Armstrong Report, which details evidence beyond the confessions that indicate that the defendants were involved in the assault. This includes statements some of the defendants made to police outside of the interrogation, things they said to family members, and details of the crime some of them provided that were not known to police at the time (for example, the NYPD did not know what property had been taken from the victim but two of the five separately described her Walkman being stolen).

The five sued the City and were helped along by filmmaker Ken Burns, who declared them “exonerated” despite the significant evidence of their guilt and made the documentary “The Central Park Five.”

The Burns documentary is an interesting examination of the case, but it is very one-sided and contains glaring omissions.  

Fans of the Burns film are buying into a narrative that lets them feel righteous indignation at a supposed injustice, but the evidence in the case does not gel with the idea the Central Park Five are victims of injustice at all.

The documentary presents its case without any of the skepticism required. It assumes that self-proclaimed lone rapist Matias Reyes is some kind of born-again angel for confessing to a crime (after the statute of limitations had expired, by the way), even though his story is full of holes.

Part of the reason that there is a belief in the innocence of the Central Park Five is what is known as the “CSI effect.” People believe that there is always going to be a mountain of DNA evidence with every case, though there often isn’t. Keep in mind also that the use of DNA collection and examination was in its early stages in 1989. Yes, DNA evidence proves Matias Reyes raped the Central Park Jogger; the evidence shows he was not alone in doing so.

But the public wants to buy into the popular story. Earnest and well-meaning New Yorkers are smitten with Ken Burns’ films and want to believe that the violent men about to become millionaires deserve it and are getting some measure of justice. They are very wrong.

Bum Coin Mystery Still Unsolved

A little more than two years ago I found a strange object in downtown Manhattan and I have been puzzled by it and would like to learn its origins. I am reopening the case as I remain curious as to its origins.

           

I spotted it as I walked past Delmonico’s restaurant. I noticed what appeared to be an odd coin sitting on the edge of the landing.

The coin is roughly the size of a quarter and appears to be plaster. It resembles a quarter that has been plastered over. On one side reads “Give Money,” and the other side reads, “To Bums.” Underneath that is the cryptic “bw 12.”  Should I take that to mean that this was created by an artist with the initials B.W. in 2012?

Is this perhaps a coin created by a mysterious artist? Has some anonymous artists been handing out coins with the insistence that recipients leave one in a public place? Have I found such a coin?

When first mentioning this find a few years ago, a few people posted comments that they found these coins elsewhere in downtown Manhattan. None of the others who found them had any clue where they came from.

If you have any clue as to the origins of this coin, please let me know. Until someone tells me otherwise, I’m going to assume it’s a priceless Banksy work that will be worth millions of dollars when I am ready to sell it to a fancy art collector

But whether it’s the work of a well-known artists or not, it’s anonymous public art that is looking to both entertain and provoke thought. Someone took the effort to make something solely for the purpose of provoking a change in the general public as well as the free enjoyment of the work itself.

Would it be a violation of the aesthetic to reveal the artist’s name if I learned it? If the artist contacts me first and lets me know who they are, I would honor their request to remain anonymous.

And while I very much appreciate finding this piece of art, I have not heeded the strange coin’s advice. Giving money to bums is a bad idea. Most of them will spend the money on drugs and alcohol and handing over your money will only encourage them to stay bums. There are plenty of legitimate homeless charities you can give to if you want to help the homeless and destitute. They should know that our streets and subways are a not place of bounty and willing donors. 

I promise to keep the coin as an interesting work of art, and will only sell it if it is given a ridiculously high valuation or I become poor and desperate to sell anything of value. Until then, the coin stays with me and the bums will not get it. 

Banish Yourself to Punk Island

This Saturday is the Punk Island 2014 festival in New York City. It will feature almost 100 bands on seven stages all for FREE on Staten Island.

I have had the good fortune to have been a fan of punk rock music since I first heard ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ in the eighth grade. And 10 years ago I decided I would take a stab at being in a punk band of my own and started a band called Blackout Shoppers.

Full disclosure: our band is playing Punk Island and has played the festival several times, and we are friends with several of the principal organizers. But this isn’t world of laminated back stage passes and cushy green rooms. In the world of DIY punk rock music, the back scratching and mutual admiration dick sucking doesn’t earn you big rock and roll money; it maybe gets you a space on a floor to sleep on, and maybe a free beer.

The Punk Island festival for the first several years of its life was held on Governor’s Island. Governor’s Island is an excellent place to visit. A former Army base, airfield and Coast Guard base, Governor’s Island boasts lots of great historic sites and rarely-seen views of Manhattan and industrial waterfront Brooklyn.

Governor’s Island became off limits in the wake of the damage done by Superstorm Sandy and more recent park development by the city.

So last year, Punk Island moved to Staten Island. It takes place on a small strip of land and pier right near the Staten Island Ferry terminal. It was a long, hot day but it was well run and everyone had a good time. It wouldn’t be a punk show without a few fights and problems. But last year only one person went to the hospital and no one went to jail; that’s a win-win for a punk rock festival.

People have been fighting over what the term Punk Rock means since 1975. Punk Island has always featured a large cross section of punk rock music. There are “crusty punk” bands with members who my live as or at least appeal to the gaggles of itinerant homeless-by-choice youngers who smell bad. There are beat-down hardcore bands that buy tattoo ink by the gallon. There are “pop punk” bands who may sound like Green Day though they probably don’t want you to tell them that. Punk Island even has a Brooklyn TransCore stage because trannies from Brooklyn have created their own punk scene. More power to them all.  

Our band has agreed to help provide equipment for the Dispatches from the Underground stage, which we’ll be playing. So I will be there bright and early by 7 a.m. It will be a day baking in the sun with my ears ringing from the sounds of a multitude of punk bands. By noon I will be a disgusting miasma of sweat and coagulated sunscreen. It will be great. As much as my inner adult voice tells me to be more serious about life, and that punk rock is a young man’s game, I find it hard to tear myself away, try though I might.

Punk Island is a very short walk from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and it’s free and for all ages. It it will have all kinds of punk bands there. You have no excuse not to go.

Alice and Dave’s Wonderful Adventure

The roads and parks this spring and summer are filled with tourists and our highways are busy with people driving through our great land. Among them are my aunt Alice and her husband Dave Siewert.

Dave and Alice are going on a giant road trip and are seeing some of the great beauty of the Western United States. There are no people more worthy of experiencing all of the natural beauty of America than Alice and Dave. And this road trip is special for them because it will be their last together.

Bad news came fast for them at the end of last year. Dave was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and has not been given long to live. Alice is a cancer survivor and Dave had heart surgery years ago. They have more than paid their dues to the trials of medicine; they have endured enough health hardships to last two lifetimes already. This just isn’t fair.

If you look up the definition of “balls of steel” in a proper dictionary, the entry will have Dave’s picture next to it. Dave is facing certain death and has doubled down on embracing life.

No one would blame Dave if he holed himself up in a dark room and gorged on cheese curds like some kind of Midwestern Howard Hughes. Not a soul would find fault with him if he numbed himself from the specter of his own approaching death.

But that’s not how he does things.

Alice and Dave acquired a camper and set their sights westward, making the journey from their home in Wisconsin to Yellowstone National Park. Early on they had an accident due to a blown tire that delayed their journey. But what is a little traffic accident when you’re spitting in death’s face every day?

Dave has to return to Wisconsin every six weeks so his esophagus can be dilated to prolong his life. Yet he’s out there, rolling down America’s highways with no regrets and no apologies. He is boldness personified and the baddest badass cruising America right now because I guarantee you the toughest trucker or biker on the road today is not staring death in the face like Dave is.

At a time when it would be easy to voice bitterness or rage at life’s unfairness, they have remained a moving example of grace and love. The way they insist on living life to the fullest and refusing to be beaten down is itself like a great work of art. Like all great artists, they make it look easy.

But no one who knows them is surprised. Alice and Dave were married outside on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year. It somehow didn’t feel that way though. The breeze was just right and no one seemed to notice the temperature. Alice’s vows included a promise to support the Green Bay Packers. After the ceremony, Alice and Dave enjoyed their first dance together as a married couple. Before their song was over, Alice beckoned everyone to join them on the dance floor. She would tolerate no slackers. Even those guests who normally do not like to dance at weddings happily obliged.

Alice created a Facebookpage to document her and Dave’s travels. She is a gifted writer and has posted comments and photos. “We can feel the petty retreating by the hour,” Alice wrote in a post. “This has not so far been a year too full of laughs. Yet we have been laughing and crying and learning things about ourselves and each other that the world of cubicles and chemo bays muffles somehow.”

“We are witnessing natural things that were previously beyond my imagination,” Alice wrote me in an email. “Talking stops and all one does is stare dumbly at a magnificence that renders your life, worries, ego all meaningless. It is fun to be on the road. But some day we come home for good. And that is a principle to wrestle with the starry night through.”

New York Summer Hate List

Summer is a time to burn with hate. The heat brings out the worst in us. The discomfort makes us loose our tempers, see the worst in everything. The constant sweat and stench of the summer boils our rage quickly.  In New York City, hate levels are at a natural high given the crowded nature of the city. The summer season pushes our hate levels to its highest levels; global warming will exacerbate this.

Here are biggest reasons you will rightfully be consumed with hate this summer:

Heat: Meteorologists forecast that this will be a long, hot, and humid summer. In the city, the heat is worse than elsewhere. The blacktop and concrete absorb and reflect the heat. Large buildings wall in hot air, car exhaust, and other sickly fumes and heat-emitting odors. We also have the worst of both words with our heat: we get very high temperatures and very humidity.

Crowds and Traffic: New York attracts lots of tourists and we need them here. I will go out of my way to help them and give them information. But they are legion and they don’t know how to move about the city. They clog our sidewalks, subways and escalators to an aggravating degree. Our city requires a fast pace and a knowledge of how to courteously use mass transit and otherwise comport oneself in public spaces. The German tourists who dumbly stand in front of an open subway car door at Grand Central Terminal risk being trampled into strudel stains on the platform. The Chinese tourists who don’t know how to stand in a line make me dread the shape of our future world. There are plenty of New Yorkers who are stupid and ignorant and invite righteous anger, but they’re a constant variable and can sometimes be shamed into compliance. Tourists don’t know better, don’t want to learn and think everything is a big joke.

Bugs: Our city is overrun with roaches. I once live in an apartment that was so roach invested that I developed the ability to kill them with my bare hands without registering an ounce of disgust. The hot weather makes roaches reproduce faster as their eggs don’t take as long to hatch. Did you know that you should spray a roach with bug spray after you crush it to death in order to kill its eggs? Yes. Do that. The heat also brings more mosquitoes, which can now spread diseases like the West Nile Virus. Joy.

School Being Out: When I was in school I loved the summer. Now that I have moved on to adulthood, summer marks the time when teeming masses of juvenile delinquents take up valuable space on subways and sidewalks. Yes, I remember being a young person on summer vacation, and I’m sure I was a big jerk back then too. All the good students are busy working jobs, going to summer camp or spending time with their families. The youth you see out and about in the city are probably being idiots or committing crimes in between getting one another pregnant.

The Happiness of Others: The yellow face of the sky burns us as it mocks our unhappiness. People who revel in the stifling heat and painful sun can’t help themselves in expressing how happy they are. The better humans who are turning red and blistering are looking for ways to get shade and are not cheering their increased chances of skin cancer. Let the heat of the sun consume those who find joy in the midst of our suffering. May their grinning countenances be melted into a rancid plasma that will flow like lava and kill some roaches.

The Wounded Warrior Project Should Not Exist

Memorial Day is a day when millions of Americans pay lip service to people who gave their life in service to our country. It’s happening at a time when the government’s treatment of our veterans has never been worse.

Laying a wreath for the dead is not a substitute for respecting the living. And our veterans have been mistreated in ways that ought to shame a nation that claims to be a serious military power. The current state of neglect of our veterans is about as respectful as taking a piss on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Why are there celebrities making commercials for private charities that care for veterans? Why should any private charity exist to support wounded veterans? Our government accepted full responsibility for the health of our veterans when the veteran signed on the dotted line to join. There should be no issue with veterans getting the things they need.

Yet our TV broadcasts are teeming with entertainers taking to the airwaves to beg couch potatoes for money on Memorial Day weekend to help wounded American veterans.

Ours is supposed to be the most powerful military in the world. Our armed forces operate drones that can send a missile up a camel’s ass two thousand miles away but can’t afford a few shekels to build a wheelchair ramp for a crippled soldier? Am I the only person in TV land who thinks this is horrifying horse shit?

Health care for your soldiers is a basic, like ammunition for rifles, boots and helmets. You wouldn’t send a soldier or Marine into battle without ammunition, you don’t bring them home without the ability to provide health care.

What better way to tell our enemies that the U.S.A. is a paper tiger than to let them see that private charities have to help care for wounded U.S. service members?

And it’s gotten worse. The Bureau of Veterans Affairs was shown to keep secret waiting lists at some of its hospitals to cover up the terrible waiting times for medical care. So upper management knew how bad things were and tried to cover it up rather than fix it.

So while the efforts of the Wounded Warrior Project are noble, such charities shouldn’t exist because they shouldn’t have to. Veterans with serious injuries should have all of their health needs tended to. They shouldn’t have to raise money for wheelchairs or artificial limbs. Those benefits should be a given and not subject to debate.

We have an all-volunteer military and haven’t had a draft since the Vietnam War (although the “stop-loss” programs and activation of inactive reservists during the George W. Bush administration served as a kind of draft, with the lottery restricted to veterans who had already served). So it behooves the government to make good on its promises to veterans. Among the outraged public are potential new recruits. If the military is willing to break its promises to the aged and the infirm, why should a patriotic American want to join. (N.B. – Years ago a family member who was then enlisted in the armed forces described recruiters as “hired liars.”).

So while I hope everyone at least takes a moment to reflect on the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives for our country, we should determine that there won’t have to be private charities tending to the needs of our veterans. 

Parking in New York: A New Path to Anger and Disgust

When I moved back to New York City years ago, one of the greatest benefits was that I didn’t need a car.

My luck with cars has been terrible. My first car, a 1987 Plymouth Horizon, broke down constantly. I was a broke college student who couldn’t afford a new head gasket when my car put itself out of its misery via self immolation.

I bought my second vehicle from a shirtless man in the back woods of Georgia who was drunk at two in the afternoon and called his son “Molson” even though that wasn’t his name. My giant 1977 Plymouth Voyager van was mustard yellow with a big white strip. If you viewed it at the right angle you could still make out the lettering from the church that used to own it. It didn’t perform much better than my old Horizon. Its drive shaft fell off on Interstate 285 in Atlanta once.

My 15-year car-free life came to an end a few years ago when the wife and I bought a used truck. I don’t live in Manhattan anymore and Eastern Queens is not as much of an automotive purgatory as Manhattan. And being involved in music means I have to haul large speaker cabinets, guitars and drunk musicians throughout and beyond the five boroughs.

But the conveniences of city car ownership are paid for with the wages of anger and aggravation.

The roads are full of bad drivers and New York City is rife with people who not only drive terribly but feel entitled to do so. I’ve seen people in Inwood triple park rather than walk an extra 20 feet to a supermarket. I’ve seen cab drivers wait until they have a red light to drive across an intersection.

And parking in New York City is a misery that never goes away unless you are somehow incredibly wealthy. The city’s parking laws are a Byzantine morass of prohibitions that are consistently poorly-signed. A liberal interpretation of a sign can get you a fat ticket or worse, towed. I have not had the experience of paying vehicular ransom at a city impound lot, but every account I have heard from survivors indicates it is a Kafkaesque nightmare that can make someone hate our city for life.

My wife has lived in the co-op apartment we share for more than twelve years and was on a waiting list for a parking space for five years.

We thought our parking troubles were mostly over. We have a regular space. But the perpetual douchery of New York City driving revealed itself again just this past weekend.

My wife had taken our baby girls to visit relatives in Nassau County and returned home from three hours of tied-up traffic on the Long Island Expressway. to find someone had parked in our spot.

Normally the travails of someone with a reserved parking spot would fall firmly in the confines of “First World Problems.” But when you’ve waited five years for that spot and you’re a barely middle-class family with no margin for parking tickets or private garages and someone rudely parks their Mercedes Benz in your spot, violence is justified.

If someone had left a note on the car with their contact info and let us call them to move the car, it would have been no problem. We would have been annoyed but impressed by their willingness to be decent upon notice. Because of the late hour and our building management’s inability to get a towing company right, we were stuck without legal parking for the night.

Normally this would be license to get creative with vandalism. If this car had a sunroof, my dream of justifiable shitting through a sunroof of a snotty dickhead’s car would have finally been realized. I would have loved to stick bananas in the tailpipe, pissed all over the door handles and leave a steaming log of justice on the windshield. It would have given me joy to superglue some tasteless gay porn all over the windows and scratched giant curse words into the expensive paint job.

But since our space is reserved, the authorities would have us as their prime suspects easily. There was little we could do but leave a tersely-worded note stating that they were parked illegally and we had been forced to call the towing service (which was true, even though the towing service was out of business).

So justice has not been served. If you see a dark-colored Mercedes Benz S550 with New York license plate FTX-2898, please vandalize the shit out of it. Thank you.

A Bridge Adventure Near 59th Street

Since four out of five New York City boroughs are on Islands, living in New York means dealing with bridges (and subway tunnels) if you want to get anywhere. Since I became a driver in New York a few years ago, I have mostly driven over the Whitestone Bridge, which is closest to my home.

Lately the authorities have gotten into the nasty habit of adding or changing names to some of its bridges. The 59^th Street Bridge was officially called the Queensboro Bridge until a few years ago when they decided to also name if after former New York City mayor Ed Koch. It’s now the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge. The Triborough Bridge has been renamed the RFK Bridge after Robert F. Kennedy, who was a U.S. Senator from New York when he was gunned down. This has been aggravating. I don’t want to call the Triborough the RFK Bridge. Triborough works better – it connects three boroughs and the name sums that up nicely.

The 59^th Street Bridge is a depressing and aggravating bridge for drivers. It has all of the congested traffic of midtown Manhattan with the sooty industrial character of the more neglected parts of Queens. But it is free, so people will stew in hellish traffic to save themselves the $7.50 it now costs to take the Triborough Bridge. (Public policy experts note that the systems of tolls we have on bridges in New York is backward, that we should charge tolls for bridges over the East River that cause more traffic congestion and instead encourage people to use the larger, highway-connected bridges, which now charge tolls).

This past Saturday I was driving home after dropping off some good friends in midtown Manhattan. I made my way east from Times Square and seriously considered taking the Triborough home. No, I thought to myself, I must overcome my apprehension about taking the 59^th Street Bridge and make a success of it this evening.

I found myself on First Avenue but did not make the first turnoff I saw for the bridge. I came upon another turn for the bridge and took it, following behind another pickup truck. I saw a sign saying that the outer roadway of the bridge was closed between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. I thought nothing of it; I hadn’t planned on taking the outer roadway of the bridge, which I had never heard of anyway, and those signs usually referred to weekday construction.

The truck ahead of mine came to the entrance of the bridge, which was closed. It was blocked off with orange traffic barrels. The man got of his truck and just moved some of the barrels. He looked at me as he got back in his truck and his face wore the expression of someone who just did not give a fuck about closed roads. For all I knew he was an off-duty cop. I paused for a minute, not sure if I should follow this driver to a new illegally-opened section of the bridge. Fuck it, I thought. If the cops stop me then I’ll play dumb and just say I didn’t know the bridge was closed because the roadway wasn’t closed. That was technically true.

I could have been driving into a dangerous construction zone or have been tailgating some kind of undercover police operation or been intruding on some other kind of high crime or misdemeanor taking place over the East River. All of those unfortunate circumstances still sounded a lot more fun than contending with the convoluted traffic that would have been required to stay law abiding. I drove up the closed ramp of the bridge.

The outer roadway of the 59^th Street Bridge (a.k.a. the Queensboro Bridge a.k.a. the Ed Koch Bridge) is one narrow late separated from the lower roadway by bridgeworks and thick concrete walls. Every once in a while there is a break in the wall and someone driving a smaller vehicle than my pickup truck could probably get away with maneuvering in and out of the lane. I was stuck on the outer roadway until the bitter end.

I drove on the closed outer roadway as quickly as I could while trying to look normal and blend in with the traffic, though there was no other traffic in my lane at all, except the daring barrel-mover, whose tail lights I could dimly make out far ahead of me. I drove on expecting the law to come bearing down on me any minute or to dead end into an impassable construction site. None of those things happened. I drove over the bridge with a paranoid mania until the regular traffic patterns of the bridge shunted me into a lane that didn’t help me get home.

The worse thing about it for someone driving home from Manhattan over it is that it is very tough to find your way when you reach the other side of the bridge. Whether you take the upper or lower roadway and what lane you take on either roadway can quickly determine your options when you reach Queens. Driving eastbound, it transports you from an anger-fueled Byzantine knot of Manhattan streets to a clustered maze of impossible roadways of Queens.

I eventually disentangled myself from whatever unappealing part of Long Island City I was in and found my way to Northern Boulevard and a more pleasant drive home. 

Revenge of the Outer Boroughs

This past weekend the wife and I attended a co-ed baby shower for my friend and spiritual advisor Rabbi Jay Levitz and his wife Sarah. We were in Oceanside, Long Island, New York, a short drive outside the city for us, as we live in Eastern Queens. As we talked with Jay, the conversation turned to what constitutes the “bridge and tunnel crowd.”

We all agreed that the term was more of a cultural construct than a geographic one, though we acknowledge that the two go hand in hand in many ways. Where I live now in Queens is not a trendy area at all and is too far from any of the celebrated night life to become popular among the moneyed classes or the upwardly mobile youth any time soon. That is actually a blessing. We happen to have decent access to public transportation, though getting into Manhattan always involves at least one bus and one train. My commute to work is at least one bus and two subways, and it is terrible, subject at all times to the fickle whims of the increasingly incompetent MTA.

The “bridge and tunnel” term may have been initially meant to denote people coming from outside of New York City—especially from New Jersey, considered by many to be a cultural leper colony filled with only guidos and hill people. But my current settings would qualify me as a bridge and tunnel crowd person when I venture into Manhattan for cultural events.

Manhattan was once the undisputed epicenter of New York City’s cultural life. Now that cultural life is much more diffuse and spread through the outer boroughs, most prominently in Brooklyn. New movie theaters, restaurants and music venues are more likely to be opening in Brooklyn or Queens today than in Manhattan. Accordingly, real estate prices in the outer boroughs are still going through the roof.

This shift has made use of the term “Bridge and Tunnel” a bit outdated, but the cultural chasm between whose who perceive themselves as cultured city residents and the people who travel to the city only on the weekends to party is not gone. Someone who takes the Long Island Rail Road from Mineola to see a concert in Brooklyn is considered part of the bridge and tunnel crowd, though they did not use a bridge or tunnel (yes, I understand that the LIRR in Brooklyn does use subway tunnels and uses overpasses on its way to the city; shut up).

And these social demarcations between what is city and what is not stretch to the outer boroughs as well. I mentioned that I drove to Long Island to attend a baby shower this weekend, but as I live in Queens, I already live on Long Island. When New Yorkers talk about “Long Island” they don’t mean the Island itself but Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the parts of the Island that lie outside of the border of New York City.

I could never justify the expense of living in a more trendy or celebrated area of Manhattan. I had a chance to move to the Upper East Side one time. I looked at an apartment in Yorkville and realized that I would be doubling my rent and would still not be able to fit the modest furniture from my small studio in Ozone Park, Queens into the new place. It wasn’t worth the money. I could have said I lived on the Upper East Side, but I’d be living like a hobbit.

So while proximity to Manhattan is become less and less of a cultural touchstone to judge a neighborhood, I propose a new measure of the value of where you live: proximity to live Shakespeare.

A good measure of the value of any place to live is how far away you are from some free Shakespeare. When I lived in Inwood in uptown Manhattan, it had yet to become a trendy place to live and people hadn’t heard of it. But I lived across the street from Inwood Hill Park which had free Shakespeare plays every summer. Score.

I can’t easily walk to free Shakespeare like that, but I am a very short trip from more than one of the venues of the free Shakespearein the Park in Queens.

Some will argue that this Shakespeare standard is an unfair way to judge where you live, but I don’t think so. I don’t want my children to live in a world where they can’t easily see some free Shakespeare every summer. I’ll be dragging their soggy asses to Two Gentlemen of Verona this season; I won’t need a bridge or tunnel to get there. 

Labor’s Love Lost

This past Easter Sunday, my family ate heartily and discussed some of the current political and economic issues of the day. There may be better ways to wash down a tasty Easter ham than a lamentation on the state of the republic, but we haven’t found it yet. Our conversation settled on how many pension holders have been screwed by their municipal or corporate overlords.

The unofficial conclusion we reached over our Easter meal was that the United States is long overdue for a resurrected organized labor movement.

Labor unions represent only about 11% of the American workforce, and a majority of union members today are government workers who can’t strike. The upside to this is that a lot of government workers have very good, stable jobs that are safer and more lucrative than their non-government worker counterparts. But most workers are continually getting screwed.

The labor movement was spurred on by the large impact of industrialization and it was designed to protect industrial laborers and tradesmen. It has not adapted to the changing economy. The majority of American workers today are not industrial tradesmen.

If there was a viable labor movement in the U.S., I would have a real union to join. I work as a financial journalist. The company I work for actually cut our salaries years ago during the financial crisis. They technically restored the salary cuts years later, but haven’t given raises since and continued to cut our pay in other ways, such as stopping all matching 401k contributions, gutting healthcare benefits, and the like. They’ve also done a lot of outsourcing. Employees with many years of service to the company under their belts were shown the door, their jobs shipped off to India.

A labor union would have fought all of those things, but there is no labor union representing us. We are considered too “professional” to join a union, though not professional enough to be tossed aside like yesterday’s garbage if someone outsourcing shyster can save the company a few dollars. But we don’t have much recourse since there is no collective bargaining going on. People vote with their feet and while people are leaving the company in droves, the rest of us are there are spending our energies looking for other work rather than fighting a good fight (and since I need my job and have four mouths to feed, I’ll kindly not mention the name of the company I work for here).

I dream of the day when the outsourcing C.E.O. gets a brick through his living room window and four flat tires on his way to work. There should be real unions to contend with when companies want to cut pay, cut benefits or cut jobs. This isn’t because I think the answer is some kind of socialist worker’s paradise. To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about democracy: Capitalism is the worst economic system there is except for all of the others.

There seems to be a great illness of myopathy among our current class of capitalists. They think only in the short term and only in terms of the bottom line. I have no problem with businesses making hard decisions and scoring a healthy profit, but a lot of executives are not thinking ahead much farther than the next quarterly report. Sure, the slash-and-burn fiscal ass-fucking they’ve been giving American workers has increased profits now, but what kind of company are they going to have in five years?

But our companies have pursued these policies and the results are predictable. American capitalism no longer means industriousness and hard work, but rather goldenparachutes and amorality.

Just as democracy doesn’t work without real political opposition, real capitalism doesn’t work without American workers having some kind of say over their working lives. Labor unions were once the source of that power. They can be again. 

Great New Yorkers: My Grandmother

This past weekend the wife and I packed our two baby girls into their car seats and drove upstate (upstate defined as north of the Bronx/Westchester border) to celebrate the 90^th birthday of my Grandmother, Mary Sheahan.

They don’t make New Yorkers like Mary Sheahan anymore. My Grandmother immigrated from Ireland and went through Ellis Island as a child in 1925. She grew up in the Mott Haven section of The Bronx. She raised seven children in The Bronx and is a grandmother to nine and a great grandmother to three. My Grandmother remained in The Bronx as long as possible and then stayed a little longer. She has never been far from the city and still visits frequently. Her last child left the five boroughs only a few years ago (after living in the city more than 60 years) and she has two grandchildren living here now.

No person I have ever met represents unconditional love and the joy of living and loving family like my grandmother. You would be hard pressed to meet a better person in all of the world. Go ahead and try. You might find someone you think is pretty good but they won’t hold a candle to my grandmother. If you think you’ve got someone who can compare in kindness and sweetness I’m sure you’ll find something terrible if you dig a little deeper, like they torture cats in their spare time or something.

My grandmother is so sweet she even gives homes to insane dogs, like her current pet, Misty, a friendly but mentally ill and hyperactive beast who would be put into KungPao form in no time if it were up to anyone else other than Grandma. I don’t know how she manages to walk that crazy animal at age 90 but she manages somehow. I always make a point to walk that damn dog when I visit her so she’ll have at least a few hours of freedom from it.

But that’s one of the minor points about my grandmother’s excellence. Having her as my Grandma has been a great privilege. In my younger years, especially when I was a teenager, I was a jaded and angry person who hated theworld. Even today I find it hard not to consider much of the world and the people in it loathsome. But no one can keep that disposition for long in the presence of my grandmother. Even in my angriest and most obnoxious teenage years when I thought it might be cool to murder my parents and live the life of an itinerant assassin for hire, I could never find it in my black heart to think a mean thought about my grandmother.

My grandmother’s wit is sharp as ever and she stays active. She can still drive and she walks under her own power, and I still try and promote the idea that she secretly runs a criminal empire and is just successful at not getting caught. It would be fun to learn that my Grandma has strangled mobsters with piano wire and brained drug lords with shovels.

It was great to introduce my own daughters to my grandmother and to take photos of her with her kids, most of her grandkids and all of her great grandkids. Grandma was happy as ever to have so many of her family in one place at one time. Her children and grandchildren now live all over the country. Family flew in from as far away as Georgia and Wisconsin to celebrate Mary Sheahan’s 90^th birthday.

I am exceptionally lucky to have the family I have. And my family is exceptionally fortunate to have Mary Sheahan as its matriarch.

Don’t Hate On Ching Chong Ding Dong

The latest target of the endless outrage fest perpetually playing out in social media is Stephen Colbert, who is an unlikely villain.

Colbert made himself a persona non grata when he decided to lampoon Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins football team. Snyder, who has come under increasing pressure to rename his team, announced that he was starting a foundation for Native Americans (a.k.a. American Indians, a.k.a. Original Americans, a.k.a. Redskins).

Colbert countered this by announcing the foundation of the “Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivityto Orientals or Whatever.” Ching Chong Ding Dong is a minstrel-like Asian character Colbert performed on his show. It was obvious and over the top and top-notch comedy. Colbert manages to make his point without going overboard or bludgeoning a point to death, usually.

But the point was missed by a few folks. A #CancelColbert effort was launched via Twitter, and the effort made the news.

Colbert’s act was satirical and if that’s very obvious from watching the bit. How someone can come away from that thinking he was trying to insult Asians is beyond me.

The piling on of opposition to the Washington Redskins is tired and has gotten silly. Colbert’s agitation, while correct to point out the desperate and pointless publicity efforts of the Redskins’ team owner, is another in the chorus of followers trying to out-lefty each other on the issue.

Sure the Redskins team name is offensive to a lot of people, but complaining about offending Native Americans is pretty hollow coming from people who are living on their land. We’re not seeing offended non-American Indians heading back to their ancestral motherlands and signing over their property to needy Native Americans, so the hating on the sports teams that are so offensive is small potatoes, and late small potatoes at that.

But that’s not the point. Clearly Colbert is on the side of those who think the Redskins name is offensive and should be changed. He was comparing his effort to start a foundation in the name of an offensive character to Daniel Snyder’s efforts to help American Indians while defending a team name that many of them find offensive.

The effort to get Colbert canceled is a sign that “anti-racism” has hit a new low point of self-defeating fanaticism. Multiculturalists have gone so insane that they have started to cannibalize their own. If the liberal Colbert can be denounced as a racist, who can’t be?

The effort to get the Colbert Report canceled will fall flat on its face, but that people could honestly be offended by Ching Chong Ding Dong speaks more to the ills of our society than any antiquated team name.